The Perils Of Defence Blogging

The past few days the military vein of the internet was abuzz about which order that Samsung reportedly received a one billion five warship order from an unidentified southeast asian country.

Daewoo Shipbuilding Stock Gains on $1 Billion Asian Contract for Warships

By Saeromi Shin and Jun Yang - Dec 15, 2010

Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co., the world’s second-biggest shipyard, rose to the highest in more than two years in Seoul trading after announcing it received an order worth $1 billion.

The South Korean yard received an order to build five warships for a Southeast Asian country, it said today in a statement, without naming the buyer.

The contract follows the $1.1 billion order Daewoo Shipbuilding announced earlier this month for a drill ship and semi-submersible rig as a global economic recovery fuels demand for vessels.

The shipbuilder climbed 3.5 percent to 33,800 won, the highest close since Aug. 29, 2008. The benchmark Kospi stock index gained 0.4 percent to 2,017.48 at the 3 p.m. close of trading in the city. (Source: Bloomberg)

Another version of the story did not even mention the type of the warship but still did not identify the nation making the order.

Daewoo Shipbuilding wins $900 mln deal

Tue, Dec 14 2010

SEOUL, Dec 15 (Reuters) - South Korea's Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering , the world's second-largest shipbuilder, said on Wednesday it had won a $900 million deal to jointly build 3 ships with an unnamed Southeast Asian partner.

Daewoo said in a statement it plans to deliver the ships from 2013. (Reporting by Danbee Moon; Editing by David Chance

Thus the net chatter was for a while wondering which country was making the order, and some from Taiwan to the Phillipines even believing the order was for their navy. The funny thing was that being Malaysian I suspected this has something to do with the contract signing between NGV Tech and DSME for 2 patrol cum training ships, but the details was quite different than what was reported by our own news bureau. But to be responsible you really cannot comment unless you are really sure that the news at least is verifiable by a reputable source.

So here it is, something from the trade news source that reported the news more accurately, with a picture even.

Daewoo Over-achieves Order Target

2010-12-15 issuer:eshiptrading.com Reading Times:31 times

DSME president Mr Nam (right) and CEO of a local shipyard in Southeast Asian nation are signing the naval vessel joint construction contract

Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering has met its order target for this year by signing a naval ship contract worth up to $1bn.

On December 14th, DSME's president Nam Sang-tae was in a Southeast Asian nation to officially sign a contract with a local shipyard to jointly build naval vessels and transfer related technology.

The Korean shipyard will design and build the hulls of the vessels. Arming and outfitting work on the ships will be conducted in the local shipyard in the Southeast Asian country through technology transfer.

They are scheduled for delivery from the local yard since 2013.

Mr Nam said, "This contract is a complex business model in cooperation with local shipyard to boost exports of naval vessels."

DSME is also planning to secure similar contracts with other Southeast Asian countries, Brazil and Russia.

The Korean shipbuilder aimed to achieve new orders of $10bn this year and it has now secured $10.9bn worth of new ship contracts so far this year. Source:Asiasis

Well then we can at least confirm that the unidentified country is actually Malaysia but the most important factor is that the contract is potentially "worth up to $1 billion" , meaning not actually one billion dollars yet with our own insight on the story. Another problem is that the other news sources got the wrong number of units to be built. So therein lies the perils of defence blogging. You really have to verify your source of information unless you too want to contribute to the misinformation on the information superhighway.