Japanese shipbuilders, once dominated the global market, seem to be falling continuously.
While major yards in China and South Korea keep contracting new orders, Japanese only have sharply reduced orders amid strong yen and postponed restructuring and are getting close to "2014 Shipbuilding Problem', when orderbook is set to run out.
Having sensed current crisis, Japanese builders are putting their all efforts to find ways to overcome the difficulties, however, it seems that they have no effective solutions at the moment.
JFE Holdings and IHI took a sudden turn for M&A negotiation in Fall 2011, which had been discussed for the last four years, concerning plunged newbuilding contracts of their affiliated yards, such as Universal Shipbuilding, etc., since last summer.
In the end, JFE and IHI announced their agreement on M&A between shipbuilding units on January 30th this year.
Japanese shipbuilders' collapse is mainly caused by losing new order competition with counterparts in China and South Korea and their inferior shipbuilding facilities, which lack scale merit.