Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast is in discussions with Ministers of the Northern Ireland Assembly over a plan to try and save the yard from closure, it was confirmed last night.
The yard has no orders beyond work currently for the British Ministry of Defence. It also faces a growing cash crisis.
Assembly Ministers are currently studying a survival business plan draw up by the yard's management, the company said last night. If the restructuring plan is not implemented the yard faces almost certain closure.
Even if the Enterprise Minister, Sir Reg Empey, and the Regional Development Minister, Mr Peter Robinson, agree, some 140 jobs are likely to be lost.
Steel fabrication work on the two roll-on-roll-off ferries being built for the MoD is coming to an end in mid-summer, and without fresh work those workers will not be needed.
The vessels are due for delivery late this year and in the first quarter of next year.
The yard has been on the brink of closure many times, but may now be in its most serious crisis.
The business plan would see Harland and Wolff moving away from traditional steel fabrication work and concentrating on high added-value elements.
These would include fitting out vessels, working on oil rigs and getting into the growing renewable-energy market of wind farms. The yard has already built turbines for wind power.
But the plan hangs on the Ministers changing the terms of the lease on land held by the yard to enable it to be used for purposes other than shipbuilding.
If they agree, the yard would be able to raise money from other businesses moving on to the land which, under the business plan, would not be needed by the slimmed-down shipyard.
A spokesman for Harland and Wolff said: "This is the only way we can see the funds being available in the timeframe we need it."
Other means of raising the estimated £20 million sterling needed to implement the business plan are winning new orders - or swiftly getting the £200 million it is demanding from a US oil firm for which it built two highly sophisticated oil-drilling ships in the late 1990s.
The shipyard chairman, Sir David Fell, said the business plan was being brought in because "we need more orders and we simply haven't got them".
There were a whole range of reasons why they had failed over the past 18 months to win a single shipbuilding order, he said.
These included the global economic downturn, the September 11th terrorist attacks in the US and more capacity worldwide than orders.