News / Box ship building in China hits new heights with 68.5% of global orders

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China has become the undisputed front-runner in containership building, with an orderbook, extending to 2030, nearly triple that of its main competitor, according to Alphaliner this week.   

The number of box ships built in China first passed those coming out of South Korea in 2015, but, as Alphaliner noted, this was “not particularly representative since ordering activity was very low overall”.  

Although South Korea accounted for more deliveries from 2017 onwards, China again took the lead in 2020 and has since asserted its dominance in the sector. According to Alphaliner data, its shipyards account for some 68.5% of the global box ship orderbook in terms of teu capacity.  

South Korea sits second, at roughly one third of this, with an orderbook share of 23.3%. 

In 2020, Chinese yards received 630,000 teu worth of newbuilding orders, against 380,000 teu for South Korea, with a boom in orders during Covid and the post-pandemic period, cementing this lead further.  

This year, China’s yards have received an astonishing 3.61m teu of orders, as opposed to the 660,000 teu recorded in South Korea.  

“Once the current boom is over, and once the orderbook will shrink, the number of fresh newbuilding contracts in Korea is expected to erode. Currently, nobody can match the price advantage that Chinese yards can offer,” said Alphaliner.  

As well as offering newbuild prices that far undercut competitors, China’s yards also boast far larger capacity for orders, with many “committed to massive expansion projects that allow them to create numerous newbuilding slots for 2027 and beyond”, said the analyst.  

Such projects include Times Shipyard (NTS) and Yangzijiang (YZJ), where “slots were eagerly picked up”. 

The containership orderbook now extends as far as 2030, and Alphaliner added that “there are a number of ‘reported’ contracts that will likely be confirmed later and add to the full-year total”. 

Preferred sourcing locations differ among the carriers, with Hapag-Lloyd, Cosco, Maersk and MSC all preferring China, according to an Alphaliner graph. 

It noted that MSC had started a partnership with Hengli Group to re-boot ship construction at the former STX Dalian shipyard in China, to “build numerous large vessels”. 

Meanwhile, South Korean state-controlled carrier HMM is a “staunch supporter” of domestic shipyards, while Ocean Network Express (ONE) prefers Japanese yards and Yang Ming, Wan Hai and Evergreen tend to spread their business between Taiwan, Korea and Japan.  

But despite Japanese carrier ONE supporting home manufacturing, Alphaliner noted that many of its recent orders went to Korea and China. 

Danish carrier Maersk also used to build ships at its own shipyard in Odense. However, this closed in 2012 and the last series of 9,700 teu containerships built there, in 2009, were later upgraded to 11,000 teu in Chinese shipyards.