Portugal and Turkey yards ink ship repair contracts at Posidonia 2016

Business is good for regional ship repairs at this year’s Posidonia with shipyards in Turkey and Portugal among those which will go home with contracts in their briefcases signed during the show, Posidonia news release said.

“We concluded three major deals during the first two days of Posidonia. Of those, two are repair projects for a tanker and a bulk carrier and the third is a rather significant conversion project for a ropax type vessel belonging to an Italian owner,”said Nedime Ozoglu, of Besiktas Shipyard.

“Posidonia is very fruitful for us and the biggest event we participate in. Greek shipowners constitute 80% of our portfolio because of the proximity mainly and because Turkey’s shipbuilding industry has significantly improved its talent pool and expertise recently,”she said.“In 2015 we repaired many Greek vessels, we give priority to the Greek market and we are competitive in our pricing and the quality we are offering.”

Portugal’s Lisnave and Turkey’s Gemak, have also inked repair deals. Alex Scaramangas of Resolute Marine Services, the exclusive representative of the two yards in Greece, said:“We have managed to conclude a few business deals during this week mainly routine mainstream repair projects of various sizes. This is great, given the current market’s prevailing conditions with a weak freight market and China’s perennial dominance in the bulk carrier sector.”

As far as the outlook and future prospects, Scaramangas believes the sector will improve.“A lot of dry docking repairs were brought forward in 2015 in order to avoid implementation of the BWT system so, subsequently, we were left with a bit of a vacuum in the first half of 2016. We remain optimistic, however, shipping is a cyclical industry and on the bulker market, specifically, the consensus is that there will be some improvement.”

This view is shared by Ozoglu who believes 2016 will be a better than expected year for the ship repair sector in Turkey.“In 2015 we repaired many Greek vessels, but January 1st, 2016 we suddenly saw the market is going down and repair activity stopped because of the developments regarding the BWT regulation.

The vessels got the extension and so everyone is now waiting. Many customers we have spoken with this week share the opinion the market is improving marginally. While 2016 as a whole will not be better than last year, it will be better than expected,” she added.

“Lisnave provides excellentservice with capacity to accommodate six vesselssimultaneously on dry dock, but we cannot compare European shipyards with China, not even Turkey, which is more competitive in terms of price,”added Scaramangas, whose company is also the representative of smallership yardsin Senegal, which can accommodate panama size vessels, Bahrain and one more Portuguese yard on the banks of Tagus River.

More than 200 shipbuilding and repair businesses are spread around the exhibition, once again driven by the major shipbuilding nations China, Japan and South Korea.