Aker set to build yard in Russia

The international shipbuilding group Aker Yards ASA could help build a huge shipyard worth $1 billion in north-western Russia. A year ago, Moscow announced plans to build a large shipyard for manufacturing commercial vessels with deadweight of 100,000 to 150,000 tonnes.

Aker Yards is negotiating with two other prospective contractors, members of a private-state partnership, namely Rossiya Bank subsidiaries, controlling the Vyborg Shipyard, and Summa Capital, managing the Primorsk seaport in the Kaliningrad Region together with the largest national oil producing and refining company Gazprom Neft.

The government, which backs the project, must choose the best contractor. A source in the Industry and Energy Ministry said state support would go to a company able to offer the best feasibility study and to reach an agreement with customers.

In late March, Aker Yards sold a 70% stake in its merchant vessels division to Russian state-run investment company FLC West, a subsidiary of the leasing company FLC, for 292 million Euros. A source in the shipbuilding industry said Summa Capital had proposed that Russia’s state-controlled United Ship-Building Corporation (USBC) join the project, and that both companies negotiate specific parameters and respective stakes this week.

“The Vyborg Shipyard and the shareholders of the North Shipyard in St. Petersburg did not make a similar offer to us,” a source in the USBC said. USBC officials declined to comment on the issue.

In August 2007, energy giant Gazprom ordered two ocean-going drilling platforms worth 59 million rubles ($2.4 billion) for the Shtokman gas condensate deposit in the Barents Sea at the Vyborg Shipyard. In early April, the Vyborg Shipyard and Russia’s largest shipping company Sovkomflot signed a contract for building liquefied-gas carriers, chemical tankers, semi-submerged platforms and oil rigs.

A top shipyard manager familiar with both projects said the Summa project was less detailed than the Vyborg Shipyard, and that its political deal with the USBC could not bring in contracts today.