Abu Dhabi Shipbuilding Company

The company began life as a product of the UAE offsets programme whereby winners of defence contracts agree to plough some of their profits back into local industry. It was back in 1994 that Newport News Shipbuilding won a contract to refit UAE Navy patrol boats.

Although this contract did not work out, the company liked what it saw in Abu Dhabi, and went ahead with the acquisition of a 40 per cent stake in a small yard previously owned by Abu Dhabi Drydock Company and injected its own capital and expertise.

ADSB was formally set up in 1996 as a joint-stock company with an initial paid-up capital of $48.5 million. This shareholding structure underwent a change in March 2001 and today ADSB is 30% owned by Newport News Shipbuilding (now part of Northrop Grumman, the US defence giant), 10% by France's Constructions Mecaniques de Normandie, 18% by the Abu Dhabi Government, and 41.5% by UAE Nationals who subscribed to an initial public offering.

Its strategy has been to build off-the-shelf instead of opting for expensive in-house designs, and the group has prospered with a steady flow of orders from the UAE Government. For the future, its UAE contracts for the Baynunah corvette are seen as likely to lead to orders from other GCC states, and a $50 million new yard allows the moulding of hulls up to 85 metres long.

There is no doubt that ADSB has made the transition from offset set-up to full listing on the local stock market with impressive speed and performance. Its challenge now will be to use its listed status as a platform for a renewed assault on GCC defence markets to widen its customer base.