South Korean contractor Ssangyong Engineering & Construction (E&C) has been awarded contracts worth $730m for projects to build a luxury hotel, apartment towers and office buildings in Dubai.

The Seoul-based Ssangyong E&C is part of a group of contractors, including Belgium’s Besix and China State Construction Engineering Company, that have been awarded contracts worth a total of $1.6bn for three major construction schemes in Dubai. Ssangyong’s portion of the construction contracts is worth $730m, according to the South Korean Yonhap news agency.

One of the projects will involve building a 47-floor hotel and a 37-floor apartment building on the offshore Palm Jumeirah development. The $840m contract was awarded by Investment Corporation of Dubai (ICD), a Dubai-government controlled investment vehicle.

The company will also construct three apartment towers on the same development. The contract signed with a subsidiary of ICD is valued at $386m. Ssangyong E&C has also won a large-scale office construction deal.

ICD, which owns stakes in Emirates Airlines, Emaar Properties, the biggest capitalised real estate developer in the UAE and Emirates NBD, Dubai’s largest lender by assets, took a controlling stake in Ssangyong E&C earlier this year.

The latest deals are in line with the ICD’s plans to increase Ssangyong’s global presence.

Ssangyong has a history of construction contracts in the Middle East, including the Hadeed iron and steel mill and Jubail desalination plant in Saudi Arabia.

The company is best known as the main contractor behind the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore. It was one of South Korea’s largest construction companies, but after being hit hard by Asia’s financial crisis of 1997-98, the company had to go through a restructuring, which finished in 2004. The contractor has since struggled with debt issues as a result of the global financial crisis, and was delisted from the Korean stock exchange in 2014.