Sri Lanka has exported its first amphibious vessel — a craft able to operate both on land and at sea — to Europe, in what the government describes as a milestone for the country’s naval manufacturing industry.
The inaugural ceremony for the vessel’s production and export was held on Thursday, 10 September at the Koggala Free Trade Zone, under the patronage of Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, the Daily Mirror reported.
The vessel was built by Ocean Voyager International.
The policy argument
Handunnetti said the government’s priority was to turn local manufacturing from a policy objective into “a practical economic reality,” and that boat and shipbuilding had been identified as a sector capable of earning significant foreign exchange in the short term — a claim resting on Sri Lanka’s position beside the main east–west shipping lanes.
He said the state would provide the facilities and support needed to develop Sri Lanka as a regional hub for naval manufacturing, built on local engineers and workers.
SLYG Group of Companies Chairman Pierre Pringiers, National Enterprise Development Authority Chairman Lakshman Obeysekara, company officials and Board of Investment representatives attended.
Why the location matters
Koggala, in the Galle district, is one of the older export processing zones on the southern coast, and the choice places the work inside the BOI’s incentive regime rather than in the Colombo industrial belt. A single vessel export is small in trade terms; its significance is as a demonstration that a Sri Lankan yard can build to a European buyer’s specification.
Handunnetti’s ministry has spent recent months pressing the same argument across other sectors, from Sevanagala’s sugar operation to a pitch to Australian investors.
Not reported
Neither the buyer nor the destination country is named, and no value, order size, specification or delivery timetable is given for the vessel. The report does not say how many people the Koggala operation employs, whether further units are on order, or what share of the craft’s content is locally made. Ada Derana — the outlet that most often carries ministry industrial announcements — has been returning a CloudFront 403 to all requests for a fifteenth consecutive cycle, and no other newsroom had filed on the export at the time of writing.
