Shipbuilding

The shipbuilding industry is one of the largest and oldest industries in the world. From East Indiamen to Suezmax, ship building has been in our lives ever since civilizations were started. Today, I would like to talk about some of my findings on shipbuilding. In the shipbuilding industry, there are 3 major categories of ships, first of all, is the bulker which transports dry cargo and next is the tanker which carries liquid cargo such as oil, LNG and other chemicals, the last is the passenger ship which carry people, like ferries.

This is a normal CMA CGM container ship which is the one of the main categories, the bulker, that transports dry cargo which I just mentioned ago. Area F&E has both upper and lower deck for cargo. While area D which is part of the upper deck of the ship, is used for cargo. Plus, area A, B, and C are the operation desk, stores crane, funnel, and the rooms for the attendants of the ship. Most of the area is for the cargo, in order to increase the maximum TEU of the ship, or twenty-foot equivalent unit. This means how much 6.1m x 2.44m x 2.59m sized containers can fit in the ship. The first picture from the right is the ship’s main engine. The main engine has quite a massive size and all ships(except for a few number of gasoline ships) are powered by a diesel similar or same with the CST380 which is a type of cheap low quality diesel, is boiled in 130CO. The boiled CST380 type of diesel is then used for powering the bulker.

 LNG TANKER

 NORMAL TANKER (TRANSPORTS OIL)

The tanker, which carries LNG (Liquid . Natural . Gas) tanker, or transports oil. The tanker, actually is a lot more expensive compared to the bulker, due to the difficulty in constructing a tanker. Especially LNG tanker is a lot more expensive as it needs to be pressured and maintained with low temperature, so that the gas changes to liquid, making it able to be transported. As per latest sales order by Hyundai heavy Industries, VLCC (Very Large Crude oil Carrier) LNG tanker was sold at about average 250M USD, while Supramax bulker container ship with a LNG engine was sold at about a avg cost of 74~75M USD. Usually, LNG ship is 3~5 times expensive than average container ship. Currently, tanker shipbuilding is led by Korean companies, as no 1 is HHI, Hyundai Heavy Industries, no 2 DSME, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, no 3, Samsung Heavy Industries, no 4 STX which is also a korean company. The liquid(pressured LNG) is sold to LNG power plants, or factories, then is transitioned to gas, and then supplied to apartments, houses, and almost everywhere. Due to green policy and energy transition, the demand on LNG which has lesser pollution, had skyrocketed in many countries.

 Fincantieri cruise ship

The last category I would like to talk about is the passenger ship. According to a current Bloomberg analysis, the no 1 passenger shipbuilding company is the Fincantieri which is an Italian company and holds 45.7% of world cruise shipbuilding market share. While Fincantieri is competing against with a company called Meyer Werft, that is the no 2 passenger shipbuilding company in the world. Plus, is taking part of approximately 21% of world cruise shipbuilding market share.

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 there was huge effect on shipbuilding. Many orders were delayed and the global shipbuilding industry had a 30% decrease since the COVID-19 had started. Even in this very moment COVID is largely impacting the shipbuilding industry and it is a huge problem to everyone.