Fujian Shipyards’ Professional Teams Contribute to Better Competitiveness

Gao Xinru

Shipyards are overwhelmed with difficulty in receiving order, destocking,cutting cost and sustaining production.Nevertheless, some shipyards keep receiving newbuilding orders and tell stories of destocking, cost control efforts pay off and production steadily advances.The secrete lies in the possession of trained technical teams, whose professional strength is given full play to.

Pioneer in Taking Orders

Newbuilding market is a typical buyer’s market as it has all of its characteristics including one -- marine products should be not only tailormade in line with the shipowner’s requirements, but also in compliance with international technical requirements. This requires shipyards to possess a trained technically competent technical team,able to participate in intent talk with the ship owner and provide design scheme at any time to meet the shipowner’s requirements for a series of key technical issues such as ship performance,equipment configuration, ship form scale, navigation speed, applicable sea area, crew manning, living facilities,environmental protection requirements,endurance, loading weight, navigation and communication, satellite positioning, etc.Thus, they may obtain the shipowner’s trust and recognition with consummate technical solutions, perfect technical design, selected technical configuration,brilliant technical presentation, and exquisite technical process.

If the shipowner is unaware of a particular highly professional technology,the technical team is obliged to give detailed or focal explanations. The deeper and more thorough explanation,the more feeling the shipowner has for the shipyard’s strength, the larger cooperation success probability.

W h e n F u j i a n S o u t h e a s t Shipbuilding Co Ltd talked with the shipowner on a newbuilding project, the design department completed production design of 10000 dwt and 12000 dwt oil product tankers and 20500 dwt bulk carrier in a very short time period, won full recognition of the shipowner, thus carried out cooperation, received an order of five 20500 dwt bulk carriers alone. By giving full play to technical team’s advantages,the company took orders of 21 new ships in 2017, contractual value hit RMB1.01 billion; as of the end of 2017, the company held 710-ship orders at hand and contractual value hit RMB7.18 billion.

Xiamen Shipbuilding Industry Co Ltd relied on its technical team to open a new chapter of building cruisers in the Fujian shipbuilding industry. The company launched the luxury cruiser project in 2013,completed the conceptual design scheme of 59300t cruiser in 2014 and 70000t cruiser was identified as the priority cruiser target of the shipyard in 2015. Through years’unremitting effort of the technical team,Xiamen Shipbuilding Industry has now started to build a 2800-passenger ro-ro luxury cruiser.

Hard Core for Destocking

Due to depressed market of international offshore engineering auxiliary ships in recent years, ship prices kept low, and a rather considerable number of offshore engineering auxiliary ships were stuck on the dock or platform of the ship manufacturer. Ship delivery difficulty has perplexed shipyards, affecting working capital. It remains an urgent task how offshore engineering auxiliary ships can carry out destocking.

The experience that some Fujian shipyards relied on their respective technical team in destocking is worth learning from. Fujian Funing Shipbuilding Co Ltd relied on its technical team to make remarkable achievements in offshore engineering auxiliary ship destocking. According to an executive there, the company experienced unprecedented difficulty in 2017, capital chain problems on the part of the original overseas shipowner caused dissolution of the contract in the course of the offshore engineering auxiliary ship construction.Later, the company managed to find a new shipowner, who requested technical retrofitting for many items in the original design, which involved technical design,construction drawings, process flow,equipment ordering, shipment, hoisting,route strike, painting, furnishing, testing,inspection among other technical difficulties, even more difficult than newbuilding.

Not only so, the new shipowner requested delivery in a very short time period. At this critical moment of pressing time, heavy task, many difficulties and huge pressure, the technical team showed its muscles. The company chairman led the technical team to meet with the shipowner from morning to 4:00 am of the next day, finalizing all technical issues. The team subsequently looked for information, prepared solutions, plotted drawings, identified process, surveying in the machine room. Reconstruction or retrofitting items reached above 1000 for one offshore engineering auxiliary ship, and testing and trial trip would last days. The technical team did make a contribution to overcoming difficulties.

Statistics show Fujian Funing Shipbuilding and its parent company Southeast Shipbuilding made concerted effort and realized destocking of five offshore engineering auxiliary ships in 2017. On this basis, the two manufacturers continued to give full play to strength of the technical teams, so that 12 offshore engineering auxiliary ships achieved destocking in that year.

Core Support for Improved Competitiveness

Amidst the fiercer market competition, ship manufacturers must propel brand strategy and set up a good corporate image. Building brands depends on technical team to improve corporate R&D capability and technical competency. When the enterprise encounters a survival crisis, the technical team always boosts corporate transformation and product upgrading through unremitting effort, thus sharpening corporate core competitiveness. There are several such manufacturers in the Fujian shipbuilding industry. Today, they are inclined to increase newbuilding orders and stable production, with better prospects.

By relying on the technical team, Fujian Mawei Shipbuilding Co ltd achieved good results in better productivity and lower cost. The company technical team applied 3D simulation technologies -- half ship floating technology, new technology for simultaneous construction of two ships and two half ships, etc., making up for the shortcoming of insufficient hardware resources and remarkably improving productivity, and providing technical and hardware support for strengthening order-taking capability.

In this regard, Fujian Southeast Shipbuilding gave full play to strength of the technical team, stepped up technical innovation, obtained invention patent certificates issued by the State Intellectual Property Office on “Installation structure of propelling device and installation method thereof” and “Stern drum installation technology” as well as 12 utility model patents, not only improving productivity, but also further enhancing its comprehensive strength.

Fujian Hengshen Shipbuilding Co Ltd gave full play to ability and cleverness of the technical team, who renovated traditional process, created fishing vessel launching method, changed traditional launching method into the method of “l(fā)arge platform trailer + large crane”, by which fishing vessel was hoisted from the building slip onto the large platform trailer, which carried it to the wharf, then the large crane hoisted the fishing vessel onto the water surface, thus completing the launching process. Through technical innovation, the company sped up launching 1-2 fishing vessels in one day to 25 in 2 days, substantially improving productivity and creating conditions for smooth delivery.★