Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, South Korea’s third-largest shipyard, was officially rebranded as Hanwha Ocean during an extraordinary shareholder meeting that took place on Tuesday.
The Hanwha Group, South Korea’s seventh-largest business conglomerate, completed its takeover of DSME through a private placement of shares, with multiple companies within the group supplying funds.
Hanwha acquired the shipbuilder’s KRW 2trn ($1.52bn) rights offering to buy a 49.3% stake that also gave it managerial control.
Kwon Hyuk-woong, president of Hanwha’s support division, was appointed as the shipyard’s new CEO at Tuesday’s meeting.
Kwon will lead the post-acquisition integration and rapid business normalisation process.
The Okpo-based shipyard will issue another 5.15m common shares at a price of KRW 27,476 per share to raise KRW 141.3bn ($107.7m). The proceeds will be used to service debts.
The issuance of additional stocks will see Korea Development Bank (KDB)’s 55.7% stake in DSME reduced to 28.2%.
KDB has been managing the shipyard for over two decades.
DSME was established in 1992 as Daewoo Heavy Industries. The shipyard was renamed Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering in 2000 when the shipbuilding division split from the group.
Last week, DSME reported a net loss of KRW 120.4bn for the first quarter of 2023, a significant drop on the KRW 470.1bn reported in the same three months of 2022.
But its operating loss increased sharply year on year to KRW 62.8bn.
DSME logged sales of KRW 1.4trn for the period, compared with KRW 1.3trn in the first quarter of 2022.
