Vallourec Pipes Up With Another Brazilian Win

French manufacturing giant Vallourec has secured a significant contract for Petrobras' Sepia 2 offshore development, covering around 130 kilometers of subsea infrastructure. This contract strengthens Vallourec's position in Brazil's technically demanding pre-salt market, providing investors with additional confidence in the group's offshore order book growth potential.

Vallourec will manufacture the carbon-steel line pipe at its Jeceaba plant in Minas Gerais, while applying thermal insulation coating at its Serra facility in Espírito Santo. The order, valued at over 15,000 tonnes of carbon-steel seamless line pipe, comes just after Vallourec won a major contract with Subsea7 for the Sepia 2 project in Brazil's Santos Basin.

Brazil has become increasingly important to Vallourec, with the company investing in local manufacturing and coating capacity to offer more of the offshore supply chain domestically. The deepwater oil segment is particularly attractive for Vallourec, as projects in deep water require specialized equipment to withstand extreme pressure, corrosion, heat, and installation stresses.

Vallourec's focus on premium products and specialist coatings provides better economics than commodity steel, and the more engineering, manufacturing, and finishing work it bundles together, the greater the value captured from each project.