(Alliance News) - Harland & Wolff Group Holdings PLC on Wednesday said it bought a former mine hunting class vessel from the UK Ministry of Defence and reported a contract win for barges fabrication.
Harland & Wolff is a Belfast-based offshore construction company operating in commercial, cruise and ferry, defence, energy and renewable markets.
It said it acquired the former HMS Atherstone from the MoD to refurbish it for non-military uses.
As announced previously, the company is also involved in a competition run by the MOD regeneration programme for the former HMS Quorn, also known as M55. Harland said the acquisition of Atherstone will significantly de-risk the M55 regeneration programme given that the two vessels share a number of spare parts and components.
Chief Executive Officer John Wood said: "The benefits of this acquisition are two-fold; we now can significantly de-risk the M55 regeneration programme by utilising spares and component parts common to the two vessels, which has been recognised by MoD and will certainly help in closing out the negotiations over the next few weeks.
"Secondly, we also can utilise this platform as the basis for other clients' projects, which will be a valuable revenue stream for 2023."
Separately, the company also secured a GBP8.5 million contract with Riverside Resource Recovery Ltd for the fabrication of eleven barges.
Riverside Resource Recovery is a part of the Cory Group, a waste management and recycling company operating in London.
The barges will be used by Cory to transport London's recyclable and non-recyclable waste on the river Thames.
Wood added: "With this material contract, we shall be opening up our vast undercover fabrication halls in Belfast and making optimal use of our new robotic welding panel line. This contract gives us the opportunity to optimise our production flows in readiness for other fabrication programmes in our plans and it demonstrates the variety of fabrication work that our facilities are ideally placed to execute upon."
The contract win came after Harland & Wolff suffered a widened loss in the most recent financial year to GBP25.5 million from GBP10.4 million a year ago.
Harland & Wolff shares were up 11% at 14.48 pence each on Wednesday in London.
By Xindi Wei; xindiwei@alliancenews.com
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Harland & Wolff (HARL)