Shipbuilding hogged the headlines at Splash this week with images of the White House and its occupant down considerably week-on-week.
The East Asian shipbuilding tango – one of the persistent shipping news themes of 2025 – garnered the most column inches.
A contraction in Chinese shipbuilding orders has been registered in the first half of 2025, with Beijing’s once unassailable dominance increasingly under pressure from geopolitical tensions and a softening global market.
According to new data from BIMCO, China’s share of newbuilding contracts dropped from 72% to 52% in the last six months — a plunge that analysts say is driven in no small part by mounting concerns over upcoming US Trade Representative (USTR) port fees targeting Chinese ships and shipbuilders. In cgt terms, global newbuilding contracting fell 54% year-on-year in H1.
China remains the dominant builder in most sectors except cruiseships, where Europe holds sway. But South Korea has now overtaken China in crude tanker orders this year.
Yet both Korea and Japan face structural challenges to expanding capacity: ageing workforces, labour shortages, and rising wage bills continue to squeeze their competitiveness. Strikes this week at South Korea’s major yards highlight the workforce challenges on home soil.
A belated decision to expand saw the South Korean shipbuilding sector get badly burned in the wake of the global financial crisis 17 years ago, leading to a lost decade and more. With shipbuilding going through a supercycle again, Korean yards are being more savvy about how they expand at home and overseas. Yesterday’s Splash lead looked at the return of what was once a top 10 global shipbuilder to the market.
After years of financial hardship that culminated in court receivership in 2018, the reborn HSG Sungdong — acquired by HSG Heavy Industries late in 2019 — had been operating mainly as a block builder. That has now changed.
This month, Samsung Heavy Industries subcontracted the construction of a full suezmax-class crude oil tanker to HSG Sungdong, elevating their collaboration from component fabrication to full-vessel delivery.
HSG Sungdong’s return mirrors Samsung Heavy’s broader strategy of engaging partners to cope with rising demand. The firm has similar outsourcing relationships with China’s PaxOcean Zhoushan and Vietnam’s PetroVietnam.
Samsung Heavy’s local rival, HD Hyundai, has been taking a different tack to expand output. Splash reported yesterday that the conglomerate was chasing long-term operating rights for Morocco’s flagship Casablanca shipyard. The initiative is part of HD Hyundai’s wider strategy to replicate its success in Vietnam by partnering with emerging maritime nations. The company is also deepening ties with Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, India and the US, including recent deals with Cochin Shipyard and Edison Chouest Offshore.
Finally, turning to the US, the Trump administration’s early ambition to revitalise US shipbuilding appears to be losing momentum, following the departure of Ian Bennitt, the White House National Security Council’s (NSC) senior director for maritime and industrial capacity. Bennitt’s exit, alongside that of NSC chief of staff Brian McCormack, underscores a broader hollowing out of the council’s maritime policy apparatus, just months after president Donald Trump pledged to reclaim America’s shipbuilding dominance.
Putting the scale of how far behind American shipbuilding is to its Asian rival, China manufactured more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than US shipyards have built since the end of World War II.
To digest this week’s main news from shipyards across the world in audio form, below is the fourth episode of the Splash Wrap podcast.
