Korea's major shipbuilders, strongly footed on offshore plant market, are stepping forward into subsea plant business, which extracts crude oil from subsea field.

Subsea market, dominated by four to five companies of the US, Norway, France, etc., appears to be two to three times larger than sea-surface offshore facility market.

As oil and gas resources from shallow water and onland are getting depleted, oil majors are aggressively investing in subsea development. Douglas-Westwood prospected that subsea system industry more than 500m under water would expand up to $25bn in 2013 from $15.5bn in 2011, which would grow further to $33bn in 2015.

Therefore, Korea's major shipbuilders, such as Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, etc., picked subsea plant as their new growth engine. They invest in subsea R&D, as well as look into strategic cooperation or M&A, etc.

Kim Man-Eung, managing director of Korean Register of Shipping, made a presentation from 'KOMEA FORUM 2012' on December 21, 2012 that Subsea X-mas Tree system, which controls or shuts out oil field production, was around $3bn, with major companies include FMC Technologies, Cameron, Aker Solutions, etc.

Manifold, a piece of pipe with several lateral outlets and/or inlets for connecting one pipe with others, has $2bn-3bn of market and Tree fabricators provide it by turn-key deal.

Also, other core subsea equipment includs - drilling facilities, control module which controls system and supplies power to it, umbilical cable which is an assembly of steel tubes and/or thermoplastic hoses controlling subsea structures from a platform or a vessel, electric motor pump, riser pipe (Flexible/Rigid/Hybrid), separation module which removes impurities from oil, etc.