Estonia, EU – Baltic States, Good for Business, Transport

"Upgrading of the vessels has started and will continue until the beginning of 2020. The Tallinn and Klaipeda shipyards of BLRT Grupp will during that period equip the overwhelming majority of vessels of Spliethoff with cleansing equipment," BLRT Repair Yards chairman of the board of directors Andrejus Babachinas said in a press release.

Previously BLRT concluded an agreement with the same company on equipping 14 Series S vessels of 21,500 deadweight tons each with ballast water systems.

The International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships' Ballast Water and Sediments (BWM Convention) which stepped into effect on Sept. 8, 2017 introduced global regulations to control the transfer of potentially invasive species. With the treaty now in force, ships need to manage their ballast water.

In the modernization projects a technology called GloEn-Patrol, developed by the South Korean company Panasia, is used. Panasia is the world's biggest manufacturer of ballast water systems and the market leader.

Panasia is a long-term partner for BLRT Grupp. The two companies have set up a testing center for GloEn-Patrol technology at the Tallinn plant to BLRT Grupp to demonstrate the possibilities offered by the technology and provide training to customers.

BLRT Grupp, one of the biggest industral groups in the Baltic Sea Region, consists of thee ship repair yards: Tallinn Shipyard in Estonia, Western Shiprepair in Lithuania, and Turku Repair Yard in Finland. The group employs a workforce of approximately 4,000. The group earned a profit of 9.6 million euros on sales of 339.9 million euros last year.

Spliethoff’s Bevrachtingskantoor B.V. is a Dutch shipping company established in 1921. The company's fleet consists of approximately 50 modern multipurpose vessels ranging from 12,000 to 23,000 deadweight tons in size.