DNV has officially opened its office in Ningbo in Zhejiang Province. The office brings the DNV Greater China network to 31 offices in 21 cities.
“The opening of our office here in Ningbo reinforces our position in eastern china as a maritime partner dedicated to providing local support to our customers. Ningbo has a wide cross-section of shipping interests and we shall now be able to offer them our full spectrum of our services,” said Bjørn K. Haugland, DNV Maritime regional manager for Great China.
The opening attracted over 80 guests including the Norwegian Consul General Fred Nomme who cited Ningbo’s strategic location, excellent infrastructure, and growing yard and port facilities as instrumental in enabling service-minded companies, like DNV, to serve its customers.
Mr Chen Guomiao, director of Ningbo’s foreign affairs office congratulated DNV with its office opening. “DNV’s presence and decision to site its new office here is a strong testimony to Ningbo’s port, shipbuilding and repair capabilities.”
There are several shipyards in Ningbo and the surrounding area, including the COSCO (Zhoushan) shipyard which has 4 dry docks, nine piers and capacity of 2 mill tons. It is slated to become a huge ship repair base covering ship repairs, conversion and offshore work by 2010.
A new shipyard, Zhoushan IMC Yongyue Shipyard & Engineering, is strategically located at the deep-sea port of Zhoushan Islands. It consists of two docks accommodating vessels up to 300,000dwt. A new floating dock (175,000dwt) and additional jetty, is planned to be completed this year.
DNV recently secured a contract with Zhejiang Shipbuilding concerning the construction of four platform supply vessels for Bourbon. The vessels will be delivered between September 2007 and September 2008.
DNV has also been involved in block assemblies for Samsung Heavy Industry (Ningbo) Co. Ltd, which plans to double the annual production capacity of its blocks assembly line by the end of this year to 120,000 tons.