Weatherford CEO: Rocky Offshore Market to Rebound in 2026

This year isn’t looking so hot for the oilfield services business, but Weatherford International CEO Girish Saligram likes how the next few years are shaping up.

Today's market is “categorized by a lot of uncertainty, a lot of volatility, and it’s very different depending on geography, depending on certain segments of the market,” he said May 5 at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. “Obviously commodity prices have led the way with a significant reduction in crude prices over the past year and especially in the past few weeks.”

The trade war that began in early April, when President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on almost every other country in the world, has dominated much of the industry’s 2025 calculus. Tensions between China and the U.S. are escalating, and most goods between the two nations are facing tariffs well in excess of 100%. OPEC’s decision to increase crude production has helped drive futures below $60/bbl and exacerbated concerns about market volatility.

"We've seen recessionary forces that are driving demand down and then of course the elephant in the room is the trade war, which is a big question mark more than anything else today,” Saligram said. "Not a great story, but still a market that has pockets of growth—offshore actually being one of the most resilient ones—and we see a very strong, very positive outlook for 2026 and 2027 as we look at those markets.”

Brazil, the Middle East and Asia have performed strongly this year, and “that continues to give us strength and confidence in the longer-term nature of the market,” he said. “I believe over the next few years we will see a strong, resilient, robust offshore market. We’ve seen a little bit of a lull in 2025 in a few pockets, but I think that’s a temporary blip.”

Saligram said the business is better prepared for a downturn than it was for the previous one.

“The industry’s been very disciplined and not built out a whole ton of excess capacity,” he said. “For way too long, industry has operated with this paradigm of when prices go high, we can claw back a little bit of pricing, but the moment they start to retreat, oh boy, get ready for the discount letters. That’s no way to run an industry.”

For Weatherford specifically, Saligram said the company’s position behind the Big Three— SLB, Baker Hughes and Halliburton—pushes it to find ways to distinguish itself.

“We differentiate mostly through our technology but also through the people who drive that technology,” he said. “We’re a much smaller company than the Big Three, but we have a broad enough spectrum of services and products that we can go toe-to-toe on most things and offer fully integrated contracts.”

In April, Weatherford and AIQ, an artificial intelligence company based in Abu Dhabi, signed a collaboration agreement. They plan to integrate Weatherford’s hardware and software with AIQ’s AI-driven systems. Saligram said it’s the beginning of a three-part plan.

First, the company is completely refreshing its enterprise resource planning systems over the next three to four years. Second, it’s embedding AI into its external systems for customers, with specific emphasis on safety. Third, it’s building on last year’s acquisition of Datagration Solutions to expand its digital transformation capabilities.

"Ultimately this is to say we've got a way that we can integrate digital AI into the offerings so that we can again deliver more value,” he said. “People are very smart. They're not going to pay for buzzwords.”