EXECUTIVES from leading shipping companies, class societies and shipyards are alarmed by falling construction standards in the rush to meet a record demand for new ships. “Safety and quality standards are non-existent and where they should happen to exist they are being compromised all the way,” According to Mr Sarris, managing director of Enterprises Shipping & Trading in Greece, many recently- established shipbuilders simply “copy-pasted” specifications from other existing designs, sometimes combining them in ways that “make no sense.
The shipbuilding industry had been growing too fast for the past five years and too few of the new builders had been able to acquire the proper knowledge or resources. However, this lack of expertise did not stop them experimenting on demanding ships, he warned. “Some new yards go directly to some difficult projects, for example they go to chemical ships,” he said. “For those who have no knowledge nothing is difficult,” he added. At the same time, he predicted that many of the yards that had been set up in the quest for instant profits would be short-lived.
There are widely differing estimates of how many new shipbuilders have appeared. Worldyards has counted at least 60 newcomers out of 129 Chinese shipbuilders it has verified with orders, with another eight start-ups recently in South Korea. But Mr Liang cited official Chinese statistics that the number of builders in the country by the end of last year had shot up to 1,059 — and unofficially could be as many as 3,000.
Source: Lloyd's
No comments:
Post a Comment