SBM Offshore Brand Guidelines: Gusto’s Buoys, IHC Caland & the Fast4Ward FPSO Fleet

A Schiedam shipyard and a partnership of Dutch yards.

SBM Offshore traces its roots to a shipyard in Schiedam. On its heritage page the company starts the story in 1862, when the entrepreneur A.F. Smulders opened a factory for steam engines and boilers, and continues in 1905, when the business moved to raised marshland in Schiedam with a direct link to the North Sea and the yard took the name Werf Gusto. Dutch Wikipedia’s article on the yard describes it between the wars as a builder of dredging equipment, floating cranes, cargo ships and large steel structures, including parts of bridges.

The war years belong to that record. Dutch Wikipedia says commercial shipbuilding almost stopped when the Second World War began, and that during the occupation of 1940–1945 the Gusto yard kept working under the direction of the occupying forces, which the article describes as contested. The same article dates the founding of the Industriële Handels Combinatie Holland (IHC Holland) to December 1943: a partnership in which Gusto and five other Dutch yards, including the two Smit yards at Kinderdijk, stayed independent but sold abroad together, mainly dredging equipment.

English Wikipedia says five of the six partners merged in 1965 into a single IHC Holland company, with Gusto in Schiedam specialising in offshore work. That offshore line began with Shell. In 1959, the company says, Gusto built the first single point mooring buoy under a licence from Shell, and in 1960 the same relationship produced the Seashell jack-up drilling rig. As the buoys sold, IHC set up a separate company for them. SBM says Single Buoy Moorings Inc. was founded in 1969 in Switzerland as a wholly owned subsidiary of IHC Holland; English Wikipedia dates it to 27 February 1969 and says the designers soon moved on to Monaco.

From a buoy and a tanker to a leased fleet.

The step from buoy to floating production came in the 1970s. English Wikipedia describes the Single Buoy Storage, developed in 1973, as an old tanker permanently fixed to a single buoy mooring by a yoke, and says twelve were delivered between 1973 and 1982. SBM dates its first permanent mooring system to 1973, for the Ifrika storage unit on Elf’s Ashtart field off Tunisia. In 1977, English Wikipedia says, a converted tanker named Delta began producing oil as well as storing it on Shell’s Castellon field off Spain, with SBM arranging the engineering and construction.

The business model changed next: SBM began to own what it built. The company says FPSO II became the first leased floating production system when it started work on the Cadlao field in the Philippines in 1981; English Wikipedia says the unit was owned by SBM and leased to Amoco together with operating and maintenance crews. Leasing a unit to an oil company and running it on site remains at the centre of the business, which the company now describes as the design, supply, installation, operation and life extension of FPSOs, leased or sold.

The corporate structure moved around it. English Wikipedia says IHC Inter and Caland Holdings, which between them owned SBM, merged in 1984 to form IHC Caland. In 1990 IHC Caland bought IMODCO of California, which SBM calls its largest competitor in single point moorings, and in 2001 it acquired Atlantia, a designer of tension-leg platforms. The shipbuilding side was sold from 2003; by early 2005 all the yards had gone, the company says, and in 2005 IHC Caland was renamed SBM Offshore N.V. Dutch Wikipedia says the yards carried on as IHC Merwede. In 2012 SBM sold its rig-design arm GustoMSC to Parcom Capital, English Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

Companies that own and run floating production units rarely sell to the public, so their identities live in a small set of places: the photograph of a unit at sea, the fleet or project page, and the investor section. The unit is usually the hero image. A floating production, storage and offloading vessel, a floating storage unit or a floating LNG design is shown whole, in open water or alongside an integration yard, often as a rendering before the hull exists and as a photograph once it is on station.

Fleet and project pages do much of the identity work. Units are listed by name, field and country, and many names follow a house pattern, so a list of projects reads as a record of where the company has worked. Counts of units in operation, completed projects and years of operating experience are given as dated figures on “at a glance” pages, and they change from year to year as units are sold, redeployed or retired.

Standardised hull programmes have become part of the story. SBM Offshore describes its Fast4Ward programme as a generic new-build hull with a catalogue of topside modules, and its hulls are numbered in sequence, as with the seventh, MPF7, reported by Offshore Energy in 2026. Programmes like this give a company a repeatable product to show, rather than a series of one-off conversions, and the language around them leans on standard designs, modules and delivery schedules as the companies describe them.

The investor pages complete the picture. Annual and integrated reports, results presentations, shareholder lists and financial calendars sit next to newsroom image libraries, and the same unit photographs reappear across them. For a designer, the useful lesson is restraint: a short corporate name, a consistent naming system for assets, and large, plain images of the units themselves carry most of the visual identity.

Fast4Ward and a fleet named by field.

The name is the main identity statement. SBM lists a “New SBM Offshore Brand” among its 2012 milestones, and in 2023 it adopted the line “TRUE. BLUE. TRANSITION.” Its shares trade on Euronext Amsterdam, and English Wikipedia says it has been a member of the AEX index since 2003. The company’s website says its fleet comprises 16 units, fifteen FPSOs and one semi-submersible, working in regions including Guyana, Brazil and West Africa; Dutch Wikipedia counted fifteen operational FPSOs in 2023.

In 2016 SBM launched Fast4Ward, which it describes as a programme of standardised designs built around a generic new-build Multi-Purpose Floater hull and a catalogue of topside modules. The first Fast4Ward hull, for the Liza Unity FPSO, reached Singapore for topsides integration in 2020, and first oil from a Fast4Ward FPSO followed in 2022, the company says; it also says Liza Destiny, installed in 2019, was the first installation for oil and gas production in Guyana. Offshore Energy reported on 30 October 2026 that Seatrium of Singapore had won an SBM contract to integrate an FPSO for a South American development, with work running from late 2026 to 2029, and that SBM had earlier ordered its seventh generic Fast4Ward hull from Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding.

The company has also dealt with serious legal matters. In November 2014 SBM Offshore settled with the Dutch Public Prosecution Service over bribery cases connected with Brazil, Angola and Equatorial Guinea, and moved its head office from Monaco to Amsterdam as one of its reforms, English Wikipedia says. A Brazilian court approved a final agreement with prosecutors in October 2019, closing the Brazilian case, Dutch Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, SBM Offshore shows how an engineering company can carry a long shipyard lineage under three initials, and let unit names, field names and programme names such as Fast4Ward do much of the identity work. Compare MODEC, the Tokyo floating-production company, and Bluewater, another Dutch FPSO owner. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a sea mist, a steel grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SBM Offshore’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.