According to Quest Offshore Resources, this is important because the subsea tree market is a better indication of the industry's production growth potential than drilling rigs.
In The Growth Imperative: A global subsea market forecast to 2019, FC Business Intelligence senior industry analyst Kerr Jeferies said this forecast might seem counter-intuitive, but industry had no choice but to keep drilling, and there was nowhere left to go but into deeper water.
Quest CEO John Chadderton said in the report that there was a "relentless push to put things on the ocean floor, and tree orders are a pretty good indicator when you're looking ahead approximately three years".
"As a signal of things to come, they are better than drilling rigs," he added.
Chadderton recalled that Royal Dutch Shell had the Discoverer Seven Seas drilling holes in the deep water Gulf of Mexico back in the 1980s.
"Drilling is not directly linked to a production time line, whereas if there is a 20% increase in trees ordered for delivery next year, you're going to see production go up," he said.
Chadderton believes the growth in capital expenditure would be even higher were it not for what he calls the "implosion" of the offshore market in Brazil.
A perfect storm of low oil prices, a corruption scandal involving Petrobras and the government's moves to limit foreign companies' ownership of developments in its vast pre-salt fields have caused great concern within the industry.
"Big oil companies have to focus on big projects," Chadderton said.
"There's a certain threshold of project size that matches their business model and they really don't like to attempt smaller things because it's just not economically efficient. That's what motivates Shell in the Arctic.
"Five hundred million barrels recoverable - that's kind of the minimum threshold, and the only thing that will satisfy that demand right now are these multi-billion dollar deepwater projects."
Chadderton said that every day an oil company was not replacing its reserves, it was "slowly going out of business.
"They're selling their assets every day and if they do not replenish, eventually they will sell their last barrel," he said.
"These fields are going to be produced somewhere down the line. It's just a matter of when, which is why the subsea market gets more and more secure every day."
Chadderton said that when the oil price returned to "acceptable" levels, the market would be surprised how fast projects snapped back from delays.
"The longer the slump goes on, the longer projects are delayed, the more severe the supply-demand imbalance will be," he said.
"What happens when all of a sudden some players want to move ahead in a hurry? Prices for services and equipment are going to skyrocket - and bear in mind that for certain deep water projects there are maybe four or five or even three construction barges in the world that can service them.
"The danger is, if you're slowing things down because you're hoping to get a better price on the oil, you leave yourself vulnerable to getting stuck on the wrong side of the flip-flop and, if that happens, you've got a different kind of financial issue."
