Non-binding offers have been received from several parties, a shortlist has been compiled and due diligence has started, with completion of a deal expected by the end of this year.

The sale will not be the first upheaval in the history of IHC Holland's Kinderdijk and Sliedrecht yards, which specialise in trailing suction hoppers and stationary dredgers respectively. They can trace their history back to 1687 when the Smit family, already busy building Kinderdijk's now famous windmills, also began building ships. The modern IHC Holland was founded in 1943 as a merger of six smaller shipbuilding companies for the purpose of completing an order to build six tin dredgers for alluvial mining sites in the Dutch East Indies.

The Merwede Shipyard was acquired by IHC Caland in 1993 just as the massive land reclamation works for Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok Airport were inspiring both project planners and dredging operators worldwide with the potential of massively larger capacity trailing suction hopper dredgers. Four years later in the continuing euphoria, IHC Caland acquired Rotterdam's van der Giessen-de Noord yard, which built a number of jumbo trailing suction hopper dredgers before the market downturn for large trailing suction hopper dredgers and stiff competition for other vessel types saw it closed recently.

MJ Information No : 19717