HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering — the holding company of HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipbuilding group — has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Shipbuilding and Heavy Industries Park Tamil Nadu and the Maritime Development Fund represented by Sagarmala Finance Corporation, formalising plans for a $4 billion greenfield shipyard at Thoothukudi on Tamil Nadu’s southern coast. The MoU was signed in New Delhi on April 20 during South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s state visit — timing that underscores how directly the India-Korea Digital Bridge summit translated into concrete maritime industry commitments.
The proposed Thoothukudi facility would be the first shipyard established in India by a foreign shipbuilding company, and with a planned annual production capacity of 3.5 to 4 million tonnes, it would be comparable in scale to the total shipbuilding production capacity that India’s government envisions for three to four national clusters combined. HD Hyundai would hold a majority stake as the largest shareholder, overseeing overall operations and positioning the facility as a digital-focused yard. The Tamil Nadu state government would hold 10-12 per cent equity in exchange for providing land and infrastructure support, while the Maritime Development Fund would hold 20-25 per cent, with the central government expected to provide infrastructure cost support of 10-12 per cent and PLI-style production incentives of 15-25 per cent — effectively a subsidy equivalent to 45-47 per cent of project cost.
Why Thoothukudi and Why HD Hyundai
Thoothukudi was selected over competing sites after HD Hyundai’s technical team, which has been stationed on-site since late 2025, assessed factors including low salinity, low typhoon and natural disaster risk (with Sri Lanka acting as a natural geographic shield), draft depth, available acreage, and the policy support framework of Tamil Nadu’s industrial promotion agencies. The NSHIP-TN cluster is a joint venture between the Union government-owned V.O. Chidambaranar Port Authority and SIPCOT, designed as an anchor for a larger shipbuilding industrial ecosystem that would attract steel fabricators, marine equipment manufacturers, and engineering contractors within the 3,000-acre cluster. HD Hyundai Chairman Chung Ki-sun accompanied President Lee’s delegation to India — a commercial signal that the MoU reflects a genuine investment commitment rather than diplomatic optics. The company described the Thoothukudi agreement as the moment when ‘bilateral shipbuilding cooperation transitions into the business execution phase.’ Separately, HD Hyundai is also in discussions with Cochin Shipyard for a block manufacturing joint venture — a different and complementary arrangement that would see Korean technology applied within an existing Indian state-owned shipyard rather than in a greenfield facility.
