Rolls-Royce Marine is shutting down its plant at Hjørungavåg in Norway, which employs around 200 people.
The factory produces equipment for seismic- and subsea vessels.
“There will be too little work for the factory after New Year to defend the costs of having the entire plant in production,” Anette Bonnevie Wollebæk told state broadcaster NRK. The head of the company, John Knudsen, resigned earlier this week.
It is expected that part of the operations at Hjørungavåg will shift to another Norwegian plant run by Rolls-Royce Marine in in Sunnmøre.
Earlier this year the company laid off another 300 people in Norway as the offshore sector has nosedived in step with the weak global oil prices.
The depressed offshore sector has seen thousands laid off in Norway this year. However, when interviewed by Splash two months ago, the country’s prime minister, Erna Solberg, refused to call the oil price decline a crisis.
“We have a structural change,” she said. “There are lower investments in the oil sector which we saw one and a half years ago which was what I challenged the former government before I came prime minister saying they were not preparing for this. That is a long-term change for a new situation.”
“It is not a crisis,” she insisted, adding: “We have had an extremely high cost level because of a lack of manpower and large influx of people coming in from other countries.”
