The obvious alternative—to build more rail lines—would have been prohibitively expensive, because the Guayas River shoreline was both shallow and very muddy. It would take dozens of 15-meter reinforced concrete pilings to support the 200 meters of rail he needed.

A lazy Susan of massive steel rails enabled a shipyard to repair more than one vessel at a time (Photo: David Mangurian)

Then Labra, an engineer by training, remembered that railroads repair many locomotives simultaneously by bringing the engines into a building called a roundhouse. There, a rotating platform distributes them onto parking rails arrayed around it. Why couldn’t the same idea work for his shipyard?

His lone piling-supported rail was sufficient to get ships out of the water. All he needed now was to build a revolving platform. But there was a big difference between a platform for railroad locomotives and one for boats, says Jaime Santibañez, Asenabra’s general manager at the time: rail locomotives weigh 20 to 25 tons, whereas fishing boats can weigh more than 250 tons. So the revolving platform had to support 10 times as much weight.

The project would cost $400,000. Asenabra needed $280,000 in long-term financing for the project, terms most Ecuadorian banks were reluctant to grant. The exception was a bank that specialized in loans to small and medium-sized firms and agribusinesses that had received a $3 million loan and equity investment from the IDB’s private sector affiliate, the Inter-American Investment Corporation.

Asenabra’s revolving platform became operational in 1998. Company officials believe it is the first of its kind in Latin America and perhaps the world.

But the story had a bitter-sweet ending. The roundhouse platform did not increase Asenabra’s earnings as expected because a few months after the project was completed, Ecuador plunged into its worst economic recession in decades. As a result, ship owners were forced to spend less on maintenance, according to Asenabra Production Chief Napoleón Cabrera. But at the same time, the revolving platform has enabled the company to work on more ships at the same time, which kept it from going bankrupt.

—David Mangurian