10 years ago, China-made ships less than 10% of the world. Today, according to the load calculation, the size of China's shipbuilding industry has been ranked first in the world.
The rapid development of China's shipbuilding industry is not by chance, but by the global financial crisis before promoting the shipping industry prosperity. Because of relatively low cost, plus always offer attractive financing for foreign buyers, Chinese shipbuilding companies to the Japanese and South Korean counterparts caused tremendous competitive pressure.
Those incentives practices during the recession has become a post-effective catalyst, when global liquidity dried up, the ship sometimes buyer defaults on payment. In addition, more and more Chinese ship owner tends to buy at home, the development of China's shipbuilding industry has also played a role.
Some analysts see this as China's strategic change. "Shipbuilding history in the past 150 years, always around commodity-dependent countries." Barclays Capital (Barclays Capital) analyst in Hong Kong, Jon? Wyndham (Jon Windham) representation.
"China is the largest source of today's commodity demand. Therefore, the Chinese government from a strategic point of view, that the national security needs of China must become a shipbuilding country."
In stock determination driven by the Chinese government in 2009 began armrest shipbuilding, unveiled a three-year stimulus plan to encourage banks to the financial crisis shipbuilding enterprises lending, and credit for the purchase of foreign ship .
The goal of this stimulus plan is: By 2011, the Chinese shipbuilding enterprises in the global offshore engineering market share of 10%.
China Export-Import Bank (China ExIm Bank) to the two largest state-owned shipbuilding company offers a total credit line of 160 billion yuan, in addition to providing loans to other shipbuilding companies.
Another reason government is keen to support the shipbuilding industry that the shipbuilding industry can stimulate the development of a large number of other activities in the iron and steel industry, marine engineering.
Chinese shipbuilding enterprises competitive in terms of cost, but also one of the reasons they achieved success.
China currently can not produce certain complex ship, such as LNG ships (liquefied natural transport of ships), however, in the production of relatively simple bulk carriers (for carrying coal, iron ore, etc.) areas, the majority of China Shipyards are very familiar to flow. They are now in this market dominated.
However, with the global shipbuilding industry hit bottom China's huge shipbuilding industry starts to look a little shaky. Steel prices, overcapacity and the global shipping at very low levels, margins have weakened China's shipbuilding industry. For the Chinese shipbuilding industry can pull through this recession, analysts have different views.
"If two or three years there in the future, more than 100 small shipyards closed down, I would not be surprised." Clarkson (Clarksons) Shanghai shipping newly established brokerage firm in charge of Zhou Jiliang (transliteration) said.
"But the whole industry will not be significantly affected, because most large-scale shipbuilding enterprises will be unscathed, but their total production accounted for about 85% of the entire industry."
He believes that the changing market situation will force the Chinese shipbuilding enterprises to increase R & D investment in order to improve efficiency, enhance LNG ships and other complex ship production capacity.
Other analysts, however, painted a bleaker outlook. "China's shipbuilding industry is actually piled up sand castle." Mirae Asset Securities (Mirae Asset Securities) senior analyst Sokje Lee expressed.
"Nobody cares about real profit figures China Shipbuilding When the endless stream of orders, it is very easy to hide. However, if there is no order, they are easily available funding will stop. Overall, I am Chinese Shipbuilding the real profitability skeptical. "he believes that China's rising labor costs and higher international steel prices, China's shipbuilding enterprises will be a heavy blow.
A big problem is that the Chinese credit tightening will cause much impact, that is, whether the government to curb the overheated economy initiatives will result in loans to shipbuilding and other strategic industries reduced.