South Korea’s Samsung Heavy Industries is looking to subcontract to Chinese yards the engineering, procurement and construction of steel modules weighing about 20,000 tonnes for two prized floating liquefied natural gas vessels destined for operation offshore Asia and Africa, respectively.

Although Chinese yards have established capacity to deliver floating production, storage and offloading vessels and LNG process modules for contractors including SBM Offshore, Modec and Novatek, sources said that Samsung is typically cautious when it comes to subcontracting FLNG scope to overseas contractors.