Yantai Raffles Shipyard (in ) is a shipbuilding

Shipbuilding

Shipbuilding is the construction of ships and floating vessels. It normally takes place in a specialized facility known as a shipyard. Shipbuilders, also called shipwrights, follow a specialized occupation that traces its roots to before recorded history.Shipbuilding and ship repairs, both...

 company in Yantai

Yantai

Yantai is a prefecture-level city in northeastern Shandong province, People's Republic of China. Located on the southern coast of the Bohai Sea and the eastern coast of the Laizhou Bay, Yantai borders the cities of Qingdao and Weihai to the southwest and east respectively.The largest fishing...

, Shandong Province, Peoples Republic of China.

Yantai Raffles specializes in offshore and marine fabrication, and shares in the company have been traded on the Oslo OTC

Over-the-counter (finance)

Within the derivatives markets, many products are traded through exchanges. An exchange has the benefit of facilitating liquidity and also mitigates all credit risk concerning the default of a member of the exchange. Products traded on the exchange must be well standardised to transparent trading....

 system in Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 since May 2006.

In 1994, Brian Chang founded Yantai Raffles at the junction of Bo Hai Bay and the Yellow Sea

Yellow Sea

The Yellow Sea is the name given to the northern part of the East China Sea, which is a marginal sea of the Pacific Ocean. It is located between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula. Its name comes from the sand particles from Gobi Desert sand storms that turn the surface of the water golden...

. The shipyard is in close proximity to Korea

Korea

Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...

 and Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, an area that accounts for 80% of the global shipbuilding capacity. YRS is the only shipyard in China to be majority foreign-owned. It has agreed to acquire 100% of the Sanlian Longkou shipyard in Shandong, China.

Company founder

Brian Chang founded YRS in 1994. Previously, he has worked with various companies in Singapore

Singapore

Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

 and Malaysia in the marine industry, including Mobil, Jardine Offshore and Far East Shipyard (now known as Keppel FELS) between 1965 and 1970. In 1971, he started his own company, Promet (now known as PPL), which grew in size over his decade-long tenure. He has worked for 40 years in the shipbuilding and marine fabrication sector, overseeing more than 600 marine construction projects

Types of vessels built

• Semi-submersible
  Semi-submersible
  A semi-submersible is a specialised marine vessel with good stability and seakeeping characteristics. The semi-submersible vessel design is commonly used in a number of specific offshore roles such as for offshore drilling rigs, safety vessels, oil production platforms and heavy lift cranes.The...
  
   drilling Rig
• Jack-up drilling Rig
• Platform Conversion
• Platform Supply Vessel
• Anchor Handling Tug Supply Vessel
• Heavy Lift Carrier
• Floating, Production, Storage & Offloading Vessel (FPSO)
• Mono-hull circular column FPSO
• Floating, Production & Offloading Vessel (FPO)
• Pipelay Vessel
• Fallpipe Vessel
• Semi-submersible bare deck Vessel

Yard Facilities

• 72-hectare shipyard
• State-of-the-art building facilities
• World's largest gantry crane
  Gantry crane
  Gantry cranes, bridge cranes, and overhead cranes, are all types of cranes which lift objects by a hoist which is fitted in a hoist trolley and can move horizontally on a rail or pair of rails fitted under a beam...
  
   with lifting capacity of 20,000 metric tonnes due for completion in July 2007
• One of the world’s largest dry docks (L430m x W120m x D14m)
• One of the world's largest land-based pedestal crane
• 2 X 370 metric tonnes gantry cranes
• Fully automated warehouse that can store up to 4,000 pallets in total

World's Largest Crane

Taisun

Taisun

Taisun is the world's strongest crane and has a safe working load of 20,000 metric tons . Taisun is designed and built for the installation of very large modules in semi submersibles and FPSO projects and located at Yantai Raffles Shipyard in Yantai, Shandong Province, China...

, the world's largest gantry crane, with a lifting capacity of 20,000 metric tonnes, has taken over 7 years to plan and an additional 12 months for the preparation of its design framework.

The crane, capable of muscling up to 10,000 Mercedes Benz cars in one lift, allows the mating of an entire outfitted deck box of a semi-submersible rig onto its hull

Hull (watercraft)

A hull is the watertight body of a ship or boat. Above the hull is the superstructure and/or deckhouse, where present. The line where the hull meets the water surface is called the waterline.The structure of the hull varies depending on the vessel type...

/pontoons

Pontoon (boat)

A pontoon is a flotation device with buoyancy sufficient to float itself as well as a heavy load. A pontoon boat is a flattish boat that relies on pontoons to float. Pontoons may be used on boats, rafts, barges, docks, floatplanes or seaplanes. Pontoons may support a platform, creating a raft. A...

in one single operation. The shipyard states that this will reduce work hazards at high altitudes and in the open sea. The lifting of the complete deck box reduces man-hours by as much as half.

External links

• Yantai Raffles Shipyard Website
• Oslo OTC Stock Exchange
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YO4J3Qm6LI&feature=related Video: Construction of the world's largest crane Taisun