In October 2025, NeuWave headed east as Jana travelled to South Korea for a week of industry deep dives, shipyard visits and far-reaching discussions on offshore innovation.
With world-leading shipbuilding and a strong push toward autonomy, South Korea proved the ideal place to explore how NeuWave’s tools can support the next chapter of marine operations. The visit to South Korea offered a rare behind-the-scenes look at one of the world’s most influential offshore nations.
Between port tours and shipyard meetings, Jana gained invaluable insight into how NeuWave can contribute to the fast-moving international marine technology ecosystem.
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Global opportunities and exciting outreach
When we first started out on the NeuWave journey here in the damp north of England, none of us could have expected the adventure that awaited us. Jana’s trip to South Korea is the perfect embodiment of this; as NeuWave’s potential brought her around the globe.
Obviously, she wasn’t really visiting South Korea for fun, friends, or food. But all were served up in generous measure by our hosts, and Jana has come back to us revitalised and re-inspired (and well fed!)
The trip was fully-funded by the UK Government, and filled to the brim with shipyard visits (at Hyundai, Samsung, and Hanwha, no less!) and engaging events. This included a bit of match-making, and we’d been paired with some compatible companies for planned B2B meetings at the KorMarine 2025 event.
We also visited the KRISO deep ocean research centre, and got to witness the largest wave tank in the world in action while testing a scale ship.
It was immediately clear that the whole trip was going to be a chance to learn more about the maritime industry direct from the source.
An introduction to South Korea’s offshore industries
South Korea has ambitious targets (and loads of yet-untapped potential) for offshore wind capacity, the future of which must be balanced with busy ports, vessel shortages, and domestic fishing industry demands.
Offshore concerns for developers and policy-makers run deeper than the country’s love for fish-based foods. When it comes to the offshore wind industry and operations, South Korea isn’t too dissimilar to the UK; with site leasing auctions designated based on environmental data and feasibility studies.
It’s a country that’s well-renowned for its innovations, always on the cutting-edge of future marine tech. So NeuWave’s visit naturally involved touring ports, and picking the brains behind these bright ideas.
For NeuWave tools to be truly useful, we know that we need to understand the industry from all angles; construction to decommission. And throughout lengthy conversations with various vessel owners and port coordinators, Jana came to appreciate South Korea’s deeper role in the global offshore operations lifecycle.
South Korea is one of the “big three” global shipbuilding nations (alongside China and Japan). With so many of the world’s vessels being built there, most other countries’ offshore industry relies on South Korean exports.
We’ve learned how our data can be utilised by larger shipping companies, and by the ship yards themselves during sea trials, for independently verifying conditions, and when conducting daily O&M.
Where we’ve always focused on NeuWave’s ability to streamline decision-making, the South Korea trip showed us just how valuable our environmental intelligence could be for long term planning and dynamic navigation (but a bit more on that, shortly).
Our hope is that by bringing NeuWave’s high-res environmental intelligence tools to SK markets we can help to digitise the country’s marine industries; and power the future of precise sea state analysis, right from the source.
NeuWave’s role in the future of autonomous navigation
The South Korean Ministry of Ocean and Fisheries (MOF) has a long-expressed interest in autonomous vessels, intended to boost the country’s shipping and fishing capacity.
While in South Korea, we wanted to learn a bit more, and to find out first-hand whether that’s something NeuWave could help to deliver. So between everything else, Jana met up with vessel owners and port managers to discuss our tools and shared vision.
It turns out NeuWave might just be essential! Just as is the case for driverless cars, fully autonomous ships are going to require sophisticated AI, advanced environmental intelligence, and robust, dynamic logistics.
The movement and navigation of these future autonomous vessels relies on high-resolution data, and lots of it. The viability of “futuristic port management” depends on advanced environmental simulation – and deep understanding of long-term site conditions.
While we can’t give too much away at the moment, some of the discussions we’ve had over the trip to South Korea have the potential to become groundbreaking innovation and industry firsts.
There’s at least three autonomous vessel projects in very early stages – some with really big names and global players, others with exciting, innovative startups that we hope to grow alongside.
Stay tuned for more info in the coming months.
So, what did Jana bring home for us from her trip to South Korea? Insights, inspiration, feedback, and some unexpected opportunities for NeuWave.
The technology for autonomy and optimised port management is there, we’ve got it in our hands. The real challenge lies ahead: wide-scale industry uptake of deep environmental intelligence tools that can truly transform offshore operations.
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