Transocean Ltd. is an offshore contract drilling company that provides rig-based well construction services worldwide, with a focus on technically demanding deepwater and harsh-environment wells. It is incorporated in Switzerland, where its registered office is in Steinhausen, keeps its principal administrative office in Houston, Texas, and has shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol RIG. Keelan Adamson is chief executive officer and the company maintains offices on five continents.
The floater fleet
The company states that it owns or holds partial ownership interests in 27 mobile offshore drilling units: 20 ultra-deepwater drillships and seven harsh-environment semisubmersibles. The rig register published on its website lists ultra-deepwater drillships rated to 12,000 feet of water, among them Deepwater Atlas, Deepwater Titan, Deepwater Thalassa, Deepwater Proteus, Deepwater Poseidon, Deepwater Pontus, Deepwater Invictus, Deepwater Asgard, Deepwater Aquila and Deepwater Conqueror, alongside units such as Petrobras 10000, the Dhirubhai Deepwater KG1 and KG2, Ocean Rig Apollo, Ocean Rig Athena and Ocean Rig Mylos. The harsh-environment group consists of Transocean Norge, Transocean Barents, Transocean Spitsbergen and the four Cat D units Transocean Enabler, Transocean Encourage, Transocean Endurance and Transocean Equinox, with rated water depths between 1,640 and 10,000 feet. Individual specification sheets are published for every rig.
Rig technology and patents
Transocean holds patents in the United States and elsewhere covering a DC bus regulator, a hybrid power plant and rig power system, station-keeping and emergency disconnect systems with dynamic-positioning drive-off mitigation, riser robots, drilling automation, advanced generator protection, and ZED blowout preventer controls with a subsea energy storage system. It also publishes technical white papers on marine motion analytics, surge suppression, high-pressure high-volume fluid delivery, contactless drill pipe profiling and derrick load testing.
Contract cover and customers
Work is concentrated among a small group of national and international operators. Equinor has contracted the three Cat D semisubmersibles Transocean Enabler, Transocean Encourage and Transocean Endurance for seven rig years at a base dayrate of USD 399,000, with Transocean Endurance due to mobilise back to Norway from Australia. ONGC has a two-year award for Dhirubhai Deepwater KG2 offshore India, with priced options that could keep the rig in Indian waters into the early 2030s, and the same operator previously drilled with Dhirubhai Deepwater KG1. Deepwater Conqueror is scheduled for a two-well campaign of about 170 days in Equatorial Guinea. Awards announced during 2026 include packages of USD 168 million and USD 184 million in the first quarter, contract awards totalling USD 1.0 billion in April, USD 425 million of additional backlog and a USD 158 million award later the same month, USD 185 million in June, and a further USD 292 million of backlog across five fixtures added in the second quarter at a weighted average dayrate of about USD 461,000.
Financial position and backlog
For the three months ended 30 June 2026 contract drilling revenues were USD 966 million at 97.0% revenue efficiency, net income was USD 170 million, or USD 0.04 per diluted share, and adjusted EBITDA was USD 312 million, a 32.2% margin. Operating and maintenance expense came to USD 608 million, net cash from operating activities to USD 236 million and free cash flow to USD 212 million, while total liquidity exceeded USD 1.3 billion and total debt principal fell to USD 5,107 million from USD 6,654 million a year earlier. Contract backlog was approximately USD 6.7 billion at 5 August 2026, with a further USD 1.0 billion from the Equinor agreement not included in that figure, and full-year 2026 revenue guidance is USD 3,900-3,975 million. A quarterly fleet status report discloses dayrates, contract durations and out-of-service time for each rig.
History and engineering firsts
The company's lineage includes The Offshore Company, whose Rig 51 was launched in 1954 as what Transocean describes as the world's first mobile jack-up, and Global Marine's CUSS I, commissioned in 1956 as the first drillship. Sonat Offshore Drilling was spun off and listed on the NYSE in 1993, adopted the Transocean name after acquiring Transocean ASA in 1996, and combined with Schlumberger's Sedco Forex in 1999 to form Transocean Sedco Forex, followed by R&B Falcon in 2001 and GlobalSantaFe in 2007. The 1999 Discoverer Enterprise was the first ultra-deepwater dual-activity drillship using the company's patented dual-activity technology. Later moves include Aker Drilling in 2011, the sale of 38 shallow-water rigs to Shelf Drilling in 2012, and the 2018 acquisitions of Songa Offshore and Ocean Rig UDW, which added 18 floaters between them. In 2019 Transocean Spitsbergen became the first floating drilling unit fitted with a hybrid energy storage system, and the fleet's depth records include Dhirubhai Deepwater KG1 drilling in 10,411 feet of water off India for ONGC in July 2013.
Certification and HSE management
Transocean operates an integrated management system certified to the ISM Code and to ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 50001. Its HSES policy commits the company to an incident-free workplace, pollution prevention and energy performance improvement, while a separate human rights statement sets labour standards, requires suppliers to share those commitments and provides a third-party helpline for concerns. The company works to a Code of Integrity and its most recent sustainability disclosure covers 2023 and 2024. Its own history page records the 2010 Macondo accident, in which 11 crew members died aboard the Deepwater Horizon in the US Gulf of Mexico.