Efinor, headquartered in Beaumont-Hague, near Cherbourg (Manche), has founded its subsidiary specialized in pollution control boats. To this end, it took over assets from the Ecocéane shipyard, located in Paimpol (Côtes-d'Armor).
Efinor still has an appetite. The boiler company, headquartered in the Hague (Manche), continues to grow externally, after several successive acquisitions in recent years. This time, it is launching a new shipbuilding and repair subsidiary specializing in pollution control vessels. Named Efinor Sea cleaner it is built on the foundations of the yard Ecocéane, placed in judicial liquidation, which it takes the site of Paimpol (Côtes-d'Armor).
Small boats in Paimpol, big ones in Cherbourg
"It's another rope to our bow and it allows us to access the action of the state at sea, a market we have been aiming for more than a year," says Fabrice Lepotier, CEO of Efinor , which pursues a global strategy at sea. Unlike Ecocéane, which subcontracted part of the production, the Norman company, by this recovery, also ensures the activity for its specialized teams in the work aluminum.
In 2016, the group bought the Allais shipyard, a struggling Cherbourg company that exclusively designed personnel transport boats to operate on oil rigs. Since then, the company has diversified its catalog. It now markets trawlers and interceptors. "The strategy is to focus Paimpol on ship repair, ship clearance studies and the construction of small units under 9 meters," says the company manager. The big units, we'll do them at Allais' .
With Sea cleaner, Efinor does not recover a production site. It is also acquiring patents for three ships of six to twenty meters, already developed. Equipped with scrapers in the front, they can recover floating materials and filter polluted water. Larger models even house a pool that can treat the water on board.
With two engineers, a commercial and three boilermakers, activity has already resumed in Côtes-d'Armor. Efinor builds two boats in clean bottom with the objective of being able to respond very quickly to an order. As for the ships already produced, they were not slow in coming into action, with the testers as a crew, responding to the emergency, after the collision between a ro-ro and a container ship off Cape Corse. "We have two on the Côte d'Azur. We have already removed several cubic meters of oil and junk, " says Fabrice Lepotier.
At the same time, the Efinor group, which has around 700 employees and a turnover of 70 million euros, continues to support its long-standing customers, Orano (formerly Areva), Naval-Group and especially EDF. After having already supplied control rooms and pools for the EPR nuclear reactors Flamanville and Taïshan in China, he also moved to the Channel, where he won a contract with Clemessy (Eiffage's liliale) for 22 million euros. euros, for future Hinkley Point EPRs.