Dear IRO members,
In a very short time we have ended up in a very unreal reality.
While the start of the year was marked by a cautious but widely supported sense of optimism within our industry, the world we are in now looks completely different.
First of all, of course, the worldwide very painful consequences and total disruption by the fast-paced Corona virus, which causes unprecedented suffering and damage.
Uncertainty
In addition, at the same time, our industry was suddenly faced with a dramatic drop in the oil price, forcing the major oil companies to immediately announce measures to drastically cut their investments as we just finally saw the first work coming.
Uncertainty dominates our lives where we now mainly depend on each other, on the one hand to ensure that there is real distance to prevent contamination, but on the other hand to support each other and to give love to overcome these uncertain times.
IRO from home
We as an association are also working on finding our way in this. Our office in Rotterdam is unmanned, yet we all work from our home environment to help you, our members, as best we can. Phone service on a rotating basis and communicating via video calling, you name it. All this is not strange to you now.
Measures around exhibitions
Our decision to postpone our participation with a Holland pavilion at the OTC in 2020 to 2021 was a difficult decision and made a big impression on us and the participating companies, but it was a direct consequence of what is going on in the world now. The OTC organisation has now decided to cancel the 2020 edition.
We have had discussions with the OTC organisation together with our fellow North Sea associations (UK, Scotland, Denmark, France and Flanders) and this joint approach has worked well and we will continue this towards ONS and ADIPEC later this year.
Measures around events
In addition to the measures regarding international exhibitions, we also deal with shifting, canceling or looking for alternatives such as Webcast (such as our IRO-EY Forecast meeting) for all our events in the Netherlands. This in order to continue to act in accordance with the guidelines of our government in order to contribute to a, hopefully, thorough approach to this in all respects very undesirable situation.
Connect and stay visible
It is precisely in this uncertain time that connecting and staying visible is so important and we would like to continue to fulfill our connecting role for our members. Now that physical meetings are not possible for the time being, we would like to continue to provide you with updates in an orderly manner via our website and social media as Linkedin, and we hope that you can also provide us with input. It would be very nice if we could show from an industry’s perspective that work is still going on and especially the initiatives you have taken to help stop this corona impact!
We are happy to help!
We are convinced that our network of innovative and resilient top players in the Offshore Energy Industry will vigorously get through this difficult situation on many fronts.
We are happy to help you with that and also wish you, on behalf of the entire IRO team, a lot of strength and good health in your private lives!
Sincerely,
Sander Vergroesen
Managing Director IRO