The nation’s leading shipbuilders are shifting their focus to offshore plant building from traditional shipbuilding, which faced a sharp fall in orders throughout the year amid the prolonged economic recession in Europe.

Hyundai Heavy Industries announced on Sunday it has built a production line on 202,000 square meters of land within the Onsan industrial complex in Ulsan to produce modules used to construct offshore plants. About 50,000 tons of large-sized modules for offshore plants will be produced annually.

“We expect to expand the offshore plant-building business based on synergy effect between the new production line and a neighboring first offshore plant-building site in Dong-gu, Ulsan,” the company said in a statement.

The investments were made based on the growth potential of offshore construction projects, including projects for floating production, storage and offloading or floating liquid natural gas.

Industry watchers predicted the offshore plant-building market is expected to double to reach $310 billion by 2020 from $140 billion in 2011.

Samsung Heavy Industries, the nation’s third-largest shipbuilder, showed the same trend, forming a joint venture with U.K.-based engineering company AMEC last month to carry out the design engineering for fixed and floating offshore platforms, and sub-sea pipelines for its future offshore projects.

“The nation’s top shipbuilders are turning to the offshore business as an alternative to their shipbuilding business, which is forecast to show signs of recovery at the end of next year at the earliest,” an industry watcher said.

By Seo Jee-yeon  (jyseo@heraldcorp.com)