Korean yards bring strong reputation to Thai navy bid. But will it be enough?

Thailand's navy is reportedly leaning toward Hanwha Ocean to build its next frigate, favoring the Korean firm over its crosstown rival HD Hyundai Heavy Industries and Turkey's ASFAT, amidst the country's delicate political situation clouding when the winner will be announced.

The Royal Thai Navy is expected to name a preferred bidder this month for a 4,000-ton frigate, a project budgeted at 17.5 billion baht ($523.2 million) that could grow to as much as 4 trillion won ($2.7 billion), according to Korean projections, if three follow-on vessels are ordered. The navy invited 11 international shipbuilders and received six proposals, two from Korea, two from Turkey, one from Singapore's ST Engineering and one from Spain's Navantia.

Reports indicate the navy has tentatively settled on Hanwha, although nothing has been finalized, according to two industry officials.

The bid is the first test of Korean naval exports since Ottawa chose Germany's TKMS over Hanwha last week, and it opens a series of upcoming contests. Saudi Arabia is weighing four to six submarines and five frigates; the Philippines, two submarines; and Greece, four submarines. Outside Thailand, the two Korean companies divide that work by agreement, with HD Hyundai leading on surface ships and Hanwha on submarines. In Bangkok, they compete directly.

That the contest is close on paper matters less than where it is being fought, because the buyer is a country whose defense decisions have repeatedly been undone by its own politics.

A buyer who has changed their mind before

The frigate program itself is evidence. The navy's white paper set a goal of eight frigates by 2037, double its current four, to cover both the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. But a parliamentary committee dominated by Pheu Thai lawmakers struck the frigate purchase from the fiscal 2024 budget, with the Srettha Thavisin government arguing that warships conflicted with its economic priorities. The navy is now tendering the ships one at a time because it cannot afford them together.

The friction has not eased: funding for the next frigate was stripped from the proposed fiscal 2027 budget in May, leaving the navy publicly pressing to keep its modernization on track.

The submarine is the sharper warning. Thailand ordered a single S26T Yuan-class boat from China in May 2017 for 13.5 billion baht, having initially wanted three until budget limits forced the number down. The contract specified a German MTU396 engine, but Berlin blocked its export to China under a European Union arms embargo, and construction stalled in 2021.

Thailand refused China's proposed Chinese-made substitute engine and, in 2023, said it would cancel the submarine and buy a frigate instead, but then reversed course. In September 2025, the two sides signed a revised contract accepting the Chinese engine and extending construction by more than 1,200 days, with delivery now due by the end of 2028, five years late. The boat is about 64 percent built, with 7.7 billion baht paid across 10 of 18 installments.

The government now weighing the frigate contract is itself young and improvised. Anutin Charnvirakul took office in September 2025 as Thailand's third prime minister in two years, then dissolved parliament that December, days ahead of a no-confidence motion, and won a snap election on Feb. 8 with about 190 of the 500 House seats. His conservative populist Bhumjaithai party had walked out of a Pheu Thai-led coalition months earlier, but the two joined forces after the vote, and a new cabinet took office on March 30.

Bhumjaithai surged by casting itself as the defender of the nation during the border war with Cambodia, Purawich Watanasukh, a political scientist at Thammasat University, told the Associated Press. Fitch Ratings cut Thailand's credit outlook to negative in September 2025, citing risks to public finances amid the political turmoil.

We shall prevail

Yet analysts caution against reading that turbulence as a threat to the deal. Yoon Jin-pyo, a professor at Sungshin Women's University who studies Southeast Asian politics, said the frigate acquisition is embedded in long-standing military planning and unlikely to be knocked off course.

"There may be noise in the process of awarding this contract, and interested parties may try to make an issue of it," Yoon said. "But I don't think that will overturn the decision or stop it from happening."

If anything, Yoon argued, the return of a conservative government has made the purchase easier, not harder. He noted that the earlier budget fight coincided with alarm over the Chinese submarine and a broader unease that Bangkok was leaning too far toward Beijing.

With Pheu Thai and the Thaksin Shinawatra camp now pushed aside and Anutin back in power, "the justification and the conditions to pursue this as a matter of national interest are in place," he said, describing Thai politics as having entered "a stabilizing phase" under a durable conservative establishment of the military, the monarchy, the bureaucracy and big business.

Against such a backdrop, the bid itself turns on how much industry each contender will leave behind in Thailand.  Bidders must commit to at least 20 percent local content — and technology transfer, joint production and workforce training all count in the evaluation.

HD Hyundai has offered roughly 40 percent local production, double the requirement, along with joint construction at a Thai shipyard, pitching an export design derived from the Chungnam-class frigate and pointing to its work for the Philippines and its joint construction with Peru's state-owned SIMA yard.

Hanwha is offering the Ocean-40F and leaning on history, since its predecessor, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, delivered the 3,700-ton HTMS Bhumibol Adulyadej to the Thai navy in late 2018, the newest of the four frigates in the fleet.

Or not…?

Experts say Turkish bidders are also viable choices for the Thai government. State-linked Asfat has entered a variant of its Milgem I-class frigate in partnership with a local firm, United Defense Technology, while TAIS submitted a separate proposal, part of an export push that has already seen Ankara beat Korean competitors for major aviation contracts in Southeast Asia.

