Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Samsung Heavy Industries builds giant ships and offshore structures, and it also constructs factories and other big industrial plants.
Samsung Heavy Industries is one of the world's largest shipbuilders. It runs huge yards in South Korea where it welds together cargo ships, gas carriers, and drilling rigs that float on the ocean. When you see a massive vessel hauling liquefied natural gas across the sea, there's a decent chance this company built it. Shipowners and energy companies pay it to design and construct these floating giants, and the contracts often run into the hundreds of millions of dollars per vessel.
The company has two main sides to its business. The biggest is shipbuilding: it makes container ships, tankers, and specialized vessels that carry liquefied natural gas, which must be kept at extreme cold. The second side builds offshore platforms and industrial plants — floating oil and gas facilities, plus factories and infrastructure projects on land. That second part is lumpier and more project-driven, which means the revenue can swing around depending on which big contracts land in a given year. The LNG angle matters a lot. Natural gas chilled to liquid takes up far less space, so it can be shipped across oceans, and the ships that do this are engineering nightmares — huge, heavily insulated tanks inside a hull, built to keep cargo at around minus 160 degrees Celsius. Only a handful of yards worldwide can build these reliably, and Samsung Heavy is one of them. That technical difficulty is its moat: not just anyone can compete for these orders, and the buyers are giant energy players who care more about a ship that works than a small discount.
In 1974, Samsung Heavy Industries opened a plant in Changwon and started out building machinery. It was part of a bigger bet by the Samsung Group that making heavy, expensive products was the next big thing for Korea.
A decade later, Samsung Heavy Industries merged with Samsung Shipbuilding and Daesung Heavy Industries, turning itself into a full heavy-industry company that made ships, heavy equipment and built construction projects.
The company sold shares to the public and added a third dock at the same time. That new dock gave it the room to become a truly large-scale shipyard serving customers around the world.
When the Asian financial crisis hit in the late 1990s, the company had to slim down and raise cash. It sold its construction equipment business to Volvo, and from then on it focused on ships and offshore engineering instead of backhoes and excavators.
For decades, European yards had the cruise ship market almost to themselves. Samsung Heavy Industries decided to break in, arguing it had to do so to stay number one in the world. It took an order to build a huge residential cruise ship called Utopia, which would be the largest passenger ship ever put together in Asia.
Weak demand and too many shipyards after the 2008 financial crisis put the company in a tough spot. It warned of operating losses and said it would sell a huge amount of new shares, and the stock fell almost 29 percent in a single day, the worst drop in its history.
The pain continued: the company was too reliant on offshore plants and was stuck with drillships that customers no longer wanted after COVID-19 cancellations. It reported a large quarterly loss, announced an 80 percent capital reduction and planned to raise a trillion won by selling new shares.
In a surprise shake-up, Sung-An Choi became sole chief executive and vice chairman while Jin-Taek Jung left the co-CEO role. The change put decision-making in one pair of hands, and the very next chapter brought the company's first operating profit in eight years.
The company marked 50 years since its founding in Changwon. Looking ahead, it said it wanted to become a sustainable, 100-year company powered by smart manufacturing and software.
The turnaround showed up in the numbers: third-quarter operating profit rose sharply on floating liquefaction projects and high-value ships. New orders through September reached most of the annual goal, and the company held a leading spot in floating liquefaction, having built four of the world's working deepwater FLNG hulls.
The business is cyclical and brutally competitive. Shipbuilding is a global price war against Chinese and other Korean yards, and profits can vanish when too many ships get ordered and then too few. Samsung Heavy has had stretches of heavy losses followed by recovery as new orders picked up. It also sits inside the Samsung group, though it is a separately listed company, and it competes directly with HD Hyundai-affiliated yards and Chinese builders. The big question for any shipyard is the order book: as long as the world keeps needing gas carriers and new ships to replace aging fleets, the yards stay busy — but when the cycle turns, the same yards can sit painfully empty.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026