The cost of labor, however – though it originally propelled Korea to the forefront of the shipbuilding industry in the 1970s and 1980s when wages in Japan were growing too rapidly for shipowners’ liking – has been a major concern for Korean shipbuilders since the 1990s. On top of this, like all their competitors, the Ulsan shipyards sport state-of-the-art metal works and steel cutting lines, and one of the only four facilities in the world that can manufacture the enormous crankshafts used in the huge slow-speed two-stroke diesel engines that propel the largest commercial ships. The Ulsan Shipyard also boasts ten “Goliath” gantry cranes while Goliath is a trademark of Kone Cranes of Finland for their family of ultra-large gantry cranes, it has come to indicate any oversized and extremely powerful gantry crane, all the way up to the Taisun, owned and operated by Yantai Raffles Shipyards of China, which has been certified for up to 20,000 metric tons of lifting capacity, the most powerful crane in the world (image via CIMC Raffles): This means Dry Dock #3 is used to build two or occasionally three ships at the same time. HHI boasts that Dry Dock #3, the world’s largest at 672 meters long and 80 meters wide, a product of the unbridled economic expansion of the 1990s, can be used to build vessels up to one million DWT (Deadweight Tonnage is a measure of how much a ship can carry, including paying cargo, ballast, fuel, provisions, and crew and passengers).Īll vessels over 400,000 DWT ever built proved to be unsatisfactory in service and, despite the present trend towards larger and larger ships to increase efficiency, it’s highly likely no more will be built in the foreseeable future: even the Valemax bulk carriers, which are certified for 400,000 DWT are rarely over 270,000 DWT these days.
The dock is 490 meters long, 115 meters wide, and 13.5 meters deep (1 meter = 3.28 feet) and is advertised as being able to build any kind of vessel customers may conceivable want. The H-Dock is used to build specialized vessels and floating structures, from Tension Leg Platforms (floating platforms for oil and natural gas exploration) to pipe-laying ships. This shipyard looks like a cross between a sprawling state-of-the-art-manufacturing facility and a futuristic nightmare, stretching as it does over a massive four kilometers of coast, At the heart of this industrial conglomeration are nine dry docks and what once was the world’s first H-dock. The Hyundai Shipbuilding Division, as the Ulsan shipyard is officially known, can be considered the true poster child for the Korean shipbuilding industry: it represents its ambitions, successes, and now the many challenges facing it.
Ulsan is also home to the largest car factory in the world by potential output, owned and operated by Hyundai Motor Company, a company belonging to the same chaebol as HHI. Both DSME and SHI have their main shipyards on the island, in Okpo and Gohyeon respectively, and especially at Ulsan, where HHI’s main shipyard, the world’s largest by capacity, is located. To understand how important shipbuilding is for the Korean economy as whole, one only needs to look at Geoje Island, near the port city of Busan. Nowhere is overcapacity more evident than in Korea, where shipbuilding alone accounts for 6.5% of the GDP and where the Big Three shipbuilders alone directly employ over 200,000 workers: Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI), Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (DSME), and Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI).