Royal Niestern Sander is a shipyard at Farmsum, beside Delfzijl in the north of the Netherlands, with a direct connection to the North Sea. It designs and builds ships for merchant shipping, inland shipping and offshore work, repairs and maintains them, and takes on customer-specific conversions in which vessels are redesigned and rebuilt to new technical and functional requirements.
The business goes back to 1901, when the Niestern family chose the port of Delfzijl for a yard building steel ships. It moved in 1912 and traded as Scheepsbouwmij Farmsum, with a separate newbuilding yard opened across the canal. The Sander brothers began building at Delfzijl in 1927 and became known for their coasters, moving to an entirely new yard in 1953. Niestern merged with the Apol yard, later Werf Appingedam, in 1970, and that company merged with Sander in 1980 to form Niestern Sander BV. The centenary fell in 2001 and the Royal title has been carried since. Family ownership ended in 2005, when the shares passed to Central Industry Group and Royal Wagenborg; Wagenborg has been sole shareholder since 2008.
Two floating docks are in use, one of them substantially larger than the other, together with a slipway. Building work is done in covered halls and the machine shop has a plasma cutting machine.
Newbuilding is current and centred on the EasyMax series for Wagenborg. Yard number 855 was handed over on 1 May 2026 as the 14,000 deadweight tonne Ariane, the sixth EasyMax. Six fuel-flex EasyMax 2.0 hulls have since been keel-laid and the first ring section of that generation left the construction hall in February 2026. The offshore DP2 carbon dioxide carrier Carbon Destroyer 1 completed two North Sea sea trials out of Delfzijl in March 2026 before going to Esbjerg for the Project Greensand offshore CO2 storage chain led by INEOS Energy.
