In the first three quarters, 30% of Chinese shipyards ran into “new order drought”, some of them even recorded “zero order”.

However, Chen Wenjin, vice president of Rongsheng Heavy Industry recently announced that the company had made satisfactory order this year.

By the end of June, Rongsheng has won 109 vessels with a value of $6.75bn, making its orderbook No. 1 in China and No. 5 in the world. In the third quarter, Rongsheng began to focus on high-end vessel orders as containership and special tanker, pushing its order backlog to 4m dwt in the first three quarters.

Nevertheless, the order drought in most shipyards makes China lag behind S. Korea again after taking the lead last year.

In the first half of 2011, Korean shipyard swept over half the global new orders at a value of $31.4bn, three times as much as China’s $8.8bn. Totally 21 oil drilling ships were ordered in H1, which all went to Korean shipyards’ pocket.

Chen pointed out that Chinese shipyards were now losing the advantages due to the increase of various costs. Chinese yards are supposed to speed up transformation, carry out independent R&D or introduce advanced technologies to improve its designing capacity and production level in high-end vessels and offshore plants.

As for Rongsheng’s development plan, Chen disclosed that the yard will step up its R&D in high-end ship types, such as ice strengthen bulker, over 6,600TEU containership, VLOC and other high-value-added vessels. Besides, Rongsheng will continue its research in drilling ships and LNG carrier to increase its incomes from building offshore plants and other high-end vessels.

Chen also revealed that mergers and acquisitions during transformation are also in their consideration. Currently totally more than 4000 shipyard dotted in China with less than 300 qualified for scale shipbuilding enterprises. The newbuilding output of ten big shipbuilders in China only accounts for 52% of national total while Korean big five finish 80% of its national output. Scattered resources, low concentration and inadequate enterprise scale are problems Chinese shipyards have to overcome.