OMS Group Secures US$1.03 Billion Financing for Four Cable-Laying Vessels

Malaysian company OMS Group, a subsea telecommunications infrastructure provider, secured financing of US$1,031.5 million to support a construction program for four fiber-optic cable-laying vessels: CS Genesis, CS Triumph, CS Resilience and CS Alliance. The new vessels are intended to strengthen the company's capacity to install and maintain submarine cables.

The package comprises US$911.5 million in corporate facilities, commercial loans and export credit agency-backed term loans, plus US$120 million in commercial facilities pending financial close. Atradius Dutch State Business, the official export credit insurer of the Netherlands, and Eksfin, the equivalent Norwegian agency, back the ECA facilities. HSBC Singapore and Standard Chartered Bank acted as joint global coordinators and bookrunners, while KKR Capital Markets served as corporate advisor. According to OMS, the corporate and ECA-backed facilities were oversubscribed more than twofold.

CS Genesis and CS Triumph are being built at the Pacific Shipbuilding JSC shipyard in Haiphong, Vietnam, as part of a program involving Royal IHC, with delivery scheduled for 2027 and 2028 respectively. These are Type-22 vessels, each equipped with two large cable tanks and a double-ended cable chute for installation and maintenance work. CS Resilience and CS Alliance, of Ulstein SX252 design, are having their hulls built at the Polish shipyard CRIST in Gdynia, before being completed, outfitted and delivered at Ulstein Verft in Norway, both scheduled for 2028. These vessels measure 130 meters in length overall by 22 meters in beam and can carry up to 6,500 tonnes of cable.

OMS said the four vessels will boost its cable-laying capacity at a time when cloud computing, artificial intelligence and data center development are driving demand for subsea connectivity. OMS Group CEO Ronnie Lim noted that with these four newbuild vessels the company aims to strengthen its cable-laying capacity. OMS Group Sdn Bhd, headquartered in Shah Alam, Malaysia, has operations dating back to 1988 and includes OMS Telco and LitUp Network among its businesses. In October 2023, KKR had agreed to commit US$400 million to OMS Group to support its growth, including fleet expansion, cable landing stations and submarine cable activities.