Page 42: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (April 2012)

The leading shipbuilders are Damen Shipyards and IHC Merwede. Both com- panies have a large number of sites in the Netherlands as well as yard abroad. Otherlarge shipbuilders of commercial vessels are Keppel Verolme, Bodewes Royal Shipyards and Niestern Sander. The major megayacht builders (greater than 148 ft) are Feadship, Royal Huisman, Heesen and Amels. The Damen Ship- building Group owns the specialist war- ship shipyard Royal Schelde and megayacht builder Amels. (covered in de- tail in a separate article starting on page40).In 2010 there were 141 seagoing shipsdelivered (2009: 176 ships). Orders taken were for 67 ships (2009: 37 vessels) with a value of $960 million (2009: $0.5 bil- lion) with and export share of 63% (2009: 75%).In a separate segment covering the building of small ships, i.e. under 100 GT and inland waterway vessels, the number of ships built in 2010 was 130 ships (2009: 170 vessels) with a value of $680 million (2009: $990 million) completed.Orders as of end 2010 were 37 ships(2009: 68 vessels) with a total value of $264 million (2009: $449 million).During 2010, Dutch yards delivered 30 megayachts (2009: 19 super yachts) with a value of $1.45 billion. The orderbook at year close stood at 64 megayachts worth over $2.54 billion. The Dutch inland shipping fleet with acapacity of more than 7 million tons, isthe largest and most modern in Europe and represents more than half of the en-tire Western European fleet. The major- ity of inland vessels are skipper owned and is mainly focused on the Rhine River and specialized transport and containertransport especially between Antwerp and Rotterdam.Offshore The Netherlands is one of the worlds largest gas producers and gives it a lead- ing position in Europe. Ashore and off- shore in the Dutch sector of thecontinental shelf a total of 20 miningcompanies are operating at about 800 lo-cations on land and around 150 at sea.Annual production in 2009 was 2,612 bil- lion ft3 of natural gas and 56.5 million ft3 of oil. Hydraulic EngineeringThe market for hydraulic engineering can be segmented into: land reclamation, dredging, coastal and offshore work, structural engineering, soil remediation,site planning, commercial sand and sandtransport. In the Netherlands there areabout 160 engineering companies jointlyresponsible for a domestic turnover in ex- cess of $1.32 billion per year and 10,000jobs. Two Dutch companies play a sig- nificant role in world projects: Boskalis and Van Oord. Sales in 2008 amounted to $2.64 billion.SeaportsAmsterdam Seaports, including theports along the North Sea Canal, saw transhipment increase by 3% in the first six months of 2011. Until June 2011 theport region counted over 46 million ton in total. It is the fourth largest seaport in Europe behind Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg. Europes largest port, Rotterdam booked financial results for 2010 amounting to $203 million, a full $13.2million more than the results for 2009.The increase in business is mainly due to the strong recovery in goods throughput, up by 11% over 2009. The two main sources of income for the Port Authority are the sea harbor dues and the leasing ofsites. Harbor dues increased by $18.5million to $380 million with revenue from leasing land increasing by $22.4million to $329 million.Marine EquipmentThere are around 750 companies in theNetherlands supplying Marine Equip-The Dutch shipbuilding in-dustry in 2010 hadturnover of $9.8 billion(2009: $9.6 billion) and atotal employment of33,000 persons (2009:34,500). It is strongly ex- port orientated with 47% going to export with the larger domestic demand split between sea goingships and vessels for in-land waterways.38Maritime Reporter & Engineering News