Page 77: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (August 2014)

www.marinelink.com 77DiversiÞ cation: The Way Out The industry has been looking at oth-er opportunities in the absence of new building orders, such as ship repair and ship conversions. However since the re-quirement of infrastructure for repair of ships is much smaller compared to build-ing ships ? a large portion of the infra- structure remains unutilized at the Indian shipyards. ?Like many other shipyards we too have switched to undertaking ship re-pairs,? said M.A. Siyad, Project Manag-er of Cochin Shipyard, one of the major state-owned yards based in South India. ?Though we have a number of orders both from the Indian Navy including an aircraft carrier now under construction, as well as orders from overseas shipown-ers, we are in the process of setting up a ship-lift facility 130 x 25 m that will have a capacity of 6,000 tons. It is encourag-ing to note that other shipyards, which have set up ship lift facilities, secured encouraging results including Chow-gules? shipyard at Jaigarh, Dempos? and Goa Shipyards in Goa and Karwar, all based on the West coast of India.? The past decade saw the birth of only two major ship yards, the Pipavav in Gu-jarat, Western India, and that of Larsen & Toubro (L & T) at Kattupalli in Tamil MR #8 (74-81).indd 77MR #8 (74-81).indd 778/5/2014 9:52:55 AM8/5/2014 9:52:55 AM