Singapore’s Sembcorp Marine has just announced that it wants to change its name to Seatrium Limited
The new identity is part of a rebranding exercise that follows its merger with rival Keppel Offshore and Marine.
With Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings as its biggest shareholder, and Sembcorp Ltd and Keppel Corp, the former parent companies of the merged yards, no longer in the driving seat, the shipyard and marine engineering giant is ripe for a name change.
However, changing the name of a company as part of a corporate rebranding exercise is always a challenging task, especially if the original name has strong historical and national overtones.
Company spin doctors and brand managers go to great lengths to explain how the newly selected name fits in with the bright new corporate vision they have so carefully curated so that shareholders, clients and employees aren’t left asking “what on earth were they thinking?”.
Sembcorp Marine said that to develop the proposed name, more than 1,000 names were generated, and a “rigorous process of legal and linguistic screening” was conducted to make sure that the chosen name would be viable.
The company will need to get the approval of its shareholders to change its name, and just in case any of those shareholders were scratching their heads over the meaning of the word Seatrium, it went to some length to explain its meaning in a statement released on Monday.
“Seatrium is a combination of two words — sea and atrium. It is a reflection of the business and its aspiration to be a premier global player providing innovative engineering solutions for the offshore, marine and energy industries,” it explained.
Whatever Sembcorp Marine chooses to call itself, it will remain Singapore’s largest shipyard group with a current net order book worth SGD 18bn ($13.5m) and 40 ongoing projects in the oil, gas, LNG, renewables and low-carbon energy sectors and.
