The Chinese shipping company Cosco have placed an order for four asphalt tankers.
The 9,000-ton special ships will be built by Mawei Shipyard, a subsidiary of Fujian Shipbuilding. The four ships were ordered via the Hong Kong-based subsidiary Cosco Shipping Investment Development and will be used to transport liquid asphalt and other cargoes in the future.
Cosco is paying US$24.5m per ship
The total investment amounts to around US$98m, so the price for a single ship will be US$24.5m, as Splash reported. The tankers are scheduled for delivery between October 2025 and August 2026.
According to the Chinese state shipping company, increasingly stringent restrictions on CO2 emissions have pushed asphalt tankers built before 2005 out of the core market. At the same time, the “younger fleet” is still very small. There are currently only 21 ships in the 7,000 to 9,000 ton range that are less than ten years old – they only make up 7% of the total.
Cosco plans to build up the asphalt tanker fleet with volumes of 7,500, 9,000 and 13,000 tons in order to develop future competitiveness on the market.
