South Korean shipbuilder HD Hyundai Heavy Industries has appointed its first overseas employee to site team leader.
In a social media post entitled “The first foreign site leader born”, HD HHI said Hewawasam Meegallal-Age Nalinda Kumara from Sri Lanka has become a team lead at HD HHI’s in-house partner.
The yard said Kumara, who arrived in South Korea in 2011 and joined the company the following year later, is now a site team leader in charge of 28 people.
The company said there are currently over 4,000 foreigners working at HD HHI.
“The numbers of foreign workers with a big dream of working at HD Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) are increasing recently,” it said.
It added that the company will continue to employ technical personnel from overseas and will provide opportunities for them to develop their careers.
Yards in South Korea, which have been traditionally staffed by domestic workers, have been struggling to attract young Koreans to careers in shipbuilding as they increasingly turn to higher-paid and less manual jobs.
One manager from rival shipbuilder Samsung Heavy Industries detailed to TradeWinds that in the first quarter of this year, the yard had over 2,800 foreign workers, with the largest number of employees coming from Vietnam, Uzbekistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
The list also included multiple workers from countries including Morocco, Yemen, Haiti, Rwanda and Mongolia.
In a slightly different move, South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean has also been growing its overseas workforce but at the management level, appointing non-Korean managers to head its operations in Europe and the US.
The labour shortage challenge is mirrored to a slightly lesser extent at Chinese yards in an era of bulging orderbooks where shipbuilders are looking at ways to extend their capacities.
