ADSB seeks new deals at defence show

The Abu Dhabi Shipbuilding Company, or ADSB will deliver three Baynunah warships to the UAE Navy by 2016 and is in discussions with other buyers to sell more, its chief executive said on Monday.

“There are discussions with some of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries as well as other international ones. Hopefully there will be something in the future,” Khaled Al Mazrouei said on the sidelines of the Naval Defence Conference.

Three of the Baynunah warships ordered by the UAE have already been delivered and a fourth vessel is due for delivery in April. The fifth and sixth will be delivered in 2016.

The first Baynunah vessel was built in France, but the last three will be built in the UAE from scratch, according to Mazrouei.

The company also builds another smaller warship, Ghannatha, and is due to sign a contract within a few weeks with a GCC client for the sale of nine ships including the Ghannatha model.

“That contract is for nine boats of different sizes. Some of them small military and some of them for logistics transportation,” Mazrouei said, declining to give a value for the contract.

The UAE government set up ADSB in 1995 with shipyards to refit and repair commercial vessels. It then diversified into repairing military ships, building commercial boats, military speedboats and amphibious landing craft.

Meanwhile, the first warship fully manufactured in the UAE — Al Dhafra, also known as ‘Pride of the UAE’, is on display at the exhibition.  The Baynunah class are corvettes built for the UAE Navy is named after the Baynunah region in Abu Dhabi. The first type was built in France in 2004, however the UAE Ministry of Defence commissioned an upgraded vessel to be built in Abu Dhabi, to form the backbone of the UAE Navy.

Baynunah was the first warship of this model and size to be fully manufactured, not just in the UAE but across the Arab World.

The warship embodies the vision realised by the UAE Ministry of Defence and Navy in the new millennium to innovate and evolve the Nation’s knowledge and skills development in the feat of building modern warships and other vessels. The ADSB was selected as the manufacturer of the new version of Baynunah military ship, rolling out the first fleet in 2011.

— With inputs from Reuters