Samsung Heavy Industries Co. plans to expedite rights offering planned for later in the year to raise immediate cash “as soon as possible” as delivery of an expensive offshore drilling facility originally set for September has been put off to next year, said the company’s CEO Park Dae-young on Tuesday.

“It looks like September delivery won’t happen,” Park told Maeil Business Newspaper.

The company won the $2.7 billion order from Japanese Inpex Corp. for the construction of an offshore central processing facility (CPF) for the Ichthys LNG Project in Australia in 2012. The delivery may not happen before May 2017 as shipping must avoid cyclone season that typically starts October and ends May in the Indian Ocean.

The company is in talks with French oil and gas company Total S.A., Inpex’s joint venture partner and operator of the deep-sea gas field, to reschedule the transport to May next year, another source close to the deal said.

“What’s fortunate is that the payment is made based on the construction progress, not at the delivery time,” Park said. Still, the company plans to go ahead with the plan to issue new shares to raise around 1 trillion won ($860 million) “as soon as possible” instead of year-end to make up for the liquidity shortage.

Due to delayed delivery in the CPF, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering also inevitably would have to reschedule its shipment of floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) structure that goes on top of the same platform in Australia.

Park dismissed the rumor that it would acquire DSME’s defense unit. Adding to the shipyard’s woes, the representatives of workers for Samsung Heavy Industries on Tuesday voted in favor to go on a strike in protest to the management’s restructuring plans.

Park previously told its employees that workforce could be scaled down by up to 40 percent over the next three years as sales would be halved to around 5 trillion won ($4.2 billion) over next few years from the past, having been unable to gain a single new order from November last year.

By Park Yong-beom

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]