Aberdeen Harbour is going ahead with its .350 million expansion project after the Harbour Board decided to sanction the investment. The construction is expected to commence in early 2017. The new facilities will include 1,400m of new quay, with a water depth of up to 10.5m and will create an additional 125,000sqm of harbour.

BAE Systems has sold its San Francisco Ship Repair business to Puglia Engineering, Inc., a Tacoma based shiprepair company that is currently operating two shipyards in Washington State.

BBC Chartering announced the launch of a new monthly service between Thailand and Australia/New Zealand, starting mid- December 2016 due to increased demand.

Ferus Smit of The Netherlands launched the 2,999gt Arklow Castle, the third in a series of ten vessels being built for Irelandbased Arklow Shipping, on 12th January.

Fincantieri announced on 16th December that it had established Fincantieri Australia with a new Australian headquarters in Canberra. The primary reason for this at present is for the building of Naval ships but orders for other vessel types will surely follow.

Flinter Group, a multipurpose vessel owner based in The Netherlands, ceased trading on 23rd December having been forced into bankruptcy when lead creditor ING stopped funding the company and sought to sell off much of its fleet. Denmark’s Thorco Shipping won in auction nine of Flinter’s ships for $42.7m just days before the end. The group had been founded in 1989 but is no more.

Höegh Autoliners took delivery of the 76,420gt Hoegh Trotter, the firm’s sixth New Horizon Pure Car Truck Carrier (PCTC), in Xiamen, China, on 8th December 2016. The Hoegh Trotter was the final Post-Panamax vessel to be delivered by Chinese shipbuilder Xiamen Shipbuilding Industry to Hoegh Autoliners in 2016.

Hyundai Heavy Industries of South Korea is to close its Gunsan Shipyard in March. The company has offered voluntary redundancy packages to all 650 employees as part of its business restructuring process. The management of HHI will look to transfer the employees who choose to stay with the company to its Ulsan shipyard. Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) and Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) are also axing further jobs in 2017 with an overall figure of 4,000 staff in the industry being reported. South Korean shipyards have been fighting plummeting orders and the nation has slumped from first to third in terms of global order books in the past couple of years.

Incat Crowther and Vigor announced the delivery of Sentinel, an 18.3m Catamaran Research Vessel, to the California Department of Water Resources on 3rd January. She was built at Vigor’s specialised aluminum fabrication facility in Seattle, Washington and her primary application is the monitoring of water quality, phytoplankton, zooplankton and benthic macro-invertebrates within the San Francisco bay area and close proximity coastline.