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Ship design companies first
began to emerge in the
late 1970s and 80s. Design
capacity was a bottleneck at
shipyards due to prototype
products requiring highly
varying design capacity so, to address it,
independent ship design companies began
to appear. It was also a time when the
European shipbuilding industry was under
extreme pressure from very low demand and
increased competition from Japan and South
Korea. Yards were closing one after another
and naval architects who had lost their jobs
had the incentive to invent new business
models.
At that time, most design offices were
providing both detail design and workshop
documentation and manpower for the
shipyards. There were also a few concept
design offices offering services to shipowners,
but none of these companies covered
the complete range from first-concept
development through project and contract
design and on to basic and detail design and
workshop documentation. Right from the
start, the business vision for Deltamarin was
to cover the complete range of consulting
and engineering services from first concept
to the delivery of the vessel and even beyond
for the life cycle of the vessel. There were a
few important strategic steps to be taken: to
develop a credible and innovative concept
design office and, at the same time, to enlarge
the design services also to include basic
design on top of detail and workshop design.
“When starting up the business, we had
a lot of ship design and building knowledge,
and the team that we had was very versatile.
The majority of them are still working for
Deltamarin. This offered us a good starting
point to realise our vision,” says Markku
Kanerva, former Development and Marketing
Director and board member, remembering
the early days of the company.
Since its inception, ship design has been
an overwhelmingly international field. For
Deltamarin, internationalisation was the
result of the following guiding principles:
trustworthiness and competitive products.
All the critical values and parameters for
a successful ship project had to be reliable
and guaranteed. Good understanding and
knowledge of the critical product features
had to be in place. Both process and product
knowledge were required and had to be of
top quality.
“People thought of shipbuilding as a dying
business even back when I was at school. Yet
here we are, still standing,” said Alf Björkman,
one of the founding members and the first
Managing Director of Deltamarin, in the
BUILDING A REPUTATION & CREDIBILITY