Orders from Middle East energy projects will help South Korean contractors win a record US$60 billion (Dh220.2bn) in overseas business this year, the Korean government said yesterday.
The new figures cement the country's leading position in the engineering, procurement and contracting sectors in the Middle East after a Korean consortium won a $20bn nuclear order in the UAE in December last year.
Korean companies picked up $50.7bn in business by the end of the third quarter, with 72 per cent concentrated in the Middle East, the country's ministry of knowledge economy reported.
The total was double the sum of overseas orders Korean companies received over the same period last year.
"Middle East countries appreciate the efficiency of the South Korean model," Theodore Karasik, the director of research at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, based in Dubai, told Bloomberg. "It's efficient and it's affordable."
Officials at Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC), the Abu Dhabi Government's nuclear energy company, said they chose a group of Korean contractors over rival bids because of their low price and their track record for building nuclear plants safely and efficiently in South Korea.
In the past nine months Korean contractors such as Hyundai Engineering and Samsung Engineering have scored large upstream oil orders and infrastructure contracts in the UAE, plus a number of power plants in other Gulf countries.
Last month, Doosan Heavy Industries said it received an order to build a 2,800-megawatt power plant in Saudi Arabia worth $3.39bn.
Korean contracting companies are now favourites for industrial and energy contracts after playing a junior role to European firms as recently as two years ago.
Last year, Korean companies won nearly all of the major UAE energy contracts, including a major refinery and chemical plants in Ruwais as well as the nuclear reactors, and racked up additional awards in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
* with Bloomberg
cstanton@thenational.ae
