Papenburg, 16.11.2004 - Today the construction of a new pipe machining centre started at MEYER WERFT in Papenburg. Mr. Bernd Busemann, Lower Saxony's Minister of Education, initiated this demanding project in the ground-breaking ceremony.

The shipyard will invest more than 5 m € in this section of the innovative and technically demanding pipe machining centre as well as in the restructuring of existing facilities. "This investment means an ongoing improvement of our productivity and quality. It will give fresh impetus to our competitiveness," as Mr. Lambert Kruse, the shipyard's Head of the Production Department, puts it. And according to Mr. Bernard Meyer, "the investment in the new pipe machining centre is another element in the company's strategy to compensate for the massive cost pressure prevailing in the market by means of well-directed in- and outsourcing."

State-of-the-art, fully-automated, CNC-controlled pipe machining plants are the core of the new pipe machining centre. In these plants pipes having a diameter of 25 up to a maximum of 700 mm can be machined, the process being controlled by data generated in the planning systems of the design offices. Hence an increased number of pipes can be bent, welded up, fitted with flanges or machined otherwise in a considerably shorter period of time. In this way the new pipe machining centre will allow for a more cost-effective and future-oriented machining of pipes, which, on top of that, presents a consistent continuation of the shipyard's logistic concept. In view of the fact that more than 200 km worth of pipes per year per cruise ship have to be machined and installed, this type of machining is certainly a crucial step in a continued, consequential process of cost optimisation and the creation of new jobs.