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Damen: the outlook for shipbuilding in 2020

Michiel Hendrix, Sales Manager – Asia Pacific for Damen, talks to Seatrade Maritime at Marintec China 2019 about the outlook for the shipbuilding and shipyard business in the coming year.

In this interview, Michiel Hendrix, who responsible for Damen commercials activities in Asia Pacific, explains about the Dutch shipbuilder’s extensive presence in Asia and reasons for exhibiting at Marintec China.

SM: Why does Damen exhibit at Marintec China?

MH: Marintec is important to Damen for two reasons. First of all, we have two shipyards in China. So we would like to give them the platform to expose themselves. And second to that, I think it's the one and only biggest shipbuilding fair in China and therefore, it's important for us to be here to show ourselves.

Although we have shipyards in China, the domestic market for us is mainly based on the partnership and local cooperation. So we are selling equipment, we are selling designs to local shipyards, and they build Damen vessels. Besides that, we also have a component division called Damen Marine Components and they are building equipment for ships and that can also be larger vessels like the big hurdles for big seagoing vessels, which they sell the complete hurdle sets to the shipyards to the local large shipbuilders in China.

SM: What trends do you predict for 2020?

MH: For 2020, we hope to have a slight recovery. 2018-2019 have not been very good years for for shipbuilding and also not for Damen. The oil price is slowly picking up and that has a positive development in the markets, renewables is still a good market so that is something we focus on. We hope that that price has also started to climb a little bit compared to previous years.

I think from Damen perspective, we are working globally so we have a geographical sales and we are active everywhere in the world, like we have a Middle East region as well. And Middle East status always say demand for for ships that we built including tugboats, pilot boats, patrol boats, dredging, so the market is quite big for us there.

Damen is active in Asia for a long time and we have shipyards in Vietnam as well. In Vietnam, we are building also a lot of ships for the local market at our own shipyard, but also at partners shipyards. We have shipbuilding in Indonesia, we have a shipyard in Singapore. So we have quite some presence in this region and and also markets including also the Pacific with  Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

SM: What are challenges and opportunities emerging?

MH: I think most important is that we get back to a profitable business and that is something you will hear from many many shipyards I think. But as long as we keep competing on low prices, then it's difficult market and it's hard to survive.

We are strong in series shipbuilding, we build ships on speculation we keep ship ships on stock. That's where we are strong and that has a certain market demand that you need. You need the volume of ships for that. So we hope that that volume comes back and that we have more opportunities with our standard vessels.

TAGS: Damen