By Tan Song Wang Xi

Since the twenty-first century, the global shipbuilding has shown a pattern of competition between the three hegemons of China, Japan and South Korea. Europe has withdrawn from the main ship type construction, but in recent years, it has returned to the market because of luxury cruises. The competition among the shipbuilding countries is actually the competition among shipbuilding groups belonging to these countries.

At present, China shipbuilding group mainly includes CSSC, CSIC, COSCO heavy shipping industry, Yangzi River shipbuilding industry and other shipbuilding groups. In terms of CGT, the handheld orders of the four shipbuilding groups respectively account for 33%, 14%,7%, 14% of the domestic handheld orders at the beginning of 2018. In terms of DWT, the four groups accounted for 28%, 22%, 7% and 17% respectively. Compared with the distribution of handheld orders among these groups in early 2017, the concentration level in early 2018 is obviously higher, which shows that the pattern of domestic shipbuilding industry is undergoing important changes to a certain extent, and the concentration of China's shipbuilding industry is gradually increasing.

Although there is a big gap between the shipbuilding capacity in Japan and that in China and South Korea,due to the large amount of orders received as the result of the depreciation of the yen in 2015, Japan became the country with the most booming shipbuilding industrywith sufficient handheld orders for the last two years.In terms of CGT, the handheld orders of the four domestic shipyards at the beginning of 2018 were 5.16 million CGT, 2.47 million CGT, 1.16 million CGT and 0.560 million CGT respectively, which accounted for 31.8%, 15.2%, 7.2% and 3.4% of the Japanese domestic shipyards' handheld orders in the year.

The shipbuilding industry in South Korea has been battered by the downturn of global shipbuilding industry especially the marine offshore industry. As South Korean shipbuilding enterprises sell assets, shutdown facilities,reduce production capacity and receive government assistance, the pro fi ts of Korean shipbuilding enterprises in 2017 are gradually improving, but their comprehensive strength is still in the world's leading position. In terms of CGT, the domestic shipyards of the three shipbuilding groups handheld orders were 6.54 million CGT, 5 million CGT and 2.84 million CGT respectively at the beginning of 2018, accounting for 42.6%, 32.6% and 18.5% of the handheld orders of the domestic shipyards.

Shipbuilding enterprises in Europe mainly focus on the high technical ships such as luxury cruise ships, passenger ships and special ships. In recent years, the boom of luxury cruise orders has brought the whole shipbuilding industry in Europe back to recovery obviously. The construction of luxury cruise ships is mainly concentrated in Germany, France, Finland and Italy. Because of Finn Cantini’s acquisition of STX France and Maier Neptune’s acquisition of Finland Turku shipyard, the competition pattern of European cruise ship construction has shifted from competition between “four powers” to that between“two hegemons”, and the market concentration of cruise ship construction was further enhanced. The handheld orders of the Italy Finn Cantini and Maier group in German accounted for 45.5% and 27% respectively (CGT).