Damen Scheldt Naval Shipbuilding
| Damen Scheldt Naval Shipbuilding | |
|---|---|
| legal form | Group |
| founding | 1875 |
| Seat | Vlissingen |
| Number of employees | 4,400 |
| sales | € 1,400 million |
| Branch | shipbuilding |
| Website | http://www.damennaval.com |
The Dutch shipyard Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding has existed since 1875 and is now part of the Damen Group . The shipbuilding company is based in Vlissingen .
history
The company was founded by Arie Smit. This came from a traditional South Dutch shipbuilding family. In Vlissingen in 1875 he founded the Koninklijke Maatschappij "De Schelde", Scheepswerf en Maschinenfabriek (KMS) on the abandoned site of the former shipyard of the Koninklijke Marine .
The company developed well in the decades that followed. Since 1882 she worked closely with the Rotterdam Lloyd shipping company , for which she delivered comfortable passenger ships for the service to the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s and 1930s , such as B. the Sibajak .
In 1906, KMS built the first Dutch submarine , the Luctor et Emergo, on its own account . In later years the shipyard repeatedly built ships for the Dutch Navy. During the German occupation, several orders for the construction of destroyers of the Flottentorpedoboot 1940 type were awarded to the company. The main business was the construction of various merchant ships. There are a number of ferries and numerous passenger liners worth mentioning. In addition, they operated machine and boiler construction and built cooling systems. At times, products that were completely foreign to the shipyard, such as bridges or even buses and airplanes, were part of the company's construction program.
On March 4, 1966, the KMS merged with the Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij shipyard and the Thomassen motor factory to form the Rijn-Schelde Machinefabrieken en Scheepswerven (RSMS). Under pressure from the government, Verolme Verenigde Scheepswerven (VVSW) from Rotterdam , which had got into financial difficulties, joined the group on January 1, 1971, which then traded as Rijn-Schelde-Verolme Machinefabrieken en Scheepswerven (RSV).
On April 6, 1983, the RSV went bankrupt, whereupon the KMS was also on the brink. After the bankrupt group was unbundled, the Dutch state and the province of Zeeland took over the company shares. Not least thanks to several new orders from the Koninklijke Marine , the shipyard continued to exist. The company Koninklijke Schelde Groep BV (KSG) has been operating since 1991 and in 2000 the Damen Holding from Gorinchem took over the company to which it still belongs today.
Web links
- Website of the shipyard (English)
- The KMS at nedships (Dutch)
Coordinates: 51 ° 27 ′ 42.3 " N , 3 ° 40 ′ 25.7" E