At this year’s SMM Hamburg Messe, with the support of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, is organising a two-day SMM Offshore Dialogue. This will take place on 8th and 9th September as part of the side programme at the world’s leading international shipbuilding exhibition at Hamburg Fair site. With its main themes of Offshore Oil & Gas, Deep Sea Mining and Offshore WindEnergy, the workshop is dedicated to the forward-looking offshore market, which is becoming more important all the time for the shipbuilding industry and its suppliers.

Oil and gas extraction on the high seas and the building and operation of offshore wind parks all offer enormous market potential. The highly regarded English energy consultancy firm Douglas Westwood Ltd. expects the offshore market, both directly off the coast and on the high seas, to grow continuously in the next five years, with anticipated investments worldwide of the order of EUR250 billion. In connection with offshore wind parks alone the analysts are predicting a global investment volume of EUR21.6 billion by the year 2013.