Hyundai Heavy Industries will halt the operations of its offshore plant manufacturing facility in Onsan of Ulsan City from March.

“Our ongoing projects will complete in March. From then we do not have a further order to work on, and the operation will stop until we get a new one,” a company spokesman said. The factory will be used as a warehouse.

Hyundai opened the 200,000-square-meter factory in November 2012 to tackle thundering orders. However, the company has already laid off 700 of its 1,000 workers there. Among the 300 remaining workers, Hyundai is reportedly considering relocating 60 regular workers, with the other 240, who are mostly dispatched workers, being laid off, industrial observers said.

Hyundai Heavy’s latest project was the $2.06 billion deal to build core parts of a liquefied natural gas plant for Australia’s Gorgon project. Due to plummeting oil prices, the outlook for another offshore plant construction is unlikely, analysts said.

The company posted 3 trillion won ($2.5 billion) in operating deficits in 2014, and was 1.26 trillion in the red between January and September 2015. However, after severe downsizing, Hyundai announced that the company expects to receive $19.5 billion in orders this year, generating 21.6 trillion won in sales.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldcorp.com)