The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently released national shipbuilding industry statistics for January to September 2026.
According to detailed data disclosed by the China Association of the National Shipbuilding Industry, in the first three quarters, China's shipbuilding completion volume reached 58.05 million deadweight tons, up 50.7% year-on-year; new vessel orders received totaled 175.29 million deadweight tons, surging 163.2% year-on-year; and as of the end of September, the hand-held order backlog stood at 399.13 million deadweight tons, up 64.8% year-on-year.
The global market shares corresponding to these three indicators were 63.6%, 81.8%, and 72.4% respectively, meaning more than 80% of global new ship orders flowed to Chinese shipyards.
"In the first half of the year, China's order intake already exceeded the total for all of last year. There is no doubt that China will maintain its global leadership position for the 17th consecutive year this year," said Li Yanqing, vice president of the China Association of the National Shipbuilding Industry, setting the tone. He noted that this year, whether in terms of the three key metrics or overall economic benefits, China will see a major leap to a historic peak.
China's Shipbuilding Ascends to the High End of the Global Value Chain
Behind the scale leadership is a profound transformation in which China's shipbuilding industry continues to deepen structural adjustment and improve quality and efficiency.
Li Yanqing analyzed that the industry showed two major characteristics in the first three quarters: first, all three key indicators rose substantially in tandem, with growth of solid quality; second, construction and delivery efficiency improved significantly, with many vessel types delivered one to two months ahead of original schedules.
Wang Peng, an associate researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, believes that the global maritime fleet has entered a concentrated replacement period, compounded by increasingly stringent international maritime decarbonization rules, driving overall global shipbuilding demand upward. Japanese and South Korean shipyards face constraints on capacity release, causing a large volume of incremental orders to shift to China. Domestic shipbuilding capacity and efficiency continue to improve, recognition of high-end vessel types keeps rising, and the combination of full industrial chain supporting capabilities and policy and financial support has jointly driven the simultaneous substantial growth of all three key indicators.
"In the first three quarters, among the three key shipbuilding indicators, new order intake saw the highest growth rate," Su Zewei, a special researcher at Suzhou Bank, told reporters. He analyzed that the surge in new orders is driven on one hand by the global fleet entering a concentrated renewal cycle, as aging vessels struggle to meet new environmental regulations and shipowners accelerate capacity replacement; on the other hand, rigid demand for bulk commodity transportation and lengthened shipping routes have created a phased capacity gap. At the same time, global maritime low-carbon regulations continue to tighten, demand for green vessels grows, and domestic shipbuilders have pre-positioned new energy vessel technology. Combined with insufficient capacity at overseas shipyards, orders continue to cluster toward domestic leading shipyards with stable delivery capabilities, jointly pushing up order growth.
From the perspective of order structure, among China's newly received orders, green low-carbon vessel types, intelligent ships, and special engineering vessels account for more than 70%, while orders for traditional high-energy-consumption aging vessel types continue to shrink, demonstrating remarkable results in the industry's green transformation. Global shipping companies, in order to comply with low-carbon emission reduction policies and reduce long-term operating costs, are increasingly choosing Chinese-built green vessels, driving sustained full order books for China's high-end ships.
Meanwhile, China's ship export markets continue to diversify. Beyond traditional European, American, and Southeast Asian markets, orders from emerging markets such as the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa continue to grow, making the market layout more balanced and risk resistance continuously stronger.
In terms of industrial clustering, shipbuilding industry clusters centered on Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong, and Liaoning, driven by central SOE leading enterprises, have formed a complete industrial ecosystem from ship design, core supporting equipment, final assembly and construction to after-sales operation and maintenance. Cluster-based development effectively integrates upstream and downstream resources, reduces industrial chain coordination costs, enhances overall competitive advantages, and continuously amplifies China's shipbuilding scale and specialization advantages.
Central SOE Leaders Break Through Key Barriers
Since the beginning of this year, the global shipbuilding market has shown a pattern of structural differentiation, with accelerated elimination of aging vessels, surging demand for green low-carbon vessel types, and continuously rising industry concentration. In the first three quarters, under the leadership and drive of central SOEs, the industry bid farewell to low-end homogeneous competition, achieving comprehensive optimization of order structure, product structure, and industrial structure, with high-value-added and high-technology-content vessels becoming the main growth drivers.
