Russia plans massive shipyard expansion

According to the BarentsObserver, the Russian government believes its powerful shipbuilding industry should concentrate on the construction of civil vessels and the establishment several new federal shipyards. Icebreakers and specialized vessels, offshore platforms, research vessels, floating nuclear power plants and tankers should be the prime objective of the Russian shipbuilders, the minister of industry and trade, Viktor Khristenko, argues.

Khristenko said that Russian shipbuilding industry does not measure up to the competition with the shipyards of South Korea, Japan and China on the market of commercial vessels. The reasons are technological gap, expensive labour and difficulties of crediting, he maintained. Nevertheless, the industry demonstrated rather good results last year with 30% production growth and over 150 billion RUB of sales turnover. However, about 70% of production was military orders and stipulated by the state defence budget.

The Russian shipbuilding industry employs over 160,000 workers in168 shipyard facilities, most of which are located in the Northwestern part of the country. According to the long-term federal strategy on shipbuilding developments adopted two years ago, three new federal shipyards are to be built in the country: one in the west, one in the south and one in the Far East.

Next year, the Ministry plans to start the construction of the new shipyards. According to Khristenko, six to seven projects have so far been processed for tendering and two to three of them will be approved for state investments. Among them, the yards with the best chances are likely to be the Severnaya Verf (St. Petersburg), Vyborgsky Shipyard (Vyborg) and a joint project of the Sevmash and Zvezdochka shipyards (Severodvinsk).

The “Severnaya Verf” project includes the construction of a world class shipyard for the construction of icebreakers, LNG carriers, offshore drilling platforms and all types of military ships including aircraft carriers. The main beneficiary of “Severnaya Verf” is United Industrial Corporation (OPK) which also controls Baltijsky Zavod (St. Petersburg). In the new project the OPK is going to cooperate with Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering.

The Vyborgsky Shipyard plans to construct a new plant, which will be able to produce LNG carriers (two vessels per year) and deep-sea semi-submersible floating and production platforms (three platforms per year). The shipyard is controlled by the Rossija bank.

The project of Sevmash/Zvezdochka is partly oriented on the production of military vessels but its main goal is still to construct new facilities for production of oil tankers of 100,000 DWT and LNG carriers of 125,000 cubic meters capacity.

The cost of each project varies from 15 to 33 billion RUB. The most expensive is the Severodvinsk project with a price tag of 33.5 billion RUB of which 25 billion will have to be state investments.