text: Seventy staff at Ferguson Shipbuilder, Port Glasgow, were laid off last August when it went into administration.
  Entrepreneur Jim McColl, who took over the business, said it now employed 140 staff - and he hoped for a near 10-fold increase in that number by 2020.
  He plans to invest up to Â£65m in the yard, which was the last in Britain fully equipped to build merchant ships.
  The firm, renamed Ferguson Marine, is currently building a hybrid electric/diesel ferry for Caledonian MacBrayne.
  A bid has also been lodged to build two large Hebridean ferries, with an announcement due soon.
  At the same time, much of the yard is being demolished as part of a Â£12m rebuild.
  Mr McColl, who made his fortune building up the engineering firm Clyde Blowers, said he was attracted to Fergusons for "sentimental reasons" but there were also sound business opportunities underpinning the buyout.
  "We look at the market they're in and try to assess the demand for the kind of products that they do," he said.
  "We saw a huge demand. Most people who are looking for boats of any kind in the UK have to go overseas for it. Many of them don't want to.
  "They want the work done here. They want repairs and upgrades done here but the facilities aren't there any more.
  "Most of the yards around the UK have been turned into executive apartments and wine bars alongside the river side."
  He said part of the deal in re-employing the laid-off workers was that they would need to work flexibly. They also received a 5% pay rise.
  Mr McColl is looking at the market for refitting luxury yachts for the "super rich". He is also working with a Formula 1 team, trying to get better performance out of marine batteries.
  "We've got a five-year plan. One scenario which is an optimistic one, we could have 1,300 employees here. That's ten times what we have got just now.
  "There's a fairly buoyant market for the kind of work we're looking to do. There are very few facilities in the UK that can do it.
  "By May next year we will have a completely new fabrication facility and shipyard here and by August next year we'll have the new office up as well.
  "So in a year's time this will be a 21st Century shipyard that's very efficient, able to compete with anywhere in the world."
target: Plans are being developed to employ up to 1,300 workers at a Clyde shipyard which went bust a year ago.