BCBusiness

July/August 2021 - The Top 100

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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MacDonald explains. "If we have healthier oceans, we also have more productive oceans. So there's a real connection between objectives in sustainabil- ity and our objectives in terms of growth." A l l h a n d s o n d e c k Countries around the world are combining eco- nomic and environmental ambitions to build what's known as a blue economy. B.C. companies like Cas- cadia Seaweed are working toward that long-term goal, but a resurgent shipbuilding industry is the primary force propelling the province's marine technology sector today. This renaissance began in 2010, when Canada's National Shipbuilding Strategy ( NSS) launched, awarding North Vancouver–based Seaspan Shipyards contracts to build non-combat ships for the Navy and Coast Guard. That includes fisheries and oceanographic science vessels, a polar icebreaker and a naval support ship. Shipbuilding had fallen dormant for many years before then, recalls Amy MacLeod, Seaspan's vice-president for corporate affairs and external communications. Industry skills had drained out of the country, and technology fell behind the times. "The ability to build needed to be completely rebuilt," MacLeod explains. Today, Seaspan directly employs some 2,300 people and anchors a still-growing web of 670 suppliers across Canada. More than 400 of those companies are based in B.C. "We had to go out and source and find and build," MacLeod says of Seaspan's decade of work to reach this point, "and get those folks to start investing in their companies so that they can deliver now." Seaspan invested more than $200 million to modernize its ship- yards in North Vancouver, where NSS-related work is underway, and in Victoria. MacLeod details how far the North Vancouver facility has come: "It is capable of building multiple ships concurrently and working on multiple programs. It is one of the most modern ship- yards in North America." Seaspan Drydock, meanwhile, repairs, refits and maintains all manner of ships near North Vancouver's Lonsdale Quay. "Pretty much anything that floats" is how Vancouver Drydock vice-president and general manager Paul Hebson describes the vessels that come in. "We generally do about 50 ship repair projects a year." Customers include British Columbia Ferry Services, the Canadian Coast Guard and commer- cial operators from Canada, the U.S. and farther abroad. The dock's parent company, Seaspan, went a few blocks down the road in March 2017 to lead a $1-million investment in Novarc Technologies, a designer and maker of robotic welding systems, and one of Sea- span's most important suppliers. Just two months later, Seaspan used Novarc's spool welding robot ( SWR) to complete a five- week refit of a French cable-laying vessel, Louis Dreyfus Armateurs' Île de Batz, that included installing a water ballast treat- ment system. Such systems are mandatory for ships sailing internationally, to prevent the dis- charge of invasive aquatic species into foreign ecosystems. Some 60,000 ships worldwide need to be retrofitted with them by next year. Welding pipe spools takes up about 80 percent of the installation work, Hebson says. That's where Novarc's robots step in. Novarc CEO Soroush Karimzadeh co- founded the company in 2013 to develop the world's first welding "cobots," or col- laborative robots. The machines work with junior welders and together they can do the work of several skilled welders. "A challenge that our customers are facing is that, for the most part, pipe welding is still being done manually," Karimzadeh explains. "And there's a huge shortage of welders in industry, exacerbated by the fact that baby boomers are retiring and younger workers don't necessarily want to start careers in trades." JULY/AUGUST 2021 BCBUSINESS 119 FROM LEFT: SEASPAN; NOVARC TECHNOLOGIES HELPING HAND A spool welding robot from Novarc Technologies SAIL FORCE In North Vancouver, Seaspan runs one of the continent's most advanced shipyards

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