McDermott said it broke ground on a new fabrication facility within the King Salman International Complex for Maritime Industries and Services in Ras Al-Khair, Saudi Arabia.

The site is being developed by Saudi Aramco and is expected to be one of the largest maritime industries complexes in the Middle East in terms of production, capacity and scale.

McDermott said it will also expand its in-country engineering and procurement offices, as well as establish a new marine base to support installation of offshore platforms, subsea pipelines and cables, skids, and associated structures and assemblies.

Within the King Salman complex, McDermott is building a 1.2 million square meter facility that will include offices, pre-fabrication shops, blasting and painting shops, and large assembly shops capable of fabricating platforms and modules for both offshore and onshore projects for Saudi Aramco and other customers.

The facility will incorporate up to 80,000 square meters of covered shops to house automation technology and will also include a 580-meter reinforced bulkhead providing marine access.

At peak production, the facility is planned to have a throughput capacity in excess of 60,000 metric tons per year. The facility is expected to be operational by 2022.

In March 2019, Saudi Aramco signed a land lease agreement with McDermott Arabia Company Ltd., a unit of McDermott International Inc., to grant McDermott a lease to establish the fabrication facility.

In January, McDermott announced a restructuring transaction to equitize nearly all the company's funded debt, eliminating more than $4.6 billion of debt. It said the restructuring transaction would be implemented through a prepackaged Chapter 11 process that will be financed by a debtor-in-possession financing facility of $2.81 billion.

The company said it also secured exit financing of more than $2.4 billion enabling it to emerge from Chapter 11 with roughly $500 million in funded debt.