Shutting Down
According to industry sources, Samsung Heavy Industries is planning to shut down its floating dock G1 located in Geoje on August 1. Late last month, its oldest dry dock was shut down. At present, Samsung Heavy Industries has three dry docks, four floating docks, and one dock for offshore plant construction.
The G1 dock was put into operation in November 2001. In January 2002, it succeeded in building a ship on the sea for the first time worldwide with it. At that time, Samsung Heavy Industries used mega-block technology to build the ship by connecting 10 super-large blocks to one another. Before this historical event, floating docks were used for ship repairing in most cases.
Floating docks played an important role during South Korean shipbuilders’ facility expansion that started in the mid-2000s. Floating docks can be built at a lower cost and within a shorter period of time than dry docks, meaning they can make a great contribution to easy production capacity expansion. With a floating dock combined with mega-block technology, a ship can be built within one and a half months. A dry dock requires three months or so.
Samsung Heavy Industries has brought in a total of four floating docks since 2001, including G1 and that for offshore plant construction. As a result, the number of its docks has risen to eight and its annual shipbuilding capacity has doubled to 60 ships.
The shutdown of the G1 dock is because of the lack of work. The company’s total order backlog stood at only 9.6017 trillion won (US$8.64 billion) at the end of March this year. For reference, the company’s annual sales were 9.7144 trillion won last year. Although it has signed several new contracts since the beginning of this year, shipbuilding processes following those contracts are scheduled to be initiated in a couple of years.