Hengli grabs 23.4% of global newbuilding orders, jumps fifth to first

Hengli Heavy Industry has taken 23.4% of all newbuilding contracts by compensated gross tonnage across seven merchant shipping sectors between January and September — up from 9.4% for the whole of 2025 and enough to leap from fifth place globally to first in a single year.

New figures from shipbroker Banchero Costa show the Dalian-based yard booked orders for 276 ships in the first nine months, split across 117 containerships, 100 crude tankers and 39 bulk carriers. That makes it by far the world's busiest individual yard for new contracts. The gap behind it is wide: Hudong-Zhonghua took 7.1% of global contracting by cgt over the same period, with South Korea's HD Hyundai Heavy Industries third at 6.9%.

Hengli's outstanding orderbook now stands at 485 ships — 11.2% of the global book by cgt across the seven sectors, more than any other single yard. A year ago it ranked fifth with a 4.8% share.

How did a dead yard get here?

The mechanism is capacity, and a lot of money. Hengli, part of Chen Jianhua's industrial empire, bought the failed STX Dalian shipyard in 2022. Output started small: four ships delivered in 2024, 17 last year. This year it has already delivered 62 ships in nine months. Banchero Costa's schedule shows 99 ships due next year and 199 in 2028. On a cgt basis, Hengli alone is slated to account for 12.6% of all global deliveries in the seven sectors in 2028.

Splash reported earlier this year that the yard launched a RMB13.5bn ($1.9bn) expansion programme, including two 2,000-tonne gantry cranes spanning 256 m — among the largest in the world. The group is also investing heavily in building its own marine engines and other key equipment.

The commercial returns have followed. Songfa, Hengli's Shanghai-listed parent, reported yesterday that attributable net profit hit RMB6.67bn ($994m) in the first nine months of 2026, up nearly 425% year on year. Third-quarter profit alone reached RMB3.06bn, exceeding the company's entire 2025 earnings.

What does this change for owners and charterers?

For owners, the immediate effect is slot availability. A yard that controls over a fifth of global contracting by cgt changes where tonnage gets built and, potentially, at what price — Chinese capacity at this scale keeps pressure on Korean and Japanese rivals' pricing power. For charterers and operators counting on 2027-2028 deliveries to ease fleet tightness in tankers and boxships, the question flips to execution risk.

Banchero Costa calculates that 32.8% of all newbuilding contracting by cgt this year has gone to new or revived shipyards, the vast majority in China, with Hengli accounting for most of that. The broker notes Hengli's scheduled 2028 output, measured in cgt, runs at roughly three and a half times its annualised production rate for the first nine months of this year.

China's wider shipbuilding sector faces the same arithmetic. Yards are scheduled to deliver 89.1m dwt of bulk carriers and tankers in 2028, against a previous annual record of 62.6m dwt set in 2011. Banchero Costa expects some of the industry's scheduled 2027 and 2028 deliveries to slip into later years — a slippage that would feed straight back into fleet growth assumptions and, ultimately, freight rates.

The rise has not gone unnoticed in owner circles. Speaking at this week's Maritime CEO Forum in Monaco, during the Tanker Market Outlook session, Lars-Christian Svensen — who heads Bruton, Himalaya Shipping and OMC Tankers — highlighted what China's newest shipbuilding giant has achieved.

"They took the world by storm," Svensen said, adding that what the yard had delivered so far had been "excellent".

Watch the delivery schedule, not the order ticker. If Hengli hits its 199-ship target for 2028, fleet supply pressure builds fast; if it slips, expect the tight markets of the past two years to stretch out longer than the orderbook suggests.