Samsung Heavy to get $920M for six very big ships

Nam Joon-ou, president and CEO of Samsung Heavy Industries, right, shakes hand with Anchor Chang, chairman of Evergreen Marine Corporation, after signing a shipbuilding deal Monday in Taiwan. [SAMSUNG HEAVY INDUSTRIES]

Samsung Heavy Industries announced Tuesday it bagged $920 million worth of orders to build six very large container ships from Taiwanese shipping line Evergreen Marine Corporation.

The new ships will be 400 meters (1,312 feet) long, 61.5 meters wide and 33.2 meters high. The ships will be able to carry 23,764 containers, which are each 20 feet long. This, in shipping industry terms, translates to 23,764 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) in capacity.

According to Samsung Heavy, the newly ordered ships are to become the largest container ships in the world. The ordered ships are even larger than a 23,756 TEU container ship delivered by the Korean firm to Swiss-based Mediterranean Shipping Company in July. At the time, the shipbuilder said that was the world’s largest container ship.

With the latest deal, Samsung Heavy now has the largest order backlog for 23,000-TEU level large container ships in the world, it said. It has 14 ultra-large container ships left to build.

“The demand for ultra-large container ships is expected to continue as global ship owners hope to reduce costs through economy of scale,” a spokesperson from the shipbuilder said.

So far, Samsung Heavy has secured $5.1 billion worth of orders to build 35 vessels of different types this year, achieving 65 percent of its annual target of $7.8 billion.

By ship type, it won orders to build 14 crude oil tankers, 11 liquefied natural gas carriers, six container ships, two product carriers, one special-purpose ship and one floating vessel, dubbed the floating production storage and offloading unit.

BY KIM JEE-HEE [kim.jeehee@joongang.co.kr]