History
HDW was founded October 1, 1838 in Kiel at the Bay of Kiel of the Baltic Sea by the engineer August Howaldt and the Kiel entrepreneur Johann Schweffel under the name Maschinenbauanstalt und Eisengießerei Schweffel & Howaldt, initially building boilers.
The first steam engine for naval purposes was built in 1849 for the Von der Tann, a gunboat for the small navy of Schleswig-Holstein.
In 1850, the company built an early submarine, Brandtaucher, designed by Wilhelm Bauer. This was somewhat of an accident: during the First Schleswig War, Danish forces had advanced too close to Rendsburg where construction of the boat had been intended, and so the task was shifted to Kiel.
The first ship built under the company's new name Howaldtswerke was a small steamer, named Vorwärts, built in 1865. Business expanded rapidly as Germany rose to a maritime power, and by the start of the 20th century some 390 ships had been completed.
In 1892 the company started a subsidiary in Austrian-Hungarian Fiume on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. The activity was closed down by the company in 1902. The shipyard still existed in 2009 under the firm 3. Maj.
With Kiel being one of the two main bases of the Kaiserliche Marine, the shipyard also benefited much from navy maintenance, repair and construction contracts. During World War I the company also built a number of U-boats.
In 1937 the company, by then having yards in Kiel and in Hamburg, was taken over by the Kriegsmarine. During World War II, Howaldtswerke in Hamburg built 33 VIIC U-boats and Howaldtswerke in Kiel 31 VIIC U-boats.
After the end of World War II, Howaldtswerke was the only major shipyard in Kiel that was not dismantled. The yard flourished during the post-war "economic miracle" of the 1960s, with the construction of freighters and tankers, and again expanded by opening a shipyard in Hamburg.
In 1968 Howaldtswerke merged with Deutsche Werft in Hamburg, and the company took the new name Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft, or HDW for short. After falling on hard times under the pressure of cheaper competition from Japan and South Korea, the Hamburg operations were closed down in 1985.
In March 2002 the American financial investor One Equity Partner (OEP) took the majority of the Babcock AG at HDW. Shortly after that the Babcock AG had to file for insolvency and called for a reserved transaction, but the OEP was able to avoid that requestion.
On 5 January 2005, HDW became a subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) - a shipbuilding group that hold European shipyard assets, that include Kockums of Malmö, Sweden and 24.9% of Hellenic Shipyards Co. of Skaramangas, Greece. TKMS employs around 6,600 employees in Germany, Sweden and Greece.
In 2009, HDW worked with Kockums and Northrop Grumman to offer a Visby class corvette derivative in the American Focused Mission Vessel Study, a precursor to the Littoral combat ship program.
In July 2011, TKMS announced that it has confirmed an existing deal to sell the civilian shipbuilding assets of HDW Gaarden to Abu Dhabi MAR.
Read more about this topic: Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft
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