The country’s Defense Ministry will send the budget request in November to these three candidates to replace the current Walrus class.
The Dutch Ministry of Defence has announced the dispatch of the Request for Quotation (RFQ) to the three European companies remaining in the race to equip their military navy with four new submarines. A note issued Friday by the Dutch department specifies that this application “will be sent to the three candidate shipyards by mid-November 2022.”
The planned schedule estimates that the shipyards will send their offers around next summer. The Ministry of Defence will then need several months to analyse the offers before making a decision on the future shipbuilder, according to Secretary of State for Defence Christophe van der Maat.
The three candidate companies to manufacture the four new vessels are France’s Naval Group, Sweden’s Saab Kockums and Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems. The Dutch procurement authorities shortlisted these three candidates to contest the replacement program of the current Walrus submarine fleet in December 2019. At that time the Spanish company Navantia was left out of the competition, which ran out of possibilities because its offer was based on a model, the S-80, which had not yet been tested, so that it did not meet one of the key requirements of the contest.