Golden shipyards: the history of branch development
Ukrainian shipbuilding facilities only start today overcoming a crisis. The impulsive force for such development introduced orders from abroad and purchasing of Ukrainian factories by foreign companies.
American cruise company “Celebrity Cruises” earns milliards of dollars holding giant liners “Millennium”. These ships were included in company’s fleet at the end of 90-ties. Due to them American organizer of popular round-the-world voyages at a moment’s notice took leading positions on the market. Unfortunately, Ukraine doesn’t have such orders for shipbuilding today. Though, the only building of one similar hull at least, would afford our shipbuilders to overcome crisis and reach good level of profitability needed for the further well-being. Meanwhile, Ukrainian shipbuilding facilities are obliged to stay content with the orders from Dutch and Belgian companies. Most often they envisage building middle-size ship hulls. Of course, such projects had saved the branch from decline earlier. But now our branch is looking for new sources of funding and more serious projects.
Ukrainian shipbuilding has huge potential. Before 90-ties the ship production of the USSR was quite successful. If we would like to operate with facts, Soviet shipbuilding enterprises were supplying the world with one third of military and civil ships. Our country inherited this mighty basis for production, but unfortunately was incapable to use it. The branch had experienced series of misfortunes in 1991, which resulted in drastic collapse of production and numerous bankruptcies. The main reason of crisis was minimization of orders made by state (main source of funding earlier). The rebirth of branch had started only at the beginning of the century thanks to two interrelated factors: the privatization and foreign orders for shipbuilding. The biggest foreign customers who signed contracts with Ukrainian shipyards are “Damen Shipyard Group”, “INDA”, “Dof Industry AS”, and “Ulstein”.