Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. (Operator instructions) Your first question comes from Roger Read from Natixis Bleichroeder. Please go ahead.
Roger Read - Natixis Bleichroeder
Hi, good morning gentlemen.
Pete Miller, Jr.
Good morning Roger.
Clay Williams
Good morning.
Roger Read - Natixis Bleichroeder
I guess the Brazilian awards would be the most interesting thing to us, I mean we understand the story with the ones that are continuing to look for financing, but the sort of incremental 28 orders from Petrobras, give us an idea of exactly how involved, you know to the extent you can, you are in terms of negotiations with them financing opportunities, would that be strictly Brazilian built rigs or does this also include the greater rig owning public out there?
Clay Williams
Yeah Roger, obviously a lot of effort going into that and just to fill in the rest of the picture about this time last year, Petrobras started off by saying they needed 40 rigs and sooner after issued letters of intent for 12 and so these are sort of the incremental 28. And everything that Petrobras has said and done since that point is indicated that they are -- I think are very serious and committed to putting those rigs in place.
We have since then seen a big meltdown obviously in the credit markets, which has kind of gotten away a lot of peoples plan, but nevertheless have worked closely with that customer on developing technical specifications for those rigs.
Along the way, I think they have been under some pressure to build many perhaps most of these rigs in country in Brazil and I think that candidly has probably slowed us both down a little bit in terms of actually winning awards for these and are still wrestling with that issue, it is clear to us that they want a significant amount of work done in Brazil by the shipyards.
We as you know have a large operation in Brazil, we are close to 700 employees, but we don't manufacture and actually a lot of our drilling equipment there. We think that most of the in-country construction work that is going to be done, is going to be performed by the ship guards with regards to the holes, and so we are optimistic that tenders are going to start flowing later this year, and that hopefully some of these 28 drilling equipment packages show up in our backlog and that is certainly part of our booking plans and an important part of our achieving the $3 billion to $4 billion in orders that we think we are going to get this year.
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