A&P Group

A&P Group

Type	Private Company
Industry	Marine engineering
Headquarters	Hebburn, Tyne and Wear, England
Number of locations	3
Services	Ship repair and ship conversion
Revenue	£124.3 million GBP (2013)
Number of employees	over 600
Website	www.ap-group.co.uk

A&P Group Ltd is the largest ship repair and conversion company in the UK, with three shipyards located in Hebburn, Middlesbrough and Falmouth. The Company undertakes a wide variety of maintenance and repair work on commercial and military ships with projects ranging from a two-day alongside repair period through to multimillion UK pound conversion projects lasting for a year or more.

The Company was established in 1971 as A&P-Appledore International Ltd (APA), a joint venture technology transfer consultancy between British shipbuilding companies Austin & Pickersgill and Appledore Shipbuilders, and focused on ship design and construction. Initially the business was directed towards the growing Far East market, as well as the Americas and Europe. Based on the production engineering solutions developed for the innovative 'ship factory' at Appledore in the late 1960s, and subsequently at Pallion, Sunderland, APA developed the formal Build Strategy approach. This was taken up by Hyundai when they developed the first modern shipyard in South Korea at Ulsanin the 1970s. The Build Strategy template was subsequently adopted in British Shipbuilders' other shipyards, and in the USA.

Following sale of Appledore Shipbuilders to the Government at the time of the collapse of its parent Court Line in 1974, and the subsequent nationalisation of Austin & Pickersgill in 1977, the shareholding was purchased by its management. APA acquired the shiprepair facilities of Falmouth Docks & Engineering Company in 1984 and they remain one of the Company's two major centres. The Company subsequently focused on shiprepairs rather than shipbuilding, becoming A&P Group in 1995 and being acquired by Royal Bank Development Capital in 1997.