Explosively important news for world tunnel boring machine market from Dnews.

Korea Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said that Korea will create an industrial ecosystem to produce tunnel boring machines (TBM). Minister believes Korea will take the global lead and dominate the global TBM market.

Minister said this at the “Han River Tunnel TBM Extra Memorial Ceremony” held at the construction site between Gimpo and Paju in Seoul writes Dnews.

Korea is currently 100% dependent on foreign countries like Germany, China, Japan and USA. Therefore Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport wants to change this. Ministry conduct research projects for this.

Korea already have two companies which produce tunnel boring machines. Namely Gangneung E&C and EM Korea. However they only produce small diameter TBM up to 3 meters. This is not sufficient for GTX (metropolitan area express railway) projects which will build many tunnels in coming years. There is also government decision to encourage TBM tunneling instead of NATM tunneling. Government does this encouragement also to create attractive TBM market for potential local TBM producer companies.

Therefore Korea work to locally develop and produce bigger diameter TBM through research. There is an important government research and development project to develop K-TBM (Korean national medium-sized TBM).

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