CTR Looks To Build An Instant Floot, Calling For 59 Ships In Four Yoars

CTR Group of Woodcliff Lake, N.J., has stirred considerable excitement in the maritime world with its recent tender for a fleet of 59 ships to help it lay and maintain 328,980 km of optic fiber cable. The company initially launched its project — dubbed Project OXYGEN — to build a Global Super-Internet last July. The Request For Proposal (RFP) was sent to 22 shipyards in Asia, Europe, and North America, calls for a fleet of 59 ships of various sizes to be delivered between 1999 and 2003. "This is one of the largest numbers of vessels ever contracted for at any one time in the commercial shipping industry," said Larry Cahill, vice president, Cableship Finance at CTR Group,Avondale Industries has reorganized into six strategic units in order to catch up on a $3.7 billion backlog of work (including options). Avondale introduced six new vice presidents that will head each of the new units. Thomas Doussan was named corporate vice president and COO. He will be responsible for the engineering, production, material and estimating departments. Thomas Kitchen was named corporate vice president and CFO. His duties will include all corporate finance departments, business practices and integrated product and data environment (IPDE). Edmund Mortimer was named vice president of Government Programs.

Kenneth DuPont was named corporate vice president of Commercial and Offshore Programs. He is responsible for the Industrial-Commercial group, commercial boat construction, the Steel Sales Division and the UNOAvondale Maritime Center of Excellence. R. Dean Church was appointed corporate vice president and Chief Administrative officer. Ronald J. McAlear was named corporate vice president of Advanced Programs and Marketing. He will be responsible for advanced programs, marketing, proposal management and public relations.Ltd., the company building OXYGEN Network.

CTR has planned a bidders' conference for the potential suppliers on March 16 in Miami, where it will instruct them on bid submission procedures as well as the time line for completing negotiations, and give them a detailed briefing on the OXYGEN Network. The bids are due March 27. On April 25, CTR will announce a short list of bidders and begin commercial negotiations with them, with the goal of signing a shipbuilding contract on June 1. CTR expects the fleet to be based in 59 locations throughout the world under Project OZONE, the global maintenance system for the OXYGEN Network. It reasons that spreading the armada will make possible an average response time of three days for a ship to reach a repair site. The RFP calls for the construction of several sizes of ships, which vary according to the water depth they are to operate in and the equipment they will carry. When the smoke clears, the CTR fleet could look like this: nine 4,000-dwt ships; 38 2,000-3,000- dwt ships; and 12 1,000-dwt ships.