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The 117-metre-long aluminium-hulled ferries are of a design similar to the very fast Littoral Combat Ships Austal builds for the US Navy at its shipyard in Mobile, Alabama.Īustal also announced the signing of a contract to build a 15th Independence-class littoral combat ship for the US, bringing total sales of the sleek and futuristic looking vessels to over $8.5 billion. In October, it won a $190 million contract for two high-speed trimaran ferries to operate in Spain’s Canary Islands. Its civilian ferry designs so impressed senior officers from the US Navy that they borrowed one to try it out and then contracted the company to produce a military version for high-speed operations in waters near to land. The company began 20 years ago building crayfishing boats and then began building giant aluminium ferries for the international commercial market. ‘Under the model announced today, Lürssen will be the prime contractor leading a fully Australian build team comprising experienced shipbuilders as directed by the Australian government,’ Mr Pyne said.įor decades, while Australia’s shipbuilding industry struggled with delays, cost overruns and uncertainty about its future, Austal was a success story that sailed largely under the radar. The announcement by Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne contained little detail but said that once the first two OPVs were built in Adelaide, the project would shift to the Henderson Maritime Precinct in WA where Lürssen would use the capabilities of Austal and Civmec to build 10 more vessels ‘subject to the conclusion of commercial negotiations’. That would benefit both Austal and Civmec, he said, and provide shipbuilding in WA with a 15-year backbone.Įarlier, Mr Singleton told shareholders: ‘There’s only one company building ships on the Henderson coast and you can be sure there won’t be two companies building ships.’ Mr Singleton said Austal was the experienced shipbuilder of the pair and it would construct the vessels at its Henderson yard, so sharing work with Civmec was not a problem. He said Civmec was a highly competent steel fabricator and the two companies would work very well together. On most of its shipbuilding projects Austal was involved in, about 70% of the work was outsourced to other companies. Work on the first OPV is scheduled to begin there in the third quarter of 2018.Īustal CEO David Singleton told The Strategist he believed the government had made a very sensible decision.
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The first two vessels will be built in Adelaide by ASC Shipbuilding to ensure continuity of employment for skilled personnel before work begins on nine future frigates in 2020. The third contender for the contract worth well over $3 billion was the Netherlands company Damen, which had also teamed up with the Civmec subsidiary and ASC. The promise to build 10 of the vessels in WA was made long ago, but Austal had joined with another German company, Fassmer, in a rival bid while Lürssen was originally teamed with Civmec and the Adelaide-based ASC. But in a move that has startled some in the industry, the government announced today that Lürssen would team up with West Australian shipbuilder Austal and a subsidiary of a WA engineering company, Civmec, to build 10 of the vessels in WA. The German shipbuilder Lürssen Werft has been selected to design and oversee the building of the Australian Navy’s 12 new offshore patrol vessels.