New Dayang Shipbuilding has celebrated its rechristening and the naming of its first ship under its new corporate identity.
And its new shareholders rather than its customers were quite literally at the forefront of the event. The second row, too, was packed with state-owned enterprise (SOE) executives and provincial and municipal Communist Party officials.
The occasion for the formal reopening ceremony was the naming of New Dayang's first ship, Avic International Leasing's 63,300-dwt Aries Confidence (built 2018), along with a letter of intent for a series of bulkers for China Development Bank Financial Leasing (CDB FL), which TradeWinds reported last week.
But the focus was not so much on shipbuilding transactions with the two state-owned customers as the official rebirth as an SOE out of the assets of bankrupt former Sinopacific Shipbuilding yard.
Shipowners Avic and CDB FL and prospective financier Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim Bank) came in the third row, while charterers and newbuilding brokers were harder to find at the celebratory event, which was billed as a press conference.
The festivities took place far from the riverfront at the municipal conference centre in Yangzhou. A visit to New Dayang itself was a brief one, which did not include a boarding of the ship being named.
Avic's series of eight ultramaxes at New Dayang comprises four complete newbuildings and four ships that were already within months of completion when the contract was signed.
The Aries Confidence and sistership Taurus Confidence are being handed over from newbuilding supervisor Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement to a new technical management crew from Fleet Management and await final outfitting and sea trials. They are to be followed by two ships originally named the Oceania Graeca and Europa Graeca before they were cancelled by Greece's Angelakos.
Reports have connected Cargill to the whole Avic series as charterer, but TradeWinds understands only the first two ships are under charter.
In the past two decades, the shipyard has passed from public ownership through to bankruptcy, a long run as a major bulker builder under private ownership, another bankruptcy, and now back into the supporting hands of government-controlled shareholders.
Unlike most major Yangtze River shipyards, New Dayang has a spacious location out of the way of the busy river's shipping lanes. It is on an oxbow lake on the north bank, created when the river changed its course to the south.
Until 2003, the site was home to local government-owned Jiangyang Shipbuilding, which Simon Liang Xiaolei's Sinopacific Shipbuilding took over and turned into a high-volume builder specialising in supramax and ultramax vessels, sharing some contracts with offshore specialist sister yard Zhejiang Shipbuilding.
Following the yard's slow-motion financial collapse, which began in 2015 before a formal bankruptcy filing in 2016, Chinese courts only recently approved a deal that put New Dayang in the hands of Sumec Marine and other state and local government-owned companies.
Sumec Marine is a subsidiary of one of China's central SOEs, Beijing-based China National Machinery Industry Corp (Sinomach), a former Dayang Shipbuilding creditor.
