Sembcorp Marine's new Integrated Yard

Read http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_450337.html for background.

Let's start off with some statistics. Singapore's Marine Industry is the backbone of their economy generating S$18.7 billions dollars of manufacturing output in 2008 alone. The marine cluster which consists of some 3000 companies provide 20 per cent for ship repair, 70 per cent for jack-up rig builds and 70 per cent for the conversion of Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) units in the world.

Back when I was interning at Keppel FELS, the company had three yards around the west area. I'm sure there are some historical reason behind the separation but anyway I think it would have been more convenient for everything to be in one centralized location. A colleague once related to me that during the SARS crisis few years ago, they had half the engineering office working at a separate location; in case of a quarantine, at least only 50% of the staff will be affected (the other 50% will be in for one heck of a working week). However after a period of time, everybody was pulled back because it was just too much of a hassle (or maybe the risk had lowered enough, who knows).

However the Integrated Yard seems like a nice idea from Sembcorp Marine. It's size is a massive 206ha, or about 490 football fields combined! It will be doing pretty much everything from rig building, ship repair, conversion, etc. From an efficiency standpoint, bringing everything under one location will definitely improve logistic cost and allow for more efficient use of personnel. It's an interesting idea but with no firm completion deadline (yet).

Keppel Corp on the other hand have enjoyed huge profits following the S$13 billion of contracts back in 2008. A year later, with many of rigs delivered, it is now looking at securing S$2 billion or more from Petrobras next year, which will keep the yards busy from 2013 through to 2018. However, Brazil has historically requested that a percentage of the rig construction activities carried out with local content. Nonetheless, the whole company stand to gain a huge opportunity to increase their contract orders if the deal goes through in 2010. Which is just nice because that's when I graduate =P.