HD Hyundai Marine Engine Brand Guidelines: STX Heavy Industries, Changwon & a 2024 New Name

An engine works in Changwon, renamed twice in a decade.

HD Hyundai Marine Engine is the ship-engine company of the HD Hyundai group, and it works from a plant in Changwon, in South Gyeongsang province. Its own name is new; its factory is not. The Herald Business, reporting from the plant in September 2026, said the company “traces its roots to STX Heavy Industries, founded in 2001.” The company’s website reaches further back: it gives its date of establishment as December 1976 and says it builds on “technology and know-how accumulated over 40 years,” a lineage that runs through the engine business of the STX group.

The company’s published history sets out that path in dated steps. It lists a designation as a maker of medium-size diesel engines in 1980, an engine research centre in 1989, a stock market listing in 1990, and a factory for low-speed diesel engines completed in February 1997. In June 2001 a materials business was spun off from STX, and that company was renamed STX Enpaco in 2005 and STX Metal in 2010. In January 2013 it combined with the earlier STX Heavy Industries, an engine maker whose establishment the history dates to 2004, and took the STX Heavy Industries name.

The years that followed were difficult, and the company records them plainly. Its history lists an autonomous agreement with creditors and a management normalisation plan in 2013, an application to begin court rehabilitation in July 2016, approval of a rehabilitation plan in January 2017, and a decision to end the rehabilitation procedure in 2019. In July 2024 the business joined HD Hyundai. The Herald Business reported that HD Korea Shipbuilding, an HD Hyundai shipbuilding affiliate that the paper says mainly produces large engines, bought STX Heavy Industries to broaden its portfolio; the company’s chief executive writes on its website that in July 2024 it “embarked on a new journey as a member of the HD Hyundai Group.”

Two-stroke engines under licence, and the parts inside them.

The core product is the low-speed two-stroke diesel engine, which the company describes as large-sized engines for ships and power plants. HD Hyundai Marine Engine builds these under licence. Its website describes a long technical partnership with MAN Energy Solutions, now renamed Everllence, covering design, manufacture, sales and after-sales service. The Herald Business reported in September 2026 that engines for medium-sized ships made up 77.8 percent of consolidated sales in the first half of that year, with the rest coming from crankshafts and after-sales services.

Fuel is the theme of most of the company’s recent product pages. It says it was the first licensee to localise the 51/60DF dual-fuel engine used on LNG carriers, and that in December 2019, with MAN Energy Solutions, it commissioned an LPG dual-fuel propulsion engine, the 6G60ME-C9.5-LGIP, which it describes as the first of its kind. The Herald Business reported that the company was already mass-producing dual-fuel engines for LNG and liquefied petroleum gas, and quoted a managing director on plans to secure engines for LNG, methanol and ammonia.

A second licensor arrived in October 2026. On 28 October the company signed a licence with WinGD, the Winterthur engine designer, to make and sell two-stroke propulsion engines, ChosunBiz and The Herald Business both reported, including WinGD’s dual-fuel engines for LNG, ammonia, LPG and methanol. The signing took place at the Changwon plant, and the company said it now holds the full engine lineups of both major two-stroke designers.

Inside the engines, the company makes much of what it sells. A dedicated plant produces turbochargers, from precision casting to assembly; the company says it has built them under a MAN licence since 1986 and has supplied more than 20,000 units, and lists a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries licence from 2011 and a production contract with Accelleron from 2024. Its subsidiary HD Hyundai Crankshaft makes crankshafts next door, and The Herald Business described engines about 13 metres tall awaiting delivery outside the Changwon works.

Design and documentation.

Marine engine makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and ship managers rather than to the public, and their websites read like technical catalogues. The core of most is an engine range sorted by bore and output. WinGD names its two-stroke engines by cylinder bore in centimetres, from the X52 to the X92, while Everllence gives its four-stroke engines bore-and-stroke numbers such as 32/44 and 49/60. Letters added to those numbers mark the fuel, the generation or the version.

The pictures follow the product. These companies publish cutaway renderings that open an engine to show its cylinders, pistons and crankshaft, alongside photographs of finished engines on test beds and in engine rooms. Model names, cylinder counts and output figures sit beside the images, so a page often reads more like a data sheet than an advertisement.

Fuel has become one of the main ways these makers describe themselves. Their websites sort engines by fuel type as well as by vessel type, with pages for liquefied natural gas, methanol, ammonia and LPG; WinGD adds ethanol, and Everllence marks its alternative-fuel two-stroke engines with a suffix for each fuel. Dual-fuel engines, which run on gas or on liquid fuel, are presented through type designations and technical descriptions in the companies’ own terms.

Two other features recur. Service network maps and location finders show where parts and field engineers can be found; Everllence speaks of more than 140 service locations, and WinGD runs a lifecycle-support arm under its own name. Heritage timelines, meanwhile, tie current engines to Rudolf Diesel, whose engine was developed with MAN in Augsburg in the 1890s and licensed to Sulzer in Winterthur, giving the oldest names in the field more than a century of dates to show.

A group name on an old engine works.

The company’s present identity is borrowed from its parent. It carries the HD Hyundai name, and its website lists group companies such as HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering, HD Hyundai Heavy Industries and HD Hyundai Marine Solution beside STX companies. Its mission line speaks of bringing “the future closer to humanity” by “steering innovation,” and its vision pairs the ocean with energy and industrial solutions. The chief executive’s message frames the next step simply: to expand the two-stroke engine portfolio with a focus on engines for cleaner fuels.

The work itself supplies most of the imagery. The Herald Business described a 66,000-square-metre plant in which engines weighing up to 430 tonnes stood finished and tested, and in which tens of thousands of parts are assembled by hand; a manager there said the works had been running at full capacity for the first time since the shipbuilding boom of 2007 and 2008. The company’s own pages set out turbocharger model line-ups, casting facilities and a long, dated history table.

For a design guide, HD Hyundai Marine Engine shows how an industrial brand can carry a new group name while its history, licences and factory remain the substance. Compare Everllence, whose engine designs it has built for decades, and WinGD, its newer licensor. For this guide we use a harbour navy, a test-bed teal and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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