Hyundai Heavy Industries says that today only 35% of its business is shipbuilding, while the offshore sector has grown to 20-25% Hanjin Heavy Industries and
Construction (HHIC) is still trying to overcome the effects of a prolonged industrial dispute with angry yard workers who protested at the loss of work to HHIC’s Filipino subsidiary in Subic Bay. However, the Korean yard has also succumbed to the draw of the offshore sector and will be manufacturing steel frames for oil rigs in the Philippines also. Last year HHIC won its first contract
at its Yeongdo yard in three years signing a deal to build four 4,700TEU container ships and a two logistics support vessels with the contracts worth a total of US$250 million. DSME is concentrating on larger
ships in every sector. “We rarely accept orders for bulk carriers,” says Sang-Kyu Lee an associate at the corporate unit at DSME, “if we do it’s 300,000dwt plus or ore carriers, while 20% of the vessels now on order are LNG ships and 30% of contracts are for the Triple E class container ships and other large [8,000TEU and above] container ships,” he adds. Te remaining ships on order at DSME
are VLCC’s and con-ro vessels. In addition DSME has made an attempt to enter the lucrative cruise shipbuilding
The Naval Architect October 2012
market, but Lee admits this is a difficult market to break into. “Cruise ships have difficult technologies associated with them, anti-rolling, low noise,” he says, adding that it is “difficult to find interior designers”. Following DSME’s completion of a 100,000dwt ro-pax ferry for Tunisian operator Cotunav DSME says it will “move away from cruise ships”. As the larger Korean yards have found
other niches to supplement their declining shipbuilding business the small and medium sized yards have been leſt to slug it out with the shipbuilding competition, particularly in the nation’s near neighbours China and Japan. Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) is also
undergoing a transformation of its business with the company saying that only 35% of its business came from shipbuilding while the offshore division has grown to 20-25% of the company’s income. HHI general manager Choi Won-su
told Te Naval Architect that the yard had completed 93 ships in 2011, but this year that figure will decline to 85 ships. The yard has signed a contract with
a European owner to build 10 energy efficient 13,800TEU container vessels that will be chartered by Evergreen for a 10 year period.
Hyundai has also agreed a deal
with Singapore-based owner APL to build 10 ships of 13,800TEU each that are optimised for operations on the Asia/Europe
trades. The ships
will have optimised hulls and derated electronically controlled engines with larger propellers offering significant fuel cost savings. HHI has announced a number of developments
that will improve
the fuel efficiency of its ship designs including improved hull designs, but the company has also introduced a the HHI VS Propeller that
it says avoids
wake cavitation and improves the power provided by the propeller. Not all medium sized yards have
succumbed to the fluctuations of the market. Hyundai Mipo and Hyundai Samho have surely benefitted from being an affiliate to the much larger HHI. Even so Choi admits that Hyundai Mipo “cannot make profits right now”. Competition with the Chinese has
focused the yard’s energy into building more sophisticated ships such as LNG carriers, bitumen carriers, LPG tankers and medium range tankers which the Chinese competition will find difficult to manage due the complexity of these designs. NA
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