BUILDING DREDGING EQUIPMENT: BEST PRACTICES ACROSS THE GLOBE

摘要

In the last decade tremendous changes have taken place in the dredging market. As a result of the booming global economy especially in the South East Asian region (e.g. China, India, Singapore, Malaysia) large infrastructure investments were made and this trend continues unabated today. Globalization of the world economy has resulted in an enormous increase in goods being transported between the different continents. This development in turn demands permanent improvement of the seaways, coasts and estuaries, as well the port facilities and the respective inland waterways. These factors have been the driving force behind the extensive increase in capital and maintenance dredging around the globe not to mention the immense capital dredging work executed in the Gulf. This global growth in dredging projects has significantly boosted investment in the worldwide dredging fleet as well as in the dredging equipment market. It is interesting to see, that this fleet enlargement is not only taking place at the market dominating European and American dredge contractors. It is also happening in an ever-increasing way at local dredge contractors in the countries where the large infrastructure projects are been realized. For reasons of high cost effectiveness both dredge new builds and dredge equipment manufacture are increasingly being carried out at shipyards located directly in the so-called "low cost" countries.This paper explains by means of several examples, how dredging equipment suppliers can act nowadays in this increasing global market, to combine years of in-depth dredging expertise with local building power close to the relevant customer anywhere in the world. It shows how an exchange of know-how is possible while at the same time protecting one's own key intellectual property. Proof of this lies with real-life examples such as the largest ever built trailing suction hopper dredge (TSHD) in Japan, the largest ever built TSHD in China and the largest ever built cutter suction dredge (CSD) in India. On the basis of a TSHD built in the USA the paper suggests how a dredge equipment supplier can work around artificial boundaries put up by the market such as the Jones Act.