Spanish shipbuilder Navantia has offered to build its ALFA 3000 entirely inside Thailand.

Yet the Korean pair enter as the clear front-runners, a standing that rests less on any single proposal than on Korea's weight as a shipbuilder. "Korea is a shipbuilding powerhouse, one of the top three in the world," said Choi Gi-il, a professor of military studies at Sangji University. "Naval shipbuilding is part of that, and we have concentrated on the Southeast Asian market in particular. In warships, as in commercial ships, we remain the strong player here."

Choi argued that the other bidders do not match that record, saying that Korea's price competitiveness and technical quality would have come through in its proposal. He likened the comparison to Korean cars, saying it needed no more explanation than why one model is simply better built than another.

Choi also read the swirl of skeptical commentary in Thailand as a sign of Korean strength rather than weakness. "If a company were never a real candidate, that kind of talk would not come up at all," Choi said. "I actually interpret it as a positive signal." He said negative local chatter, some of it suggesting the outcome was preordained for the Korean side, reflected the perception that a Korean yard was the one to beat.

"The global weapons market is not a fixed-price market," Choi said. "It is not decided simply by price competitiveness or technical excellence. Networks a company has built with the local government and military, and its external negotiating power, factors that are hard to quantify, will influence the final choice."

Other analysts are more cautious about the front-runner label. Jang Won-joon, an associate professor specializing in the defense industry at Jeonbuk National University, said Thailand's pragmatism runs counter to any assumption that a Korean win is assured.

"Thailand is neither pro-American nor pro-Chinese. Its diplomacy is pragmatic," he said, noting that the Thai military already fields American, Chinese and Korean systems and chooses by practical interest.

"In the end, the key is who offers the better package," he added, citing technology transfer, maintenance support and industrial cooperation as the terms most likely to decide the award.

On those terms, the competition is real, Jang said, adding that Turkey appears willing to transfer close to all of its technology and should not be underestimated. "This is not a market we can comfortably predict in advance," he said. "The companies have to give it everything to the end, and the government has to back them actively."

Contested waters

The pressure to buy is not only budgetary. The strategic case for the frigates comes from a war on Thailand's own maritime doorstep. Thailand's border war with Cambodia that erupted in July 2025 reached the sea in December, when a Thai warship in the Gulf of Thailand shelled Cambodia's Koh Kong province.

The two governments signed a fresh ceasefire on Dec. 27 after fighting that killed at least 100 people and displaced more than half a million, and it has held since, though the Center for Strategic and International Studies has called it as fragile as the one before, with the underlying border still undefined. As of May, Anutin and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet reaffirmed the truce at a regional meeting, but sporadic incidents and mistrust persist.

Cambodia's navy, meanwhile, is being rebuilt by China. Beijing financed the upgrade of Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand, which reopened in April 2025 with a pier long enough for large warships and a joint logistics center operated with the Chinese military. China then donated two Type 056C corvettes to Phnom Penh, the first arriving at Ream in April, giving Cambodia its first modern surface combatants and China a foothold in the same gulf that Thailand's new frigate would patrol.

Thailand's position between the powers is uncomfortable. It is a treaty ally of the United States, yet Bangkok saw Washington's handling of the border conflict as tilting toward Phnom Penh, and the United States has since agreed to lift its arms embargo on Cambodia and resume joint exercises there.

China supplies weapons to both sides and insists its defense cooperation has nothing to do with the fighting, even as Thai forces displayed Chinese-made anti-tank missiles seized from retreating Cambodian troops.

Yoon cautioned against forcing Thailand into a United States-versus-China frame. "Think of Thailand as bamboo," he said, invoking the term bamboo diplomacy. "It sways this way and that as the wind blows, but it does not break."

Thailand is at once historically close to the United States and, in Yoon's words, culturally, historically, religiously and geographically bound to China, which is precisely why it guards its room to maneuver on arms purchases. That, Yoon said, is what separates Thailand from Canada, where Hanwha's faster timeline and proven boat lost to the pull of the NATO alliance. "That was a case of being pushed out by the structure," he said of the Canada defeat. "This is different."

One bidder is conspicuously missing from all this. China, Thailand's largest arms supplier of the past decade, did not submit a proposal for the frigate, an absence Naval News attributed to the submarine debacle and to the incompatibility of Chinese sensors and weapons with Thailand's Western-derived fleet.

That is the opening Korean shipbuilders occupy, neither American nor Chinese, offering capable hardware without a bloc attached. Yoon sees the Bhumibol Adulyadej, the frigate that Daewoo delivered in 2018, as Hanwha's quiet advantage because the ship bears the name of Thailand's revered late king, Rama IX.

"For Thais, that name is like naming a ship after King Sejong," Yoon said, effectively calling it the fleet's flagship and noting that its roughly eight years of service have earned strong reviews within the navy. In the Southeast Asian market, he argued, Korea competes on merit rather than against a bloc.

"This is a fair fight," he said. "There is nothing about Korea's image that works against us here."

BY KIM MIN-YOUNG [[email protected]]