Chinese ship industrial structure adjustment in downturn

It is reported that shipbuilding industry eyed a gentle recovery in new ship orders lately, but experts from China Association of National Ship Industry thought the real recovery wouldn’t come so early and the downturn would dominate the industry for 1 to 2 years. According to China industrial policies, the downturn will provide the country a good opportunity to neaten and upgrade the ship industrial structure. In recent times, China shipbuilders faced frequent delivery to oversea buyers. Some foreign ship owners, making quite behaviors from theirs in last year, even required to move up the delivery in order to put their new ships into the reviving shipping market earlier.
In January to October the new ship delivery dropped 85% from the same period of last year. China new ship orders in the first 3 quarters slumped by 70%YoY. After a long time of depression, Shipbuilders saw some hope of reviving from the recent recovery in new ship orders.
Mr Qian Jianping vice GM of China Shipbuilding Industry Corp said “We hadn’t got any orders from last September to this August. However, the company starts to win new ship orders in recent months, with the total orders in January to October overrun 2.2 million DWT. But there still is a large order gap from last year record, indicating the serious situation still exists.”
The above mentioned experts said “The present market circumstance is still bad for shipbuilders and it’s too early to talk about the recovery. Shipbuilders should calm down and adjust the production according to the requirement of ship owners to ensure the delivery.”
During the crisis, China uncovered the revitalization plan of ship industry to guide the industrial structure adjustment. Mr Qian said “The plan is good news for the long term development in ship industry.”
It’s written down in the plan that the state encourages shipbuilders to carry out upgrading technologies and product mix, meanwhile, Government will pick up destroying old ships to enlarge the demand and keep the stable growth in ship industry.
As per report, CSIC developed 180,000 DWT new bulk carrier and the 6th generation semi submersible drilling platform according to the new international standards and realized the batch production during the crisis. In addition, as a leading power in China ship industry, CSIC officially gained the approval for Its IPO in A-share market in recent days, however the assets related, much different from other large shipbuilders mainly refers to marine equipment industry. CSIC will be the first listed company in China’s shipbuilders to list the assets of marine equipments.
Mr Gan Fengqi vice director of the assets management dept of CSIC said the money collected by listing will be wholly used in upgrading the technologies and facilities of producing marine equipments. The assets will be a new growth point for CSIC in future when global economy comes back.
The expert of CANSI said “China has to develop its marine equipment industry quickly, if she wants to be a real large shipbuilder in the world.”