Shipbuilding: China Builds and Builds….

Unsurprisingly, it was not unexpected.

China’s shipbuilding industry, says the official China Daily, saw a strong performance in the first quarter of 2021 while maintaining a large global share in terms of completion volume, and new and holding orders.

The completion volume of shipbuilding in China, rising 39.8% year-on-year to 9.79 million deadweight (dwt) tons  in the first three months of 2021, accounted for 43.4% of the global market share, according to the nation’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

New shipbuilding orders surged 251.7% from the same period last year to 17.2 million dwt, taking up 47.4% of the global market share.

The volume of holding orders, down 1.4 percent year on year to 78.48 million dwt by the end of March 2021, accounted for 44.6 percent of the global market share.

Simply by looking at how China has stopped the COVID1-9 pandemic in its tracks does offer lessons for some hard-headed introspection. The Economist citing a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Federal Reserve and quoting from a paper headlined as, “Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not”, aptly concluded that cities that acted early and forcefully had the best economic outcomes.

In the publication’s words, those that delayed such measures could not escape the pandemic’s shadow: people still curbed their consumption and businesses capped their investment. Cities that imposed strict controls, by contrast, limited the damage to public health and were able to bounce back sooner.

The article then elaborated that the economists will pore over data from the COVID-19 shock for years to come. But China’s GDP figures for 2020 have validated those findings. After its early fumbles in managing the novel coronavirus outbreak, China imposed stricter lockdowns than just about any other country. The new data confirm that it was one of a handful of countries to register any economic growth at all last year. Its GDP for 2020 says Statista was US$14.72trillion.

One of the few items China cares assiduously about, is shipbuilding. Ships are vital for its merchant fleet. They transport the goods and manufactured wares the nation wants to export to other nations. They are used to earn useful foreign exchange. And they establish independence from ship management companies that gnaw at those foreign exchange.

Thus, it does not become hard to understand why China simply needs to import iron ore – that quintessential, raw material to make steel, for shipbuilding – from Australia, even as bilateral tensions have shaken the relations between both powers. (Anatha’s use of ‘shaken’ is an incorrect adjective)

In 2019, Australia was China’s biggest supplier of iron ore, accounting for around 62.2 percent of the total iron ore import tonnage to China. China’s National Bureau of Statistics of China said the nation imported approximately 1,064.12 million metric tons of iron ore in 2018.

Such colossal amounts do point that shipbuilding in China, can neither shrink nor stop.  It must continue. As after all, it is a national priority and the vessels China builds, means more than just tonnage.

For years and indeed decades, China seemed to have perfected the art of shipbuilding.

“They (meaning Chinese) have been learning from the outside world and have forged international collaborations”, said a source who spoke anonymously to Marine and Offshore.

Just in December 2020, nearly 70 Finland and Nantong-based companies, including Wartsila, MacGregor, Konecranes, Nantong COSCO KHI Ship Engineering Co, COSCO (Nantong) Shipyard Co, and China Merchants Heavy Industry (Jiangsu) Co, held a discussion in East China’s Jiangsu province to seek cooperation opportunities in the shipbuilding and marine engineering sectors, reported China Daily.

“Nantong is the second largest shipbuilding and marine engineering base in China and a very important market for Finland,” said Pasi Hellman, consul general of Finland in Shanghai.

Cao Haifeng, director of the Nantong bureau of industry and information technology, agreed with Hellman, stating that the city is working to upgrade its shipbuilding and marine engineering industries with luxury cruise ships and high-end equipment at its core, which requires many advanced products from Finland.

China State and Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) accepted more than 73 vessel orders in the first half of 2020. Shipbuilding has been at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation. It was, as described by the CSSC,“as the backbone of China’s shipbuilding industry and the leading force in marine equipment development”. The body’s chairman Lei Fanpei, even was reported by The Naval Architect as saying, ‘Innovation drives development to provide strong momentum for building a world-class shipbuilding group.’ 

Back in May 2021, CSSC launched the world’s largest marine dual-fuel low-speed engine, WinGD X92DF, which had been developed by CSIC subsidiary, WinGD, and built by Shanghai CSSC Mitsui Shipbuilding Diesel Engine Co. 

In July, CSSC signed a strategic agreement aimed at strengthening the country’s transportation and maritime sectors, in cooperation with China’s Maritime Safety Administration of the Ministry of Transport. The agreement targets the development and acceleration of high end-marine equipment in China, including equipment for cruise ships, large-scale LNG vessels.

And in March 2021, China’s Marine Design and Research Institute (MARIC) obtained an approval in principle certificate from Italian class society RINA, for a dual-fuel, 157,000 dwt crude fuel oil tanker with the vessel featuring two four-stroke, dual-fuel engines, and an electric power demand system.

Such an accolade marks a milestone in Chinese technological innovation. Now, it is a given that such engineering and technological feats can be duplicated across the board to kit out all manner of vessels from liners, LNG tankers or even cruise vessels, etc.