Hanjin books $5B in sales in 5 years
MANILA, Philippines—Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction Philippines Inc., which operates the largest shipyard in the country, posted a “landmark” $5 billion in accumulated sales and 100 vessels in cumulative orders from 2009 to December last year.
This only showed how the company, in five years, was able to strengthen its leading position in the Philippines, the South Korean shipbuilder Hanjin Heavy Industries Corp. (HHIC) said in a statement.
According to HHIC-Philippines, it was able to build in its shipyard at the Subic Freeport a total of 68 ships including container ships, tankers and bulk carriers and seven inland and offshore plants as of end-October 2014.
The dockyard has also received more orders since the first order to build four 4,300 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) ships in February 2006 despite the sluggish global market. As a result, it hit the 100-ship landmark in accumulated orders in August 2014, HHIC noted.
“Thanks to these successes, the Philippines is now the world’s top four shipbuilder in the world. According to statistics announced by Clarksons, the world’s leading provider of integrated shipping services in the UK, HHIC-Philippines’ Subic Shipyard first entered the top 10 shipbuilders in the world in terms of orderbook,” HHIC added.
Citing records provided by Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA), the number of ships handed over by the Subic Shipyard increased to 11, worth reportedly $900 million, in the first half of 2014, from only five the previous year, thus confirming its position as the largest exporter in the Subic Bay Freeport.
HHIC-Phil’s Subic Shipyard, which sits on a 300-hectare area within the Freeport, features an ultra-large dock (550 meters in length, 135 meters in width), ultra-large gantry cranes and automated assembly lines with 600,000 deadweight tonnage (DWT) of annual shipbuilding capacity.
“HHIC-Philippines’ Subic Shipyard has been recognized as one of the most successful foreign investments in the industrial history of the Philippines because it has achieved win-win growth with related industries, boosted national economy, created jobs and made a contribution to the local society,” SBMA chair Roberto V. Garcia was quoted in the statement as saying.
Ahn Jin-gyu, president of HHIC-Philippines Subic Shipyard, meanwhile, noted that the shipyard would focus on achieving “qualitative growth with the production of high-profit ships through the continued improvement of competitiveness and gradually expand our shipbuilding capacities up to ultra large ships, high value-added vessels and offshore plants.”
HHIC was founded in 1937 as Korea’s first shipbuilder. Since then, it has played a major role in Korea’s shipbuilding industry, building Asia’s first membrane LNG carrier, Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC), cable ship and icebreaker.
However, the company started to fall behind because of limited facilities in the Yeongdo Dockyard and eventually had to stop participating in biddings. Since the completion of the Subic shipyard in 2009, the company has rebounded strongly, winning a bid for the construction of the Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC).
