China's top shipbuilders are all over US golf courses, in ways you might not imagine, but they may be spending too little time in its courtrooms.

For almost three years, China Shipbuilding Industry Corp (CSIC) has been vulnerable to a $26m default judgment in favour of a US sports equipment dealer, after CSIC failed to show up to defend itself in a California court.

Now a Florida court is being asked to certify the long-standing California judgment. This would allow CSIC adversary Los Angeles-based Folex Golf Industries to pursue CSIC assets in the Southern District of Florida federal court jurisdiction, including in Miami and other ports.

Folex, owned by Los Angeleno Chris Fu (Fu Qingyu), has no ships on order. Nor is CSIC necessarily the first name that comes up when golfers meet.

But the Chinese state-owned company is also the world's largest manufacturer of "raw casting titanium steel golf club heads".

CSIC owns a vast network of laboratories devising innovations for shipbuilding technology. Other product lines from its Luoyang Ship Material Research Institute (LSMRI), based in inland Henan province, include medical equipment, armaments, wind turbine blades, bridge bearings and sporting goods.

Since 2009, LSMRI has been turning out about 150 million golf club heads per year.

The legal dispute goes back 20 years, due to a three-way deal that enabled LSMRI as a central state-owned company to supply Taiwanese finishing company O-Ta Precision Industry. The golf club heads were shipped from China to Taiwan, but the orders and the money took an indirect route. O-Ta ordered through distributor Folex, which then remitted the money to China after taking a commission of up to 10% in some cases.

Folex claims it was cut out of an exclusive distribution deal when from 2005 O-Ta ordered directly from LSMRI. Litigation ensued, but CSIC failed to attend the US court case, and in October 2015 a California judge handed Folex its $26m judgment by default.

Meanwhile, a Chinese court had given CSIC a default judgment of declaratory relief, voiding the contract with the US company. However, the two countries do not typically recognise each other's court judgments.

But now that the California judgment has been recognised in Florida, Folex's lawyers could go after CSIC's four LR2 product tankers that subsidiary CSIC Leasing bought from Eletson last year in a debut third-party sale-and-leaseback deal.