The UK arm of a US-listed subsea equipment group, with its UK headquarters in Aberdeen and a factory in Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire, building underwater robot vehicles (ROVs) under the Perry name.
Forum Energy Technologies, known as FET, supplies equipment to the energy industry. In the UK, its subsea business designs and builds remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs: robot submarines connected to a ship by a cable and flown by a pilot from the surface. They are used to inspect, maintain and repair underwater pipelines and structures. The company sells them under the Perry brand, with ROVs, seabed trenchers and submarine rescue vehicles listed on its website. An Aberdeen Business News article from November 2023 reports that a work-class ROV, the XLX-C, was built in the UK for the Ministry of Defence's Salvage and Marine Operations team, with a two-year support package, training and spares.
FET's website says the Perry name traces back to Perry Slingsby Systems, a British company said to have been founded over 50 years ago, which made ROVs and manned submersibles for oil and gas, construction and research. It later passed through several owners, joining Technip in 2001 and then the Triton Group in 2007, which merged into Forum Energy Technologies in 2010. We did not find a published mission statement. The company says its products serve defence, energy, telecoms, mining, aquaculture and academic users, and have gone to several navies, including submarine rescue vehicles and life support pods.
The UK presence is clear in the 2023 article: the company's UK headquarters is in Aberdeen, and its UK manufacturing site is in Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire, where the XLX-C was built. The group as a whole is headquartered in Houston, Texas. Industry reports also describe UK-built ROVs delivered to customers in Brazil, Mexico and Spain, which shows that engineers in the UK are building equipment used around the world. We could not find a figure for the number of people employed in the UK.
On people, the 2023 article quotes Kevin Taylor, Vice President of Operations for the subsea business, calling the XLX-C one of the most versatile models on the market, and Kristin Pearson, the MoD's project manager, calling the contract a complex one completed quickly. We found no page describing the working culture, and no employee views, so we cannot say more.
The roles in a business like this include mechanical, electrical and control engineers who design the vehicles, software engineers who write the pilot and control systems, workshop technicians who build and test them, project managers, and support engineers who train customers and keep the ROVs working. Subjects such as engineering, physics and computing lead to this work, and the Aberdeen base places it in the middle of the UK's offshore and subsea industry.
Website: f-e-t.com
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