Maersk Drilling Brand Guidelines: The Drilling Company of 1972, Spun Off & Merged Into Noble

A shipping group’s rig business in Lyngby.

Maersk Drilling was the offshore drilling business of the Danish shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk. English Wikipedia gives its founding year as 1972 and its base as Lyngby, north of Copenhagen; gCaptain, reporting in February 2014, also gave 1972 as the year it was established. When it was listed on its own in 2019, its parent company took the legal name The Drilling Company of 1972 A/S, a name that repeats that year, while the business kept trading as Maersk Drilling.

For most of its life it sat inside the Maersk group. In February 2014 gCaptain reported that Maersk Drilling had taken delivery of its first ultra-deepwater drillship, the Maersk Viking, from Samsung Heavy Industries in South Korea, the first of four such ships due that year; the Viking was heading to the US Gulf of Mexico for a three-year contract with ExxonMobil. At that point the company counted 17 drilling rigs, including deepwater semisubmersibles and high-end jack-ups, had three more drillships and four jack-ups on order, and employed about 3,600 people, gCaptain reported.

In August 2018 A.P. Moller-Maersk said it would spin the drilling business off and list it in Copenhagen, part of a 2016 plan to focus the group on transport and logistics, Reuters reported. Chief executive Jørn Madsen told Reuters that about two-thirds of the fleet were jack-ups, which drill in shallow water, and the rest floating rigs, and the agency named BP, Aker BP, Equinor and Total among its biggest customers. The demerger took effect on 4 April 2019, when shares in The Drilling Company of 1972 began trading on Nasdaq Copenhagen under the ticker DRLCO, Reuters reported. Danish Wikipedia names APMH Invest and a Møller family foundation as its main shareholders after the split.

Jack-ups for the North Sea, drillships for deep water.

Maersk Drilling’s fleet worked in two very different settings. In the North Sea it ran harsh-environment jack-ups, rigs that stand on legs on the seabed. English Wikipedia’s fleet table, drawn from the company’s own rig list, includes the Maersk Innovator of 2003 and a series of larger units built between 2013 and 2016, among them the Maersk Intrepid and Maersk Invincible, as well as a group of smaller harsh-environment jack-ups from 2008 and 2009.

In deeper water it ran floating rigs. The same table lists semisubmersibles such as the Maersk Developer and Maersk Discoverer, both of 2009, and four Samsung-built drillships delivered in 2013 and 2014: the Viking, Valiant, Venturer and Voyager.

The drillships carried the company into very deep water. gCaptain reported in October 2021 that the Maersk Venturer had drilled the Raya-1 well for Total off Uruguay in 2016 at a water depth of 3,400 metres, then the record for the deepest water drilled, and that TotalEnergies had extended the contract of its sister ship, the Maersk Voyager, to drill the Ondjaba-1 well off Angola at a planned 3,628 metres. gCaptain described the Voyager as a seventh-generation ultra-deepwater drillship. The specifications published with the Viking’s delivery in 2014 give a sense of scale: a hull about 228 metres long, a dual derrick, a rated water depth of 3,600 metres and a rated drilling depth of 12,000 metres.

Through these years the business kept the Maersk name of its former parent, even after the 2019 listing made it a separate company. Its legal parent, by contrast, carried a plain name with a date attached.

Offshore drilling and its names.

Offshore drilling contractors sell time on rigs rather than goods in a shop, so their public identity is built around the fleet. Their websites tend to pair plain corporate wordmarks, often in navy, red or orange, with large photographs of drillships, semisubmersibles and jack-ups at sea, published by the companies themselves.

The rig is the working unit of the brand. Contractors commonly give each rig its own page with a short run of specifications: the design, the water depth it is rated for, how deep it can drill, how many people it can house, and where and for whom it is working. Shelf Drilling’s fleet page, for example, gives every one of its jack-ups the same set of fields. Rig names often share a prefix or a word, so that the company name travels with each unit from contract to contract.

Fleet-status reports are the other recurring document, listing rigs with their current customers, locations and contract periods for investors and clients. When Noble Corporation completed its acquisition of Diamond Offshore in September 2024, it published an updated fleet status report alongside the announcement, The Maritime Executive reported. Operating-region maps sit next to them, placing rigs in waters from the North Sea to West Africa and Southeast Asia.

Investor pages complete the picture, because the sector has been reshaped by restructurings and mergers. Diamond Offshore went through Chapter 11 in 2020 and 2021 and became part of Noble in 2024; Shelf Drilling became part of ADES in 2025. For designers, these companies show a corporate identity carried by rig names, specification sheets, fleet reports and maps rather than by packaging or retail.

A Copenhagen listing that lasted three and a half years.

Maersk Drilling no longer trades as a company of its own. In November 2021 Noble Corporation and Maersk Drilling agreed to combine in a mainly all-stock deal, gCaptain reported; the merged group would keep the Noble name, the two sets of shareholders would each own about half, and the fleet would number 20 floating rigs and 19 jack-ups. APMH Invest, which then held about 42% of Maersk Drilling, backed the deal.

Competition review followed. In April 2022 the UK Competition and Markets Authority found that the merger raised concerns in the supply of jack-up rigs in north-west Europe, gCaptain reported, and in May the companies offered to sell North Sea jack-ups to address them, Bloomberg reported. The deal closed on 3 October 2022, Noble said in a press release that day: Noble completed its exchange offer for the shares of The Drilling Company of 1972 A/S, and the two companies began operating as a single organisation. The same release tied the combination to the sale of five jack-ups to Shelf Drilling. Noble’s own company history now lists 2022 as the year it merged with Maersk Drilling.

For a design guide, Maersk Drilling shows how a business can carry a group’s name, list on its own and then be absorbed within a few years, with its rig names outlasting the company. Compare Noble Corporation, which absorbed it, and Odfjell Drilling, a Nordic driller that Reuters named among its competitors in 2018. For this guide we use deep navy, a cool sea blue and pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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