Emanuele Grimaldi is in a hurry to take delivery of his newest series of high-spec ro-ros.
The Italian shipowner is offering Nanjing Jinling Shipyard $10,000 per day for early delivery of all 12 hybrid fuel ro-ros for the Mediterranean and Baltic trades.
The ro-ro giant disclosed in April that it had placed an order for six firm 64,000-gt, 7,800-lane-metre ships to be delivered in 2020.
Later that month, Grimaldi doubled the order by exercising options to be delivered in 2021, bringing the series to a total value of about $800m.
If each of these ships in the series earns eight or nine days of Grimaldi’s early delivery bonus, that would be worth one-eighth of a percent of the contract value, or $1m extra.
On Watch hopes that would translate into a tidy bonus for some project managers at the Chinese state-owned yard.
But the shipbuilder is probably not counting its money just yet.
'Best ever built'
Emanuele Grimaldi recently confided that these vessels are “the best ships ever built — for ro-ros”, and they are hardly off-the-shelf units.
In addition to their generous cargo capacity, the ships are engineered with hybrid fuel propulsion technology as well as other economical and environmental features to form what the shipowner calls his “Grimaldi Green 5th Generation” ships.
Nanjing Jinling, part of Sinotrans & CSC Jinling Shipyard, and in turn part of the state-owned shipping and finance conglomerate China Merchants Group, is best known as China’s biggest and first ro-ro builder.
Grimaldi has a separate series of car carriers on order at privately owned Yangfan Group’s Zhejiang East Coast Shipbuilding and has recently been in talks for another series at Xiamen Shipbuilding.
