Korea's big four shipbuilders - Hyundai Heavy Industries, Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering and STX Offshore & Shipbuilding - are getting warmed into growing together with their shipbuilding partners by creating a business support council to transfer management techniques and core technologies, etc from 2011.

Those big four and their collaborative ship equipment suppliers announced the 'Measures for Shipbuilding Industry's Shared Growth' focusing on making a public-private joint technology development fund and organizing a business support council for win-win management on November 30th.

The measures include; cutting a loan interest rate for a shared growth fund; magnifying cash payment rate (by big 4 to equipment makers) to 100%, and securing a stable supply of raw materials, such as shipbuilding steel plates, for small-scale partners.

Korea's Small & Medium Business Administration and HHI are planning to invest KRW 15bn ($13m) respectively in creating a public-private joint technology development fund, to support HHI's shipbuilding partners in developing new technologies and push ahead shipbuilder's purchase execution only if the technology development is successful.

Besides, there will be a loan interest cut of the shared growth fund, which is jointly created by large shipbuilders and banks to loan shipbuilding partners funds with low interests. HHI has already cut the interests of the shared growth fund of KRW 70bn in scale, which HHI is now operating, by 2% points to 3~4%.

Large shipbuilders are to pass on know-hows of effective management to their partners by organizing a kind of regular council for management consultation supports, etc.

HHI will increase the scale of support for its partners in establishing the production, sales and purchasing system. SHI will expand the range of segmental consultations for a shared growth to multiple sectors, such as ship-fittings and bulker-components.

STX O&S is to train employees of small- and mid-sized companies by pass on its know-hows. Plus, DSME is planning to develop a specialized Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to disseminate it to its equipment suppliers.

Besides, to follow the measures announced on the day, the Korean government is to promote the exports of shipbuilding equipment by establishing a global support center for shipbuilding equipment and building a real-time A/S management system.

Plus, the government will enlarge the scale of its support through actively using the purchase conditional technology development project for developing core technologies of the shipbuilding-related IT, cruiseship and offshore plant sectors and jointly involving in the global shipbuilding & offshore plant industry exhibition.