IHC Merwede
When IHC Merwede, one of the Netherlands’ premier ship building, services and equipment companies, built its first dredger back in 1895, the company’s rise to become the world market leader in the construction of specialist dredging equipment began.
Today, headquartered from the Netherlands with roughly 2,800 employees throughout its bases there and in China, India, the Middle East, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the company offers a one-stop service for everything from specialised custom shipbuilding to equipment, design and technological innovation, to its acclaimed after-sales service. IHC’s all-encompassing spectrum of business components makes this company the most economical choice for clients in the offshore oil and gas, marine, dredging and mining sectors and beyond.
IHC as we know it today came about roughly five years ago, when the company known as called IHC Caland was split up into IHC Merwede and SBM Offshore. With 200-plus years of dredging experience already in place, IHC chose to focus more strongly on building up the offshore part of the shipbuilding and equipment business. Having built up this business division, IHC acquired a number of equipment companies to strengthen part of its offshore work, leaving the company with one division involved in building ships for the offshore dredging and mining industry, another for offshore and marine—mainly building ships for the offshore market. In addition, there is the technology and services division, aimed at providing technology of all sorts both internally to IHC’s shipyards and externally to its customers.
Goof Hamers, President of the IHC Merwede Group, joined the team about four-and-a-half years ago following appointments at Imtech, Fokker Services and the Delta Container division at ECT. IRJ spoke with Hamers and Arie Korevaar, Director of Marketing and Sales for IHC’s Dredging Division (and a devoted company employee since finishing technical university in 1978), about IHC’s continued standards of excellence, international strategic goals and some of the record-breaking projects the company has been working on recently.
The full scope of IHC
IHC’s rise to becoming one of the Netherlands’ leading shipyard groups (along with Damen) has been extremely important to the company and served to highlight the ways that IHC stands out from the rest of the pack.
“It’s typically a Dutch activity which started with Dutch contractors,” Korevaar says. “There were works in the Netherlands done by those contractors and as a supplier of equipment we actually grew with them. That turned out to be specialised products in a niche market with more and more of a global requirement.”
When the global demand was created, IHC rose to the challenge. Today the company is enviably placed within the dredging business, supplying a one-stop shop for dredging equipment with about a 50 per cent market share.
“For the past 20 years (the company) has grown quite handsomely,” Hamers says.
“We’ve always focussed on much more complex custom-build ships. We’re not the standard ship-type builders which many other shipyards are. We focus on highly complex vessels and typically one-off vessels.”
As a group, IHC is not only involved in the building process of the ships, but greatly involved in the design and production of the equipment which turns the ship into a dredging vessel or an offshore vessel too. “Those two markets are our main focus,” Hamers says.
“We have done about €1 billion turnover now for the past couple of years and this year will be the same. Of that about one third is in the equipment that we deliver to our own ships and also to the market.” The way that IHC approaches these complex vessel building projects is not what you might typically expect from shipbuilders. The company approach is much more integrated than most.
“We want to be able to understand and control every strategic important element involved with that,” Hamers says. “So not only the building but also the equipment associated, the automation, the mechanical parts, and the hydraulics: everything that turns an offshore ship into a dredger.”
Under IHC’s technology and services division, the company expands past the provision of ships and services and into the future working reliability and economics a client can enjoy when it completed a build with IHC.
“We do not just focus on building new ships and equipment, but we also offer lifecycle support services to our customers to make sure the ships are well-maintained and that there is good spare parts availability, providing training to our customers, logistical services, and all kinds of technical services,” Hamers explains. “For the next 30 years or so of the ship life, we work to make sure that it is as profitable as possible for our customer.”
Korevaar explains that organising IHC in specialised business units has enabled the group as one, to excel in so many different areas of dredging. “All those companies work together to build the best dredge and individually in the market to sell components in the after-sales market,” he says.
IHC: As profitable as possible
Guiding us through IHC’s in-house magazine, Ports and Dredging, Korevaar indicates the lengthy “On Order” list of the company’s Winter magazine issue list of dredgers, workboats and station projects.
“We’re building so much,” he says. “Just to give you an idea; we’re building a dredge for Panama Canal, we’re building a dredge for China, we’re building a dredge for a contract next door here in Holland, and in Saudi Arabia.” Hamers agrees and says that the company has been extremely busy on the dredging-side of late.
“We’ve just delivered a large hopper dredger to Van Oord, 30,000 cubic metres. That ship was launched by our princess of the Netherlands and that ship is doing very well in daily operation,” he says.
“We have just started building another very big hopper dredger for another big dredging player, DEME; another 30,000 cubic metre hopper dredger. We have just started the construction of one of the world’s largest self-propelled cutter dredgers.”
Within the offshore division, the work continues with a recently completed project for Helix Energy Solutions, of Texas.
“We have the well intervention vessel with Helix, which is now in full operation working in the North Sea. We are finalising a 5,000 ton crane vessel for Seaway Heavy Lifting which will be the largest in the world when it’s operational,” Hamers explains.
“On the ship side there are quite a lot of record-breaking projects in our shipyard that we have just delivered.” The equipment-arm of IHC has been another hive of industry, as Hamers says that the company is also investing quite heavily in its Hydrohammer® business unit. This unit sells and rents pile-driving equipment which is particularly popular at the moment with offshore oil and gas business and the windmill installation business.
“We have just decided to invest almost €40 million in increasing our rental fleet for these hammers” Hamers says. “There are plenty of record-breaking projects at the moment and as a company we are very much focussing on our technology side.” This leads to the single company goal towards which IHC’s multitude of highly complex and variable projects are directed; to be the top economical choice for each of its clients.
“We call ourselves, ‘the technology innovator’ and it’s our goal to provide our customers with the right solutions, the right ships and the right equipment so that they can make more money with ours than anybody else’s,” Hamers says.
“Our competitive edge is that at the end of the day the company makes more money with our ships than anybody else’s simply because they are better integrated, and they have greater efficiency and higher reliability.”
Plans for the future at IHC
Hamers explains that as the world struggles out from under the global financial crisis and tentative, yet small scale successes appear, IHC aims to stay consistent at its current size for now. “In terms of our product offering, we will keep on investing in research and development to make sure that our products are the best around and the most profitable for our customers,” he says.
“In terms of the international policy, we have a policy where we build more standardised vessels locally and close to our customers, then the custom-built projects in the Netherlands.” The company now has a complete set-up for building dredgers in China which Hamers says is extremely important to IHC. “We have our own factories, we have a joint venture partner and then we work together for that complete set-up,” he says.
“Increasing our international policy is another target for the coming year.” A large focus in doing this is to bring about ease of localised support for after-sales clients. “Today we are developing more and more our lifecycle support activities; lifetime support offices in Dubai, Singapore, Xinjing—around the world where dredges are located,” Korevaar adds. “We’re setting up local offices to support the market.”
IHC, the company coming from the beginning of dredging back in 1800s Holland, to offering everything its client needs with the most profitable and reliable lifecycle you can expect from each machine, has already proven its worth. The company’s standing in Holland’s dredging industry, its turnover and its market share speak for themselves. As a historical, cutting-edge, highly-regarded shipbuilding, equipment, services and aftercare front runner, “the Technology Innovators” can truly impress on any project, challenge or client request that comes along.
www.ihcmerwede.com
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