Belfast’s historic Harland & Wolff (H&W) shipyard has clinched its first newbuilding order since being bought out of administration in 2019.
And the company, owned by UK infrastructure fund InfraStrata, also announced an intriguing deal to convert a UK naval vessel.
H&W said it will build 11 barges for Cory Group in a contract worth £8.5m ($10.7m).
The units will carry London’s recyclable and non-recyclable waste on the River Thames.
The first steel will be cut in about eight weeks.
The schedule allows for four barges to be built in tandem, with the entire build programme ending around mid-2023.
H&W group chief executive John Wood said: “With this material contract, we shall be opening up our vast undercover fabrication halls in Belfast and making optimal use of our new robotic welding panel line.”
The contract gives the company the chance to optimise production flows in readiness for other fabrication programmes in the order pipeline, he added.
The shipyard also said it had bought the former HMS Atherstone mine-hunting vessel from the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD).
The plan is to refurbish it for non-military uses.
Talks have begun
Discussions about this have already started with interested parties, but the company is not revealing more at this stage.
H&W is also tendering for a Ministry of Defence regeneration contract for the former HMS Quorn.
The yard believes the acquisition of the HMS Atherstone will significantly de-risk this programme given that the two vessels share a number of spare parts and components.
Should H&W win the tender, spare parts and components from the HMS Atherstone will be used.
The shipyard was acquired by InfraStrata in 2019 for £6m (then $7.4m).
The yard that built the Titanic believed it had won a first newbuilding order in 2020, but a deal to construct wind farm vessels fell through last year.
The potential $500m contract with Croatian-linked Triumph Subsea collapsed amid a volley of accusations on both sides.
LOI set aside
InfraStrata said it had “set aside for the time being” a letter of intent (LOI) for one firm and one optional 200-metre wind farm development (WDV) vessel agreed with the start-up in December 2020.
The yard group said it did not have “a high-enough level of confidence in this project progressing to speculatively invest heavily in it at this time”.
The deal was part of a Triumph order programme worth more than $1bn for six ships in the UK and Croatia, where Brodosplit is set to build a field development vessel, with three options attached.
The shipping company hit back, saying it had already formally cancelled the LOI.
Triumph said the decision was not taken lightly.
“To this date, Triumph has not received any formal commercial quotation and/or vessel build schedule,” the company said.
