Company: NE-WTA
Filing Date: 2025-08-06
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001628280-25-038188
Chunk: 104

Company: Noble Corp plc
Filing Date: 2025-08-06
Form: 10-Q
Item: Item 2
Chunk 104
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 to make their way into the global market over the next few years.

Although the market outlook in our business varies by geographical region and water depth and despite recent downward pressure on the price of oil, we remain encouraged by the long-term outlook in the ultra-deepwater floater market. However, within this ultra-deepwater market, our customers continue to focus on our highest specification floaters, which represents the majority of our floater fleet. Assuming current market fundamentals, continued customer prioritization towards these highest specification floaters is likely to result in lower utilization for our lower specification drillships and our semi-submersibles. Demand for midwater semisubmersibles is primarily driven by brownfield activity in mature basins, especially in Northwest Europe, South America, and the Asia Pacific regions, where a generally stable level of baseload demand is supported by infield drilling and plug and abandonment requirements. Despite some recent contract suspensions in select jackup markets, we have also observed an overall demand increase in the global jackup market since 2020. While we remain encouraged about overall long-term rig demand, as evidenced by recent multi-year, multi-rig contracts that we have booked into backlog, the near term utilization outlook for both floaters and jackups over the next several quarters is anticipated to be lower than the utilization rates realized during the prior two years. Furthermore, economic uncertainty and lower commodity prices arising from recent trade policy and tariffs, compounded with OPEC’s stated intent to increase oil production, collectively present a potential for additional demand risk for offshore rigs in the near term.

As of the date of this report, the majority of our jackup fleet is positioned in the North Sea. While we have seen generally stable demand in the UK and southern North Sea in recent years, overall activity levels in the region remain subdued compared to historical levels. Similarly, the ultra-harsh environment jackup market in Norway also remains below historical levels despite the market being attractive to operators given it is characterized by low-cost and low-emission barrels.

Recent contract awards and open tenders show an increasing proportion of multi-year contracts, although a significant number of shorter term commitments continue to be fixed, as well. Longer term contracts can generally provide economic efficiencies by reducing the number of rig contract start-ups, both with different customers and among different regions, which is expected to reduce incremental resources and costs. On the other hand, certain multi-year contracts that are scheduled to commence a year or longer into the future can present near term utilization inefficiency due to challenges with filling interim availability on