How Chris Ong helped Seatrium emerge from a messy merger between two shipyards to become a profitable offshore oil and wind giant

(Credit: Courtesy of Seatrium)

Over in Singapore’s Tuas industrial district, workers are assembling a giant floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) unit, part of the infrastructure that separates crude oil from what’s pulled up from offshore reservoirs. Next to it is a giant Goliath crane, which can lift up to 30,000 tons in a single heave; a gleaming white Royal Caribbean cruise ship sits just a few docks away.

This particular FPSO vessel, built by Singapore’s Seatrium, No. 42 on the Fortune Southeast Asia 500, will soon be bound for Brazil and its state-owned oil giant, Petrobras. It took around three to four years to get the ship completed, a lifetime compared to how quickly most goods get produced.