Papenburg, September 6 2019 - The ceremonial awarding of the symbolic training propeller has taken place for the seventeenth time at MEYER WERFT. The symbolic ship propeller represents movement and drive and serves to emphasise the importance of employee training.

Thomas Weigend, Managing Director, Anna Blumenberg, Executive Board Member Human Ressources, and Nico Bloem, chairman of the works council, presented the awards to 31 employees at the shipyard who have successfully completed a wide range of further training and education measures. At the ceremony, the trainees were also presented with their training certificates.

The good level of training and ongoing education of employees at MEYER WERFT ensures the high degree of knowledge and quality that the company needs and is indeed indispensable, in view of the constantly growing technical and economic requirements of the highly complex process of cruise ship construction.

“Well-trained employees are of enormously high value to the MEYER group. It is thanks to the combination of initial training excellence and ongoing further professional qualifications that our employees are constantly able to ensure that our family-managed company continues to survive and grow in the complex cruise ship market. We are grateful to our employees that the company has orders on hand to last it until the year 2023. They are the ones who breathe life into our corporate goals and who, as specialists in their fields, see them through to their realisation. This is why we offer them a wide range of training measures to support both their personal and professional development. We are constantly on the lookout for new specialists to strengthen our team in performing our challenging projects”, said Thomas Weigend.

„In name of the works council I congratulate and thank you for. I want to stress, that with every additional qualification, our team gets stronger”, says Nico Bloem.

Training measures, bachelors and masters studies, technician and master craftsman courses and technical management training are held in association with the chambers of commerce and industry, vocational colleges, institutes of higher education, and other education providers inside and outside the region.

Papenburg, 16 August 2019 – Due to the weather conditions, Norwegian Encore will be leaving the covered building dock II at MEYER WERFT shipyard six hours earlier.

The manoeuvre is now scheduled to start at approx. 2:00 am on Saturday, 16 August. Once Norwegian Encore has left the dock, it will berth at the shipyard's out-fitting pier to be fitted with its funnel cladding. The ship will then remain in the shipyard port for further out-fitting work and on-board trials until its passage through the river Ems up to the North Sea, which is expected to take place end of September.

All times are subject to the weather.

Papenburg, 15 August 2019 – With the symbolic steel cutting ceremony at MEYER WERFT, work has begun on the next cruise ship for AIDA Cruises. Like the AIDAnova that was delivered at the end of 2018, this ship will be fitted with a particularly environ-mentally friendly liquefied natural gas (LNG) propulsion system.

The button to start the computer-controlled steel cutting machine was pressed by Sven Fahle, Project Manager at AIDA Cruises, together with the MEYER WERFT team, thus starting production of the next LNG cruise ship. Delivery is planned for spring 2021. MEYER WERFT will be delivering a third ship in this class to AIDA Cruises in 2023.

"We are very pleased to work with AIDA Cruises and Carnival Corporation at further es-tablishing LNG as a fuel in the cruise industry. We will also be implementing other inno-vative technologies on board this ship", says Stephan Schmees, Executive Board Member Project Management Ships at MEYER WERFT.

This generation of ships for AIDA Cruises uses LNG engines by Caterpillar / MaK, which fulfil the strictest environmental regulations. This class of ships has been devel-oped and designed with a focus on energy efficiency. The planning and design activities gave absolute priority to heat recovery, innovative electric motors, LED lighting, ship au-tomation and glazing, all geared to energy efficiency, optimized underwater paintwork to reduce resistance, weight-optimized material selection and many other topics.

The new ships for AIDA Cruises have capacity for around 2,600 cabins, with a rating of 183,900 GRT.

Papenburg, 08 August 2019 – Norwegian Encore will most likely be leaving the cov-ered building dock II at the MEYER WERFT shipyard on 17 August 2019. The ship has a rating of 169,145 GRT and measures 333.46 m in length and 41.4 m in width, with capacity for 4,004 passengers.

The ship built for the American cruise shipping company Norwegian Cruise Line will start to leave the dock at around 8 a.m. Once Norwegian Encore has left the dock, it will berth at the shipyard's out-fitting pier to be fitted with its funnel cladding. The ship will then remain in the shipyard port for further out-fitting work and on-board trials until its passage through the river Ems up to the North Sea, which is expected to take place end of September.

Possible delays due to the weather

For Norwegian Encore to be able to berth at the out-fitting pier, the floating section (en-gine room unit) of P&O’s Iona that is currently moored here will have to be moved to another berth in the shipyard port. Once Norwegian Encore has left the dock, the float-ing part for Iona, which is due for completion in spring 2020, will be manoeuvred back into the free covered building dock II for further construction work.

All times are subject to the weather.