RE: Coming Next ?10 Nov 2021 17:53
The renewables sector is growing quickly. The Company is involved in several negotiations with clients who are looking at booking fabrication capacity across all the Company's yards. The contracts being negotiated are complex and multi-year, with values ranging from approximately £30 million to £200 million. Project developers have now become conscious of the lack of fabrication capacity across the UK and are making efforts to book capacity in order to meet their local content requirements. The Company expects this market to be a key growth market for the whole Group going into 2022 and beyond.
The Company recently announced an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) between H&W, Navantia and Windar. This MoU is expected to be converted into a formal joint venture shortly with the consortium bidding for large fixed and floating wind projects in the UK and Europe. Significant growth is expected in the floating wind turbine market, which requires large scale fabrication capacity and much larger load out capacities in contrast to fixed wind structures. The consortium is well placed to bid competitively for these large projects given the depth of experience that each partner carries and the fabrication and loadout capacity that the H&W group has across four sites.
With the inevitable move to floating wind, Harland & Wolff has dry docks and quayside facilities that can fabricate and load-out respectively these structures rapidly. The fabrication volume of these structures will be at a scale that the UK has not witnessed in the past. Further, the growing importance of as much local content as possible, as well as overseas yards reaching near-full capacity levels, bodes well for UK plc involved in large scale heavy engineering and fabrication.
· The Directors believe that the Harland & Wolff Group now has the largest fabrication footprint in the UK dedicated to the marine and renewables industries capable of delivering large, complex ship building and fabrication contracts.
· Company's first major fabrication contract signed in April 2021; fabrication of eight wind turbine generator jackets for the NNG project in Scotland signed with Saipem UK Limited for a total value of £26.50 million; fabrication has commenced at pace, with a significant contribution expected in the second half of 2021.
· Strong pipeline of contracts across five distinct markets and six service sectors developed and being actively progressed.
· Defence and renewables markets are coming into play quicker than originally envisaged; significantly larger opportunities brought forward by the Government in its commitment to naval defence spending and transitioning to green energy by 2030.