Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday that Iran will ban purchasing foreign ships in the future in order to support native Iranian manufacturers, the official IRNA news agency reported.
“If a governmental manager buys ships from foreign countries, he will be sacked from his position,” said Ahmadinejad during a ceremony to launch Iran’s first home-made ocean liner in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas.
Ahmadinejad urged Iranian experts to “more strongly and carefully” continue their bid to manufacture more domestic ships by their own hands. He also urged Iranian organizations involved in the marine industry “to order their needed ships from domestic producers.” The first home-made liner was designed, built, tested, and completed by Iranian experts at the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization, said the report.
The 32,000-ton-weight ocean liner is 186.25 meters long, 29.8 meters wide and 16.5 meters high, with a maximum speed of 22 nautical miles per hour, according to the report.
Earlier in July, Iran launched a semi-floating drilling rig weighing 14,000 tons in the Caspian Sea, manufactured by domestic expertise. All the construction, installation and operation works of the drilling rig were carried out by Iranian experts, according to Iran’s English daily Tehran Times.
The drilling rig can operate at a water depth of up to 1,030 meters and drill down to 6,000 meters under the seabed. It is planned to drill an exploratory well in the Caspian Sea which is estimated to hold at least 32 billion barrels of oil reserves.
