Samsung Heavy Industries has swallowed the whole of Evergreen Marine Corp’s newbuilding order for 20 neo-panamax boxships.
Taipei-listed Evergreen said in an exchange filing that it had booked the 15,000-teu vessels at the South Korean yard for between $115m and $130m each.
SHI told the Korea Exchange that it had secured the KRW 2.81trn ($2.48bn) order. It told TradeWinds this is the largest contract it has received from any single shipowner.
The scrubber-fitted vessels are expected to be delivered between the second quarter of 2024 and June 2025.
The filing surprised market observers, as Evergreen was thought to be splitting the order between several Chinese, Japanese and South Korean yards.
Industry sources had initially suggested that Imabari Shipbuilding would take the lion’s share of the order with 10 ships. SHI would build five and the remaining five would go to Jiangnan Shipyard and Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding.
Shoei Kisen would have signed up for the 10 vessels at Imabari, its parent group, and chartered them to Evergreen on long-term contracts.
But some suggested the Chinese yards — both of them controlled by China State Shipbuilding Corp — might have offered a price too high for Evergreen’s liking.
Meanwhile, the business ties between Evergreen and Shoei have come under media scrutiny following the Suez Canal blockage.
The 20,388-teu Ever Given (built 2018), one of Shoei’s boxships on charter to Evergreen, ran aground in the Egyptian waterway on Tuesday. All traffic in the key waterway has been blocked since.
The incident might have proved to be an obstacle to further deals between the two companies — both known to be media-shy — for now.
Evergreen has also publicly stated that Shoei would be responsible for any damage to the ship’s hull, salvage operations and third-party liabilities arising from the grounding.
A good year
Looking forward, SHI said it could start to receive orders for LNG carriers from Qatar Petroleum’s massive expansion plan.
It is also bidding for Shell’s Bonga and HI projects off Nigeria while targeting tanker and containership orders.
“The market was negatively affected due to Covid-19 pandemic in 2020,” SHI said in a monthly update. “However, overall global new orders following by the recovery of world seaborne trade are positively expected to increase in 2021.”
