Harkand: the build-up strategy, or how to regroup SMEs to create a world leader

In 2010‚ Gulmar Offshore‚ a company which operates in the oilfield services sector, encountered serious financial difficulties and was not able to pay its debts. Oaktree Capital Management took control of the company in order to turn it around and implement a ‘build-up’ strategy. The aim of this strategy is to achieve the critical size which will enable a company to deal with the scale of investments in the industry in question. To complete the range of services offered by Gulmar Offshore and enable it to be present on four continents, Oaktree Capital Management acquired ISS-Andrews Survey in 2012 and VMS in 2013. By merging the three companies‚ it created Harkand whose turnover in 2014 was four hundred million dollars. For Nicolas Mouté‚ a former fund manager at Oaktree and ex-CEO of the Harkand Group‚ this sort of operation is difficult for an SME to put in place without help from investment funds even though, in exchange, the funds impose certain constraints linked to the nature of the investment and divestiture phases in the build-up process.