Over the past three years, Mr. Marine has grown exponentially. With two successful acquisitions under its belt, the Dutch-based TIC group is not stopping there. CEO Karel Peters, explained more in an exclusive interview with Inside Marine.
Report by Imogen Ward.
When it comes to the marine elevator space, Mr. Marine has retained the market lead for many years, bolstering a foundation of technical know-how, quick response times and high-quality craftmanship.
“We have 250 engineers based strategically around the globe, and a strong presence in every time zone” said CEO Karel Peters. “Every year, we aim to work on more and more vessels – providing a first-class service to each one. In 2023, we completed around 9,000 different jobs on board more than 3,500 vessels. This year, we intend to surpass those figures.”
The group now has seven offices dotted across the world, with the latest one opening last year, located in Thessaloniki, Greece. This area of the world is renowned for its maritime heritage, so Mr. Marine was confident in its decision.
“We believe strongly in the Greek maritime heritage, and we have a sizeable contingent of Greek people on our team,” Mr Peters continued. “This really led to an epiphany for us: we had the resources, so why not make the most of them and provide our customers with a strong base in Greece?
“At the end of the day, more than 20 per cent of the world’s fleet is controlled by people from Greece, so now we can be close to our customers whilst providing them with a high degree of local customer service. That really is a strong competitive advantage for us, and the new office has been a complete winner.”
Firm roots
Established in 2002 under the name Mr. Elevator, the company quickly built a reputation for excellence within the marine elevator sector. With high-quality servicing, spares and repairs offered to customers, the company became a global market leader for marine elevators. This has laid the foundation for what has grown into Mr. Marine today.
The group has been on a path of steady growth and success, organically advancing by 15% per year between 2010 and 2020. From 2020 onwards, the group’s growth accelerated at a substantial rate while it expanded its capabilities .
“Since 2020, we have tripled in size,” Mr Peters commented. “We have expanded a lot quicker than previous years, thanks to several acquisitions.
“We have maintained a strong presence in the marine elevator space for a long time, with long-standing, loyal relationships with the world’s leading shipping companies, owners and managers. We have always harboured a desire to add to our portfolio – mostly to expand our ability to keep vessels safe and compliant Initially, we attempted to achieve this
“We are confident in our ability to triple our current turnover through organic growth and new acquisitions”
organically; however, we soon realised that there is a major opportunity to be the consolidator in the global marine TIC business.”
Growing portfolio of solutions
This realisation led to the group’s first acquisition in March 2022. I&C Services B.V. was an expert in ballast water
treatment and marine instrument and control systems. With the desire to expand its portfolio, Mr. Marine felt this was the perfect match.
“I&C Services B.V. was a great fit for what we wanted to achieve with our portfolio,” said Mr Peters. “15 per cent of the business was dedicated to ballast water treatment, but the
majority was instruments and controls, which includes gas detection systems, oil-water separators, UTIs and ODMEs.
“We are essentially a testing, inspection and certification company. We go on-board vessels to carry out the investigation work; then if there is repair work to be completed, we can offer that as well, because all our engineers are fully trained and equipped to do so.”
Going global
After the integration of I&C Services B.V. , Mr. Marine felt it could do more to take full advantage of its new capabilities.
“Once we integrated I&C Services B.V. into the group, we then needed a way to effectively internationalise our new service solutions,” said Mr Peters. “The world’s capital of shipping
is Singapore, which is a very challenging market to advance in, because it’s so fragmented. There are loads of different service providers, but the shipping companies of today want to reduce their vendor lists – they don’t want to work with 10,000 different vendors. That’s why we felt we were the perfect one-stop solution for the market.
“We felt it would benefit us greatly to build our presence there, so we began searching for our next acquisition.”
In February last year, Mr. Marine successfully acquired Atlas Marine Services Pte Ltd, a Singaporean-based TIC organisation. This development greatly strengthened the group’s foothold within Singapore –one of the key global maritime hubs.
With global coverage in the marine elevator sector already achieved, the group
is continuing with its mission for internationalisation of its extended portfolio. In line with this, Mr. Marine also has a strong presence within northwest Europe and India.
Investing in the future
Alongside its mission for internationalisation, the group has also set significant short-term revenue targets.
“Having successfully tripled in size since 2020, we want to repeat this achievement again by 2026,” Mr Peters commented. “It’s an ambitious goal, but one that is very achievable. We are confident in our ability to triple our current turnover through organic growth and new acquisitions.
“We still have three years to make this happen, and with a solid flow of acquisitions, we believe we can do it.”
The group also intends to pursue digitalisation to make its scheduling processes much more efficient, making it easier for clients to work with Mr. Marine.
“We are investing and building custom software to achieve this key strategic goal,” Mr Peters explained. “We have just successfully launched the first major application, so we are excited to see what the future holds.
“With so much knowledge and experience gained from working on our customers’ vessels, we can help them by making sure they are always compliant, providing preventative maintenance and making sure their equipment is up to date. We can achieve that much more easily once we have the software up and running, and we are excited to make our service better for our clients.” n
