Our history and timeline

To mark Fugro’s 60th anniversary, the month of May sees colleagues celebrating this milestone together in Fugro offices and work locations across the globe.

Celebrating 60 years of Fugro

Fugro’s newest generation of uncrewed surface vessel (USV) launches in the Netherlands. The Blue Essence is controlled during operations from onshore remote operations centres and will reduce Fugro’s carbon footprint by 95% when compared to traditional survey methods.

Blue Essence in the North Sea

Fugro signs a partnership agreement with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (IOC-UNESCO) to improve the coordination of and access to global ocean science data. This is in direct support of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030 (the “Ocean Decade”).

Fugro completes the divestment of its non-core subsidiary Seabed Geosolutions to PXGEO Seismic Services Limited (PXGEO) as part of a strategic focus on divestment opportunities for non-core assets. The divestment represents the final step in Fugro’s exit from deep seismic data collection.

Fugro’s SpaceStar® next-generation positioning service heads into space for the first time on a Loft Orbital YAM-2 satellite launched on 30 June 2021 from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Fugro launches its new values, underpinning our company culture and guiding us in fulfilling our purpose as an organisation: ‘Together we create a safe and liveable world’. The new values were created based on conversations and workshops with Fugro colleagues across all regions and business lines, and they embody the company culture.

Fugro’s values

Fugro implements a new top-management hierarchy and moves from a divisional to a regional structure. The Executive team now includes the Group Directors of the four new regions: Americas; Asia-Pacific and Australia; Europe and Africa; and Middle East and India.

As part of Fugro's strategic focus on divestment opportunities for non-core assets, we step up our efforts to sell Seabed Geosolutions to support its ambition to capture the opportunities of a growing ocean bottom node (OBN) seismic market.

Mark Heine is appointed CEO and Fugro’s Path to Profitable Growth strategy is launched, based on three objectives:

• Capture the upturn in energy and infrastructure – population growth, urbanisation and ageing assets are driving the infrastructure markets in most of the countries where we operate
• Differentiate by integrated digital solutions – we are fully leveraging technology developments in the field of robotics, connectivity and advanced analytics in order to offer safer, faster, more efficient and higher-quality services
• Leverage core expertise in new growth markets – we are well positioned to leverage our existing expertise in areas such as hydrography, levees, weather forecasting and early warning systems.

Fugro divests its non-core trenching and cable-laying business to Global Marine Group (GMG), a leading supplier of subsea cable installation and maintenance services. This enables Fugro to participate in a more diversified business where cable installation services are complemented by long-term telecoms cable and wind farm maintenance services and sales of subsea telecoms systems.

Fugro regroups the geotechnical, survey and subsea services activities into Marine and Land divisions, each of which has two business lines: Site Characterisation and Asset Integrity. This allows us to leverage synergies more effectively between our services and provide a superior integrated service to our clients.

ROAMES® analytics and visualisation tool

ROAMES® in Australia joins the Fugro portfolio as a specialist in high-resolution mapping services and solutions for the electric power distribution sector. The acquisition supports the repositioning of the Geospatial business line as a solutions provider rather than a data acquisition provider.

Fugro acquires RailData® (Netherlands) to help build market share in corridor mapping. A leading expert in measuring the absolute and relative position of railway tracks, Fugro RailData® uses a unique cutting-edge device to measure data in three dimensions.

Fugro divests most of its Geoscience division in 2013

Following a review of Fugro’s marine streamer seismic data acquisition business and associated activities, we divest most of the Geoscience division to CGGVeritas, exiting the capital-intensive and volatile seismic segment of the oil and gas exploration market. However, Fugro retain the division’s multi-client library and OBN business.

Fugro and CGGVeritas enter into a Seabed Geophysics joint venture (Seabed Geosolutions), which immediately becomes the market leader in seabed geophysical activities. It includes both companies’ OBN businesses, plus CGGVeritas’s transition zone, ocean bottom cable and permanent reservoir monitoring activities. Our services portfolio becomes more balanced as a result.

Fugro Galaxy crew

Fugro acquires TS Marine (TSM) in Australia, a specialist provider of subsea construction, inspection, repair and maintenance, as well as light well intervention. The acquisition leads to substantial synergies and enables us to strengthen our subsea services business in support of the offshore oil and gas industry, with a particular focus on Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa.

Having provided remotely operated vehicle (ROV) support to Seabird's OBN business for several years, Fugro decides to buy the business, with source vessel capacity chartered from Seabird to support the OBN operations. The OBN method is the only way to gather seabed 3D and 4D (time-lapse reservoir monitoring) multicomponent seismic data in deep water and around obstructed areas.