Norway gets it right
The Motorship has recently returned from a week-long trip to Norway’s west coast, on a press trip with colleagues from other maritime and energy publications.
That such events are so well attended is a pointer to the importance of Norway in these market sectors. That Norway should be strong in the offshore industry is unsurprising. The North Sea is close at hand, and Norway is historically a major power in the fishing industry – offshore support ships began as modified fishing vessels. But much the same could be said of Britain, so why should Norway be such a prominent maritime nation when Britain’s industry has seen such a decline, at least in the larger sizes than yachts and workboats?
One pointer comes from the ‘maritime cluster’ as the Norwegians are constantly reminding us. There is every impression of a thriving, innovative industry where companies feed off the successes and new developments of each other. Marine is a major industry in Norway, with a high public profile. The mainstream press contains plenty of maritime coverage – and even our band of journalists on an ‘official visit’ merited a splash in a local west coast paper. Whereas in Britain, if it wasn’t for specialist publications like ours – and let’s not forget that Britain still leads the rest of the world in the maritime press marketplace – nobody would know that we had a coastline and seaborne trade, or that the North Sea energy industry is still doing well in Scotland.
Norway has got it right where maritime matters are concerned. And even though the North Sea is beginning to slow down, Norway is maintaining its position by keenly looking further afield, not just to the much-publicised Brazil but to West Africa, the Far East, and various other areas, where the ships and the technology all have a strong Norwegian accent.
The fact that in these days of shrinking travel budgets and growing workloads we can still visit Norway (four times for The Motorship in 2011) shows the importance we place on the country’s industry. And that we will be giving increased coverage to the offshore support ship market in 2012. We know some of our traditional readership dismisses these vessels as ‘overgrown workboats’ but The Motorship reports on latest ship technological developments, and many of these developments are taking place offshore. In fact we have considerably revamped our features calendar, to allow us more flexibility to cover a wider range of subjects, more regularly. Part of this is enabled by shifting our expanded news coverage online, though we retain a review of the news in print, knowing that many copies of The Motorship are kept as a reference source.
