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‘Slowly then suddenly’: Wood Group’s slide from North Sea champion to struggles with debt
Problems of Aberdeen-based group reflect decline of city built on oil and gas
© Nature Picture Library/Alamy
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Simeon Kerr in Aberdeen and David Sheppard in London
Published
MARCH 1 2025
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When a young Ian Wood splashed out on an imposing presence for his family’s company at the inaugural Offshore Europe conference at the University of Aberdeen in 1973, his father John was aghast.
Sir Ian — he was knighted in 1994 — has recalled since how Wood senior, head of the family’s fishing company, thought his son was spending far too much on marketing the enterprise’s offshore expertise to the nascent North Sea oil sector.
But the gamble paid off handsomely for the offshore engineering arm, which was spun out of the family company in 1982 and listed 20 years later. Wood Group became synonymous with the transformation of Aberdeen from a fishing port to an oil and gas boomtown renowned for exporting its energy expertise across the world.
Yet, as Aberdeen grapples with the maturing of the North Sea basin, the group’s struggles with a heavy debt load and disappointing earnings performances have come to symbolise the city’s decline.
Wood Group had been one of the few homegrown success stories of the UK’s development of the North Sea, becoming a true multinational with global partnerships with titans of the oil industry such as ExxonMobil and Chevron. Its market value reached a peak of £5.3bn in 2018.
Paul de Leeuw, director of the Energy Transition Institute at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University, said Wood was an “iconic company”
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