Western Marine creates history
Pankaj Dastider and Jasim Uddin Haroon
CHITTAGONG, Nov 20: Western Marine Shipyard, a leading shipbuilder of Bangladesh has created a milestone in the country’s shipping industry by successfully launching the largest and longest marine vessels in Bangladesh.
The company is going to deliver the ice class multipurpose vessels of 5200 DWT each – EMS SEA and EMS RIVER – to the German owner Ms Grona Shipping GmbH formally from Chittagong Dry Dock on November 26 next.
Each of the ships has been built at the cost of Tk 1800 million under a contract signed for building as many as 12 ships for the same German company. The company will make complete delivery of all the 12 ships within 2012 as per contract signed in 2008.
Industries Minister Dilip Barua will attend the vessels’ delivery and reception ceremony of the two vessels as chief guest while Martin Biesel, state secretary of the federal foreign office of FRG and Holger Michael, ambassador of Germany in Bangladesh, will be present as special guests.
Each ship is multipurpose dry cargo equipped for carriage of containers having strength for heavy cargo with overall length of 99.53 metres and draught load 9.00 metre and the container capacity is 108 TEUs in the hold and 88 TEUs in the hatches.
Gross tonnage of each of these Antigua flag vessels is 3500 MT and net tonnage is 1382 MT. The export price of each of the vessels is 8.0 million euros (US$11 million).
WMS officials said sea trial of the ships was accomplished by the engineers of the vessels’ German buyer Grona Shipping on November 15 in the sea waters of Bangladesh.
The 40-men strong special team headed by owner of the company came to Chittagong from Germany and joined the day-night sea trial. They made the voyage with the ships at 9.00 am from Chittagong and returned at 9.00 pm at 12 nautical miles an hour in the deep waters of Kutubdia.
The engineers and crew were fully satisfied at the performance of both the vessels after examining their machineries and speed capacity, they said.
WMS managing director Shakhawat Hossain said, the ships have been built with the world’s sophisticated machineries.
He said that it was a great achievement for Bangladesh that it is building 12 highly sophisticated ships for a German company. Building of eight more ships for the German company has been going on at the shipyard in Chittagong.
He said that they have successfully completed two ships now and expressed the hope that other countries would come forward with orders of building bigger ships for them.
Earlier in December 2008, the local ship building giant inked a deal to build 12 vessels for the company.
Sakhawat said, “These vessels are bridge controlled. Bridge controlled vessels are operated remotely having few people on the engine room. Those can also ply on the ice.”
Western Marine Shipyard Ltd was established in 2000. In 2008, the Chittagong-based company set up a Tk2.00 billion shipyard and slipways at Kolagaon on the bank of the river Karnaphuli with orders from European companies to build 18 ships at a price of US$180 million.
source:http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/more.php?news_id=117929&date=2010-11-21
