The shipyard, formerly Oman Drydock Company, is now part of the Asyad Group, the logistics arm of the Oman government. Management of the yard has been combined with shipowner Oman Shipping Company, and overseen by Dr. Irbahim Al Nadhairi, Chief Executive Officer, Shipping & Drydock.
“We have integrated the shipping and drydocking as the shipping service. The companies are still two legal separate entities but then we share the same executive team to be more efficient,” Dr. Ibrahim told Seatrade Maritime News in an interview at Posidonia 2022.
On the shipping side of the business the group owns a fleet of 65 ships with plans to increase the fleet to over 100 vessels over the next five years. He explains that with such a size of fleet the shipowner needed a quality shipyard so it made sense to work together.
Asyad maintains most, if not all its fleet at the shipyard in Oman, accounting for around 15% of its business. While part of the same group Dr Ibrahim says it does not send its ships to the yard “by default”, and they have to make sure it is competitive as it needs to be for their third-party customers.
Business has been growing for the shipyard and it experienced a spike in the first half of this year as Chinese capacity has been taken out of the market by Covid restrictions pushing work to yards in other parts of the world. “So, we could see there was a big hike in the number of ships, not only for Asyad Dry Dock, but the entire region as well,” Dr. Ibrahim said.
“The next 12 months I believe the ship repair industry will still continue to flourish on our side.”
The shipyard’s two 600,000 dwt drydocks are already operating at full capacity and this year sees it adding a floating dock with the capacity to handle vessels up to Panamax size.
“We’ve recently acquired a floating dock which is of Panamax size and we reckon that about 40% of the business in ship repair is within that Panamax size. The floating dock gives us around 20% extra capacity,” he said. It will increase the number of ships the yard can repair from 200 to around 240.
The floating dock is expected to arrive in Oman in the next six weeks, and following some dredging works be operational by the start of Q4 this year.
Greek owners are major clients of the shipyard and account for around 40% of business, and Dr. Ibrahim said they added two more Greek clients last week. “It seems we have a good reputation in the Greek market and between now and end of Q3 we have 27 ships in orderbook from the Greek market.”
Globally its customer base includes MSC, AP Moller-Maersk, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd, and Mitsui OSK Lines. Maersk currently has currently two vessels in the yard.
Being able to deliver services efficiently and on time is of critical importance in the financially booming container sector.
“Today when you talk about bringing a containership into a shipyard time really is money,” Dr. Ibrahim said. If containership owner says a ship will be in the yard for 15 days the owner will expect work to be completed in 12 days.
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