The founder
The master shipbuilder.
A welder who decided the dry dock was a habit, not a law, and rewrote how the world builds ships.
1949 — 1986
The welder
He learned discipline in an army electronics battalion and pressure in the hydraulics workshops of Kyeongchang Machinery. But the craft that made him came at the Uljin Nuclear Power Plant, where welds are either perfect or catastrophic. Four years in the precision welding division taught him that a seam is a promise.
By the mid-eighties he was managing automatic welding at Jeil Safety Materials and studying as a visiting researcher at the shipbuilding research institutes of Hyundai and Samsung. He had seen how the giants built ships. He had also seen what they took for granted.
The seam is a promise
1986 — 2003
The builder
In 1986 he founded Sungdong as a welding company. His automatic and CO2 machines, patented in his own name, became standard equipment at Korea's three great shipyards. Samsung Heavy Industries named the company its Best Partner. He was building the builders' tools.
Then he stopped supplying and started competing. Sungdong Heavy Industries in 2001, mega-blocks and hull sections. And in 2003, on an empty shore at Anjeong with no dry dock anywhere on the plan, Sungdong Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering. The industry assumed the dock would come later. It never did.
2003 — TODAY
The world first
The first order arrived in 2004: eight bulk carriers for a Greek owner, won on reputation before the yard was complete. In 2006 came the invention that carries his name into the textbooks: the Gripper-jacks Translift System, a way to assemble a vessel whole on land and launch it in hours.
The records fell in sequence. First medium and large ships ever built on land. A three-hour launch. A 180,000-ton bulker rolled off a beach. Within three years of its first delivery, Sungdong stood among the world's top ten shipbuilders, with 342 vessels delivered and honours from the Korean state, including a Presidential Commendation.
One of the 342
In his words
The strongest power that moves a vessel is not the oceans, but the people.
He calls his work “gathering ships”: gathering the expertise of diverse people, gathering blocks, gathering the perspiration of workers. A relay race in which every runner is trusted to do their part.
Jung Hong Jun · Chairman’s message, Sungdong company profile
At 76, he is building again.
The empty shore this time is in the Emirates, and the plan is larger than anything he has attempted before.
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