Struggling Ferguson still afloat

Ferguson Marine, the last independent commercial shipbuilder on the Clyde, revealed it had plunged deeper into the red with its third year of hefty losses.

Although the yard continues to struggle against cutthroat competition and is still reeling from the loss of contracts to the Polish shipbuilder Remontowa, it said it was in the process of developing “new strategies” which “continue to be marine related” but were not dependent on new ship orders.

Alan Dunnet, the company’s chief executive who rescued the Port Glasgow shipyard in the mid-1990s with his father, was not available for comments to expand upon the new plans but, in its annual accounts, the company stated that: “Once established, the settled structure should be less vulnerable to volatile swings in profitability.” Ferguson is hanging on to the lifeline thrown in December 2004, when up to 300 jobs were secured until 2007 by a £5.8m contract to build the Largs-Cumbrae ferry. As yet, however, it has secured no work beyond next year.

The company’s accounts reveal pre-tax losses had widened to £1.2m for the 2005 calendar year, compared with a loss of £741,000 in the previous year. Turnover plummeted to £12.2m, compared with £19.9m the year before, highlighting the strain of the lack of orders. The 2005 calendar year was one of Ferguson’s most difficult periods in its 104-year history, as the old yard suffered body blow after body blow.

It was a year marred by the loss of a contract to build the fisheries protection vessel Jura and a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry to Remontowa in Gdansk. A political dispute then erupted and critics have demanded to know why the Scottish Executive awarded the orders to the Polish shipyard which is under investigation by the European Commission after allegations it received illegal state aid.

At the time, Dunnet accused the executive of driving another nail into the yard’s coffin by forcing it to compete without favour against new, subsidised members of the European Union and from firms in Asia. Meanwhile, the company’s headcount declined to 272, from 297 the previous year.