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Samsung Heavy Industries builds giant ships and offshore structures, like oil rigs and floating platforms, for customers around the world.
Samsung Heavy Industries is one of the world's biggest shipbuilders. It runs enormous shipyards in South Korea where it welds together cargo ships, container ships, and specialized vessels that carry things like liquefied natural gas across the oceans. It also builds offshore structures — floating platforms and rigs that oil and gas companies use to drill and process fuel at sea. Most people never see its products up close, but global trade depends on the ships it makes.
The business is simple in concept but brutal in practice. A customer — usually a shipping line, an energy company, or a government — orders a vessel that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and takes years to build. Samsung Heavy Industries buys steel, hires thousands of workers, and assembles the ship piece by piece. Shipbuilding is a feast-or-famine industry: when global trade booms, orders pile up and prices rise; when it slows, yards fight over scraps and can lose money on every hull. The company competes fiercely with other Korean yards like HD Hyundai Heavy Industries and with Chinese shipbuilders that have grabbed a growing share of the market. The most interesting part of the business today is liquefied natural gas carriers. Natural gas is cooled to about minus 162 degrees Celsius until it turns into a liquid, which shrinks its volume dramatically so it can be shipped across oceans. Building a ship that can keep gas that cold for weeks is a serious engineering challenge, and Samsung Heavy Industries is one of a handful of yards worldwide with the know-how. These vessels are complex and expensive, and demand for them has been strong as countries look for cleaner fuel alternatives to coal and oil.
The company has had a rocky stretch. It posted heavy losses for years after the 2015 oil-price crash dried up offshore orders, and it needed support from its parent group to stay afloat. More recently, rising ship prices and a wave of new orders have helped it return to profit. Samsung Heavy Industries is part of the sprawling Samsung group, though it operates separately from the electronics giant Samsung Electronics. Watching this company means watching global trade, energy demand, and the shipbuilding cycle — a business where the tide goes out fast and comes back slowly.
Saved answer · last researched 7 Nov 2026