HII Completes Purchase of W International's Charleston Plant

 

Huntington Ingalls Industries has completed the purchase of W International's fabrication facility in South Carolina, opening up new workforce options for the U.S. Navy's biggest shipbuilder. 

The W International plant in Goose Creek, South Carolina is an example of the Navy's challenge in scaling up the submarine industrial base for a once-in-a-generation demand surge. As part of a program to boost capacity, the Navy helped a previously unknown company, W International, to set up a fabrication facility in South Carolina to build modules for HII Newport News - starting with components for the Ford-class aircraft carrier program. In 2022, quality issues were found with these modules and W International began shedding contract volume. It eventually came under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for possible misappropriation of funds, focused in part on its complex ownership structure. 

In December, W International sold essentially all of its assets to Huntington Ingalls Industries. The purchase includes a 45-acre complex, nearly 500,000 square feet of covered manufacturing space, and an extensive array of tooling and production equipment for complex metal fabrication. (Outgoing HII Newport News President Jennifer Boykin emphasized that HII had not bought W International as a legal entity - just its plant and equipment.)

500 employees were invited to stay on under HII's management at the newly-renamed plant, now known as Newport News Shipbuilding - Charleston Operations. 99 percent of them accepted the offer, HII said in a statement Monday.

HII now plans to grow the site and use it to build modules for its own submarine construction pipeline. As the plant gets rolling, HII plans to create hundreds of additional jobs in the area. 

"HII is committed to going where the labor is to increase shipbuilding capacity," HII President and CEO Chris Kastner said in a statement. "This lets us efficiently add trained talent and state-of-the-art manufacturing capabilities to the urgent job of building ships, making it a unique opportunity to immediately accelerate throughput at Newport News Shipbuilding."