As a strategic pillar industry of China's high-end equipment manufacturing, the counter-trend rise of the shipbuilding industry is not only a direct reflection of China's comprehensive manufacturing strength, but also inseparable from the leading traction, technological breakthroughs, and market development efforts of a group of central SOEs with China State Shipbuilding Corporation at the core.
Among them, core shipyards under China Shipbuilding Industry Company Limited (ASX: CSSC), including Jiangnan Shipyard, Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding, and Guangzhou Shipyard International, continue to win orders for globally high-end ultra-large container ships, green bulk carriers, and giant oil tankers, with high-end vessel order intake ranking first globally. The new-generation ultra-large eco-friendly container ship delivered by Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding combines low energy consumption, high load capacity, and intelligent features, with all performance indicators reaching international top levels, and has been batch-delivered to leading shipping companies in Europe and Southeast Asia. The special vessels and high-end liquid cargo ships researched and built by Jiangnan Shipyard have broken foreign technological monopolies, filled multiple domestic industry gaps, and become benchmark products in the global high-end ship market.
As of now, Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding has a hand-held order backlog of nearly 60 LNG carriers, accounting for more than 20% of global market share, with the latest delivery schedule extending to 2031. LNG carriers are known in the industry as "the jewel in the crown of the shipbuilding industry," and their containment systems, cryogenic materials, and dual-fuel power systems have long been barriers held by a small number of Japanese and Korean shipbuilders. Chinese shipbuilders going from "able to build" to "able to build in batches and deliver ahead of schedule" means the maturity of high-end production capacity has crossed a critical threshold.
Product structure upgrading is also reflected at the CSSC Longxue base. In the first three quarters, Guangzhou Shipyard International and Huangpu Wenchong Shipbuilding together delivered 69 vessels. Among the 45 vessels delivered by Huangpu Wenchong, multiple LPG carriers were successfully delivered, marking the shipbuilder's formal entry into the stage of large-scale construction of high-end gas carriers; its independently developed "Honghu" series feeder container ships have accumulated a hand-held order backlog of 84 vessels, achieving full-process independent control from design to production. Guangzhou Shipyard International, meanwhile, is accelerating its positioning in the car carrier segment, signing contracts in September jointly with China Shipbuilding Trading Co., Ltd. for 10 8,200-vehicle LNG dual-fuel powered car carriers, with a total value exceeding US$1 billion, expected to be delivered between 2029 and 2031.
Additionally, in the field of intelligent shipbuilding, central SOEs continue to advance smart manufacturing upgrades, building digital shipbuilding production lines and achieving full-process digital control of ship design, production, assembly, and inspection, significantly shortening shipbuilding cycles, reducing manufacturing costs, and improving ship precision. Through intelligent transformation, the shipbuilding efficiency and yield rates of China's mainstream shipyards remain at the forefront globally, further amplifying scale manufacturing advantages and providing solid capacity support for continuously undertaking massive global orders.
At the same time, central SOEs continue to tackle the localization of core ship supporting equipment, focusing on bottleneck areas such as marine engines, high-end control systems, and ship electronic equipment, continuously increasing research and development investment, and driving a substantial increase in the autonomous controllability rate of core marine supporting equipment. Currently, the localization rate of supporting equipment for China's mainstream vessel types has exceeded 90%, completely breaking free from dependence on foreign core equipment and building an autonomous, controllable, safe, and efficient shipbuilding industry chain and supply chain, laying a solid foundation for high-quality industrial development.
Cao Bo, director of the Statistics and Information Department of the China Association of the National Shipbuilding Industry, recently stated that the world's new shipbuilding market is currently in a golden period of development exceeding expectations. However, it should be noted that demand-side indices are almost all at their peaks, and future uncertainties are increasing; stably maintaining a high level is itself a positive. He suggested paying attention to the price and quality of orders, as the saying goes, "even in the best market there are bad orders, and even in the worst market there are good orders." On the supply side, efforts should focus on becoming bigger and stronger; on the demand side, expanding capacity and improving quality, with car carriers, offshore energy development, marine tourism, and marine ranching all being important scenarios.
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