Expansion by Appledore owners
THE owner of Devon’s Appledore Shipyard has bought up two waterfront sites from a troubled Scottish manufacturer in an £850,000 deal.
InfraStrata Plc, which snapped up the closed-down North Devon shipyard for £7 million in 2020, has now splashed out on two sites owned by Burntisland Fabrication Ltd (BiFab) from its administrators.
The sites are in Methil, Fife, on the east coast of Scotland, and Arnish, on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides.
The deal, worth £850,000, will be split across two tranches: £650,000 upon completion and £200,000 when substantial revenues are generated.
The facilities will trade under the Harland & Wolff brand, a whollyowned subsidiary of InfraStrata, which operates shipyards in Belfast and Appledore. BiFab’s 29 remaining staff will transfer to the new company, although they are currently furloughed.
The Methil site will focus on fabrication for the oil and gas, commercial and renewables markets, while Arnish will take on defence, oil and gas, renewables, commercial and cruise and ferry work.
BiFab, which had steel fabrication yards in Fife and the Isle of Lewis, went belly up in 2002 after failing to secure contracts to build offshore platforms for wind turbines. The company – part-owned by the Scot£15milion tish Government and a Canadian engineering firm – was put into administration at the end of 2020.
The Scottish Government invested £37 million into BiFab via equity and loans, and had offered a further loan facility. But when a plan to manufacture eight wind-turbine jackets as part of the Neart Na Gaoithe windfarm off the coast of Fife fell through, both the UK and Scottish Governments said that state aid rules prevented a further rescue package.
The deal mean InfraStrata will gain more than 25,000sq m of undercover fabrication capacity in a 580,000sq m of total site area.
The prime waterfront sites are capable of load in, load out and launching activities and are in close proximity to an array of wind-farm projects currently ongoing and planned in the Irish Sea and North Sea.
The company said the deal will catapult Harland & Wolff on to the “project runway of significant projects” that were previously at the planning stage before the Belfast site was acquired in December, 2019, but are now ready to commence fabrication.
John Wood, chief executive of InfraStrata, called it a “very important and highly strategic” acquisition. He added: “The acquisition of Bifab’s assets will open up a larger demographic of tender opportunities – most importantly, it is expected to substantially boost our existing sales pipeline success rate, given that the fabrication risk carried by the project developers will drop significantly since we will now be more favourably located geographically than others.
“I wish to warmly welcome the personnel whom we have taken on at Methil and Arnish.”