Last year’s stagnation of exports in shipbuilding industry are seen to have continued during the first three months, however, contract cancellation, delivery delay and etc., have been settling down this year that stable growth is expected from the latter half of this year when deliveries in offshore plant sector are to be carried out in full scale.
An official at Institute for International Trade at the Korea International Trade Association (KITA) said on May 27 through a research report called ‘Trade Brief’, “Newbuilding orders in global shipbuilding industry was recorded to be a combined 6.6m cgt in the first quarter of this year (tally by Clarkson), which represents a 13.8% rise comparing with the same time period of last year," and added "Although there are signs of getting out of the two-year stagnation, a full recovery is hard to expect yet due to fleet oversupply, shrinking financing and etc."
The report also pointed out that the stagnation in shipbuilding continued, as we can see it from global newbuilding deliveries in Q1 having declined by 29% year-on-year to 9.57m cgt, while orderbook having showed a year-on-year decline of 24% to 91m cgt as of late March.
Korea’s ship export in Q1 posted a 27.1% drop y-o-y to $8.6bn while China and Japan also showed falls of 29.6% and 4.5% to $7.3bn and $5.7bn, respectively. This overall stagnation is particularly attributable to greatly shrunk ship finance, affected by European financial crisis.
The official said in the report that the matter of recovery in ship export depends on smooth delivery on schedule and indicated that only 77% of newbuildings were delivered last year, comparing with initial delivery plan for 2012.
As for Q1, however, it seems that the rate of contract cancellation, delivery delay and etc. are quite low and shipbuilding and delivery are underway as scheduled. Therefore ship export is likely to recover going towards the second half of 2013 since some of offshore plant deliveries are planned after the second quarter.
The report prospected, “Due to uncertainty of the global shipbuilding industry, the exports will become stable just pulling out of last year’s stagnation rather than showing a sharp increase.”