The shipyard that most recently delivered the Oasis-class ships to Royal Caribbean International will lay off 350 workers and close down until next summer due to a lack of ship orders.
STX Finland, formerly Aker Yards, has been building cruise ships for Royal Caribbean since the introduction of the Song of Norway in 1970.
After the cruise line last week took delivery of the $1.5 billion Allure of the Seas, the shipyard, for the first time in recent memory, found itself with no other vessels on order. It has predicted that its future pace of growth will be more moderate.
A letter of intent for a $335 million ferry with Finland’s Viking Line brought some relief to STX and to Finland, a country with a long history of shipbuilding, but the 56-ton vessel will not require enough workers to avoid the layoffs, and work on the ship does not begin until next year.
STX Finland CEO Juha Heikinheimo was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "One or two ship orders aren’t enough to bring back all our workers."
He added that 1,100 of STX Finland’s 3,300 employees were already temporarily laid off.
The impact of STX’s order drought extends to the many hundreds of companies and subcontractors serving the industry.
According to local news station YLE, some 750 subcontractors were involved in the Oasis-class project, and 200 companies associated with STX are closing or cutting back significantly as a result of the slowdown.
"I do not know if STX Finland will ever again build large-scale vessels," said Mikko Varjanne, COO of the Finnish ship refurbishment specialist FCR. "The network of professionals is getting a lot smaller, so I do not know if such large-scale projects are much longer… even possible here."
FCR, which is currently doing refurbishment work in Australia for Carnival Corp. and in Europe for Royal Caribbean, established a website, www.rautakourat.com, for laid-off Finnish shipbuilders to register to be recruited for FCR’s projects and to sell their shipbuilding expertise to other companies.
This report appeared in the Nov. 8 issue of Travel Weekly.