“BETTER funding situation solved the ship order to the benefit of the French shipyard of STX, President of STX France Laurent Castaing told Helsingin Sanomat in a phone interview.
‘The difference with our Finnish colleagues is that our funding situation is much better than STX Finland’s. Thus we had less difficulty in securing a loan for building from banks,’ Castaing said on Friday morning.
The Turku shipyard of STX announced to having lost the contest for the billion euro contract. The shipping company Royal Caribbean Cruises has announced that its luxury cruiser will be built in the French shipyard of STX in Saint Nazaire instead of Turku.
According to Castaing, procuring funding was not easy for the French shipyard either. ‘In the current crisis it was much more difficult than 2-3 years ago.’
The loans which the French shipyard of STX received from French banks were backed by the state of France. ‘It happened according to the usual export loan system.’
The funding for two other cruise ship orders from STX Finland is at stake, as the government did not grant the shipyard a 50 million euro loan, says the Vice President of STX Finland Jari Anttila.
The same loan would have been used to build two other cruiser ships at the shipyard of Turku, ordered by the shipping company TUI. The two cruisers correspond to 11,000 working years in total, and the orders amount to around 400 million.”
HELSINGIN SANOMAT 28 December
LEHTIKUVA / PEKKA SAKKI
