Ulstein X-BOW shows it's possible to create shipping history
Ulstein's celebrates 40th design sale, nearly half of which have the revolutionary X-BOW design.


Ship design company Ulstein Design was established in 2002 as part of the new Ulstein Group. Now, five years later, Ulstein Design has built up a solid clientele and today the company sold their design number 40. Almost half of these ships have the ULSTEIN X-BOW®, the familiar inverted bow.


There has been major interest in ships with the ULSTEIN X-BOW® , a bow concept that was voted “Engineering Achievement of the Year” by the magazine Teknisk Ukeblad in 2005. The first ship with this bow, anchor handler Bourbon Orca, was delivered in summer 2006. She was voted “Ship of the Year” the same year by the magazines Offshore Support Journal and Skipsrevyen. Also, the ship was nominated to the finals in the Innovation Award contest at the ONS trade show in Hamburg and the Seatrade Awards in London.

Since the 1970s, when the oil age was in full bloom and Norwegians started designing offshore vessels for North Sea conditions, there have been constant innovations in such designs. The ULSTEIN X-BOW® was launched in 2005, literally turning the whole notion of how a bow should look on its head. Within two years, 17 ships with this bow have been sold to five different shipowners.

Until this year, the Ulstein Group has been committed to ship design for the offshore market, with particular focus on anchor handling, offshore supply and special-purpose vessels such as construction, seismic and pipelay ships. Ulstein Es-Cad is a new design company that was established at the turn of the year by the Ulstein Group and former ship design company Es-Cad in Istanbul, Turkey. Ulstein Es-Cad has expertise in short-sea shipping and offers ready-made designs and engineering services for container ships, ro-ro vessels and product-and-chemical tankers.

“Having more legs to stand on allows us to reduce vulnerability in certain markets and increase our commitment to innovation. This is a strategy the Ulstein Group has followed since the start,” says Tore Ulstein, deputy CEO of the Ulstein Group. He also heads Ulstein International, a company whose sole mission is to concentrate on the Group’s international commitments.

“Our future success depends on growth and international commitment. Locating in other countries better enables us to reach new markets with our products. We already have activity in Poland, China and Brazil, and last year we set up a company in Slovakia in order to boost our engineering capacity,” says Tore Ulstein.

“We want to turn visions into reality within demanding marine operations. With its technical innovations, the ULSTEIN X-BOW® has shown us it is possible to create shipping history,” says Ulstein.

The Ulstein Group was established in 1917 as a small yard repairing mainly wooden fishing boats. Ninety years on, it is concentrating on ship design, shipbuilding and electrical and control systems. The Ulstein Group has some 600 employees, 10 per cent of whom work abroad or have internationalisation as their main task.