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Back to SSG 6
Expansion and full order books
Reports from shipyards in our region are once again mainly good. Both newbuilding yards and repair yards are willing to expand.
In Skagen, Denmark, a new dry dock has been dug out. In Orskov they have bought new floating dry docks, but at Århus Yard the three docks lie idle since nobody knows what is going to happen to the shipyard after some troubles with the previous owners.
At the Lloyd Werft Bremerhaven, Managing Director Werner Lüken is thinking of getting a larger dry dock to be able to handle the ever-bigger vessels. German yards are pumping out container vessels and Germany takes the fourth place among the biggest ship building nations after South Korea, Japan and China.
Poland’s venerable shipyards are still facing serious problems. They are in the process of being privatized, or rather re-privatized since they already went through the process once but had to be re-nationalized only to find out that they inevitably must be privatized. The European Union is demanding large-scale reductions in production capacity or the yards will have to re-pay EU subsidies.
In Finland the cruise ships and ferries are completely dominating the scene, they are the only types of vessels found in the Finnish order books. Those books have had no new entries for a long time now, but hopefully a fourth Freedom-class vessel will be ordered very shortly. With such a solid knowledge about passenger vessels, refurbishment is a possible way forward for the Finnish yards, which have had problems with keeping the delivery times of their newbuildings lately.
The Russian shipbuilding sector is dominated by construction of war ships. Since Russian shipowners order their ships abroad, the civil shipbuilding sector is in a crisis. This worries the federal government to the extent that it is investing more than EUR 30 million to try to pull the yards out of the crisis.
Estonia sees a number of groups extending their operations around the Baltic Sea. Latvian yards are building hulls and work with the repairs of Russian vessels that considers Latvian yards more European than Russia’s own yards. In Lithuania the yards are cooperating with their Danish owners and Norwegian partners in building hulls and hull blocks, for both container vessels and small ferries.
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In Sweden we find mainly repair yards. In the centre of Stockholm the yards at Beckholmen are finally sure they can continue without fear of having the island turned into a residential area, and at Muskö the former Navy yard has been taken over by Kockums, who are now targeting both navy and commercial vessels. In Lake Vänern a new ferry for the Göteborg archipelago is being built.
The western offshore giant Norway has all her order books fuller than ever and the production value of the ordered vessels have trebled to EUR 1.9 billion in 2007 from EUR 0.55 billion in 2004. Norwegian yards have been very active in establishing alliances with Eastern European yards for steel work, but only Aker Yards actually owns any such facilities.
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Fredrik Davidsson |
Latest update 21-02-2008 11:30 |
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Older issues
2008
