The shipping company Wan Hai from Taiwan has added six new ships of 6,000 TEU each to its order book. They will be deployed on Asian routes from 2030.
The Taiwanese liner shipping company Wan Hai is expanding its fleet with six newbuildings. The contract, which has been awarded to the shipyard CSSC Huangpu Wenchong Shipbuilding in China, is worth at least $450 million.
As Wan Hai announced in a stock exchange release, the six ships will each have a capacity of 6,000 TEU and will be deployed on regional services in Asia. The price per ship is between $75.2 million and $82 million, meaning that the total value of the order will be at least $450 million and $492 million.
Wan Hai has chosen LNG as its fuel, continuing a trend that has been apparent for some time. While the shipping company initially opted for methanol as an alternative fuel, it is now increasingly tending towards LNG. Originally, all 32 ships that have been added to the order book in the last 18 months were intended for operation with methanol in dual-fuel propulsion systems. However, Wan Hai has entered into renegotiations with the shipyards to switch to LNG. The reason given by the shipping company is that there may not be enough methanol available.
Wan Hai is currently the eleventh largest liner shipping company in the world. Around 120 ships are in service worldwide, with a capacity of almost 580,000 TEU. The closest competitor in the market is the Israeli shipping company Zim with around 700,000 TEU. Compared to the current fleet size, Wan Hai’s order book is remarkable: a further 38 ships with a total capacity of 390,000 TEU are currently under construction. In August, the shipping company completed a series of 13,000 TEU newbuildings ordered from Samsung Heavy Industries in South Korea with the delivery of the “Wan Hai A20”.
