Hanwha Ocean Brand Guidelines: Daewoo’s Okpo Yard, a 2023 Rename & the Tricircle

A yard older than the Daewoo name.

Hanwha Ocean is the shipbuilder at Okpo on Geoje Island, in South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, known until 2023 as Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, or DSME. English Wikipedia counts it among South Korea’s “Big Three” shipbuilders, with Hyundai and Samsung. Its yard is older than the Daewoo name: the company dates its history to 1973, when the Korea Shipbuilding Corporation began building the Okpo shipyard, and Korean Wikipedia gives 11 October 1973 as the start.

The Daewoo Group took the project over in 1978. Korean Wikipedia dates the founding of Daewoo Shipbuilding Industry to 26 September that year, and The Korea Herald wrote in 2023 that the 1978 name change came when the yard was acquired by Daewoo. The company records a completion ceremony for the Okpo shipyard and its Goliath crane in 1981 and a second dock in 1983. In 1994 the shipbuilder was merged into Daewoo Heavy Industries; when the Daewoo Group was broken up in 2000, the shipbuilding business became an independent company again, Korean Wikipedia says, and it adopted the name Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering in 2002.

The state-run Korea Development Bank was its largest shareholder, and a first sale to Hanwha fell through in January 2009, Korean Wikipedia says. In 2016 and 2017 the company was at the centre of an accounting case: in March 2017 South Korea’s Securities and Futures Commission moved to suspend DSME’s auditor from new business for a year for overlooking the window dressing of losses in the shipbuilder’s 2013 and 2014 accounts, and state-run creditors proposed a second rescue package the same month, The Korea Herald reported on 24 March 2017.

Hanwha announced in December 2022 that it would take a controlling stake, English Wikipedia says. The deal closed on 23 May 2023. At a shareholders’ meeting in Geoje that day the company was renamed Hanwha Ocean, and Hanwha completed its purchase of newly issued shares, becoming the largest shareholder with 49.3 percent while the Korea Development Bank kept 28.2 percent, The Korea Herald reported. The paper added that South Korea’s competition regulator had given conditional approval a month earlier, after seven foreign regulators had cleared the deal, and that the takeover ended a debt rescheduling programme in place since 2001.

Gas carriers, giant container ships and submarines.

Hanwha Ocean builds merchant ships, offshore plants and naval vessels. Korean Wikipedia lists tankers, container ships, bulk and ore carriers, LNG and LPG carriers, car carriers and passenger ships among its merchant types. Gas carriers sit at the centre of its record: the company says it made its 100th LNG carrier delivery in 2016, and that in 2005 it delivered an LNG regasification vessel, which it describes as the first of its kind.

Container ships are the other headline. English Wikipedia records orders from Maersk in 2011 for ships of the Triple E class, each designed for some 18,000 containers, and lists later series for other lines, including the Gülsün and Olympic classes. In 2020, the company says, it named the Algeciras, a 24,000 TEU container ship. English Wikipedia also lists the crane vessel Pioneering Spirit among the ships built at the yard, along with Tide-class fleet tankers for Britain’s Royal Fleet Auxiliary, ordered in 2012 and in service from 2017.

Naval work is described here by programme name only. The company lists the submarine SS-062 Yi Cheon in 1992, the destroyer DDH-971 Gwanggaeto the Great in 1996, a Nagapasa-class submarine delivered to Indonesia in 2017 and the launch of a Dosan Ahn Changho-class submarine in 2018, and says it became the first Korean company to export submarines in 2011. In 2024, the company says, it won its first maintenance, repair and overhaul contract from the US Navy and bought Philly Shipyard; English Wikipedia dates that first job, for the USNS Wally Schirra at Geoje, to August 2024.

The yard itself is the company’s main exhibit. Its website describes No.1 Dock as 530 metres long and 131 metres wide, served by a 900-ton Goliath crane that it says Guinness World Records recognised as the biggest crane, and No.2 Dock as 540 metres long and 81 metres wide, and says the site is sheltered by mountains on three sides. The company decided in 2016 to move its head office from Seoul to Geoje, Korean Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

Shipbuilders present themselves to a small number of very large customers: navies, coast guards, shipowners and energy companies. Their identities therefore lean on a short, sturdy wordmark, often a set of initials or a group name, set in navy, blue or red against white, and repeated on yard gates, crane girders, hard hats and the hulls of ships still on the slipway. Many yards sit inside wider industrial groups, so the mark on the crane is frequently the parent’s symbol rather than the yard’s own.

The photography does most of the work. Launch ceremonies, float-outs and naming days, sea trials with a bow wave, aerial views of a dry dock with a goliath crane spanning it: these are the standard images on yard websites and in annual reports. Scale is the message, and a single picture of a hull in dock is usually given more room than any slogan.

Ships are named by type and class, in the words the yards themselves use: LNG carriers, container ships, tankers and bulk carriers, ferries and research vessels, and, for naval yards, patrol vessels, frigates, corvettes and submarines described by programme or class name. Specification panels with length, beam, deadweight and capacity in containers or cubic metres stand in for product shots, and order books are reported ship by ship.

Most shipbuilder websites follow a similar plan: a history page told as a timeline of yards, mergers and renamings; sections for new builds, repair and conversion, and offshore work; a page on facilities, docks and cranes; and, for listed and state-owned yards, investor pages with annual reports. For a designer, the sector shows how an identity can be built from places, dates and ship classes rather than from consumer advertising.

A group symbol over a fifty-year yard.

The rename brought the shipbuilder into the Hanwha Group’s identity. Hanwha Ocean’s corporate identity page presents the Tricircle, the group symbol of three circles, which it says “infinitely evolve, expand, and grow into space through constant change and innovation,” and offers the Hanwha Ocean signature in Korean and English versions. The Korea Herald reported in May 2023 that the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering logo had been taken down at the Geoje shipyard before the relaunch, and showed the new Hanwha Ocean logo released by the group. The parent’s own identity is covered in the Hanwha guide.

The website sorts the business into commercial vessels, offshore business, naval ships and a wind power plant line, and uses the Korean name 한화오션 and the English name side by side. Its history page is a year-by-year list of deliveries and Korean technology awards going back to 1973, with the Daewoo-era milestones kept in the list.

For a design guide, Hanwha Ocean shows how a shipyard with a fifty-year history can take on a parent group’s symbol in a single day while keeping its docks, its cranes and its ship classes. Compare Samsung Heavy Industries, which also builds on Geoje, and HD Hyundai, the third of the large Korean yards. For this guide we use a deep ocean blue, a warm orange and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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