COSCO SHIPPING spends nearly RMB 10 billion to order 10 container ships

In this year's record container ship market order boom, COSCO SHIPPING, which has been silent, finally launched to order 10 new Panamax container ships at COSCO SHIPPING Heavy Industry (Yangzhou), which is also the first time that COSCO SHIPPING Heavy Industry (Yangzhou) received container ship order again after 7 years.
 
COSCO SHIPPING Holdings ordered 10 container ships worth $1.5 billion
 
On July 15, COSCO Shipping Holdings issued an announcement that the indirect wholly-owned subsidiary COSCO (Cayman) Mercury Co., Ltd. signed 10 shipbuilding agreements with COSCO SHIPPING Heavy Industry (Yangzhou) on July 15, 2021. COSCO Mercury or its designated entity has ordered 6 14,092TEU container ships and 4 16,180TEU container ships, with a total price of 1.496 billion US dollars (about RMB 9.67 billion).
 
These 10 container ships all adopt the technical solution of traditional fuel and desulfurization device. Each of the 14,092TEU container ships is priced at $146 million (about 944 million yuan) and is expected to be delivered between December 2023 and September 2024. Each 16,180TEU container ship is priced at $155 million (approximately RMB 1.02 billion) and is expected to be delivered between June 2025 and December 2025.
 
The ship payment will be paid in five phases in cash according to the construction progress of the ship. The proportion of the self owned funds in the source of the transaction shall not be less than 40%, and the rest will be external financing.
 
COSCO said the transaction is in line with the group's 14th five year plan for development, which is conducive to the group's position as the first tier of the industry and a matching capacity scale.

COSCO SHIPPING Group's first container ship order this year
 
COSCO's latest order, which COSCO has disclosed, is also the first time COSCO has ordered container ships this year.
 
According to Alphaliner, COSCO SHIPPING currently operates a fleet of 498 vessels, including 181 self-owned vessels and 317 chartered vessels, with a total capacity of 3.018,100 TEU, slightly ahead of CMA CGM and ranking third in the world with a market share of 12.2%.
 
Another factor that prompted COSCO to invest in ship ordering is its soaring performance. In the first quarter of this year, COSCO realized net profit attributable to shareholders of listed companies of RMB 15.452 billion, not only 50 times higher than the net profit of RMB 292million in the same period last year, but also exceeded the total profit of RMB 9.927 billion in 2020. On July 7, COSCO issued performance forecast, with a profit of RMB 37.793 billion in the first half of the year, an increase of 3162% year-on-year, which is equivalent to the net profit of 21.6 billion yuan in the second quarter, making more than 6 billion yuan over the first quarter.

In the first half of this year, container ships supported "half" of the new shipbuilding market. According to Clarkson's previous statistics, the order volume of new ships in the first half of the year reached 23.8 million CGT, with a total of 52 billion US dollars, the highest level since 2014, in which container ships accounted for more than half of the share, with a total of 12.7 million CGT and 25 billion US dollars.
 
Source: Sarah Yu, XINDE MARINE NEWS

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Xinde Marine News.