HD Hyundai Samho will accelerate the Korea-U.S. shipbuilding cooperation "MASGA" project through a U.S. port crane business.
HD Hyundai(267250) said on the 26th that it signed a contract with the Washington United Terminals (WUT) to supply four port cranes.
The supply contract was pursued as part of a terminal modernization project to replace WUT's aging cranes—WUT is the U.S. affiliate of Korea's largest shipping corporations HMM—and to expand capacity for large container ships.
WUT currently operates eight ship-to-shore cranes at the Port of Tacoma in Washington state, U.S., four of which were supplied by HD Hyundai Samho in 1999. Ship-to-shore cranes are cranes that load and unload containers to and from vessels berthed at a port.
The project will replace two of the aging ship-to-shore cranes with new equipment and add two new yard cranes. Yard cranes are cranes that load and unload containers to and from vehicles in the terminal yard.
HD Hyundai Samho will carry out the entire process for two ship-to-shore cranes and two yard cranes—design, manufacturing, transport, installation, and commissioning—on a turnkey basis and deliver all of them by 2028. High-quality steel produced by POSCO will be used in the cranes.
An HD Hyundai Samho official said, "Since 1985, we have supplied a total of 20 port cranes to major U.S. ports," and noted, "this order was underpinned not only by HD Hyundai Samho's outstanding design and manufacturing capabilities, but also by its understanding of operations at U.S. ports and customer trust."
Meanwhile, HD Hyundai Chairman Chung Ki-sun met with Jamieson Greer of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) in May last year to discuss Korea-U.S. cooperation in the shipbuilding industry, where he introduced HD Hyundai Samho's crane manufacturing capabilities and proposed ways for mutual cooperation.