A ceremony took place today (12 December) to christen the first of four 125 Class frigates to be used by the German Navy, with the warship being named ‘Baden-Württemberg’.
The event was held at the Hamburg site of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems – a company of ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions. This is an important milestone in the construction programme for the F125 Class frigates.
Delivery of this first frigate is scheduled for November 2016. The order for the four ships is worth around €2 billion in total.
ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems heads the ARGE F125 consortium which was awarded the contract to build a total of four F125 Class ships for the German Navy in 2007. The ARGE F125 consortium also includes the Friedrich Lürssen shipyard in Bremen, which is building the ships in cooperation with Blohm+Voss Shipyards in Hamburg.
Gerlinde Kretschmann, wife of the Baden-Württemberg State Premier, performed the christening ceremony. Also at the event were high-ranking representatives from the Federal Ministry of Defence, the State of Baden-Württemberg, the German Parliament, the Baden-Württemberg State Assembly, the German Navy and the companies involved.
Dr. Hans Christoph Atzpodien, CEO of ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions AG and chairman of the supervisory board of ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems GmbH said: "The F125 is a completely new type of frigate with numerous technological innovations which will secure a solid basic workload for the shipyards involved in the coming years and help the German naval shipbuilding industry maintain and expand its leading position in key technologies."
The four 125 Class frigates will replace the German Navy’s eight (Bremen type) 122 Class frigates. The ships were developed specifically for current and future deployment scenarios for the German Navy. In addition to the traditional tasks of national and alliance defence, the 125 Class frigates are designed for conflict prevention, crisis management and intervention/stabilization operations in the international arena.
The frigates are capable of remaining at sea for 24 months and thus represent the first realisation of the intensive use concept, i.e. significantly increased availability in the deployment region. This capability is supported by a much smaller crew and a two-crew strategy which permits a complete change of team members during deployment.