Market potential for local ship builders

Transportation between countries essential:

Anuradha KODAGODA

The international trade is keep on growing day by day. The transportation between countries is essential and therefore ship building industry is playing a huge supporting role for the sustainability of the local as well as international trade.

There is a huge market potential available for local ship builders in the international market. However, the problem is whether they have identified these opportunities to expand their business internationally, said the Managing Director/CEO Colombo Dockyard PLC, Mangala P.B. Yapa.

“There are various types of ships in the market. Considering the capacity constrains, we as a country have identified the models of ships that we can build.

Colombo Dockyard has identified the market requirements and according to that we are producing many models of ships that are unique in the local as well as in the international market and also we are trying to find our own niche market segments to be globally competitive and successful,” Yapa said.

Ship building is one of the main businesses that Colombo Dockyard is engaged in and at the early stage the target was to cater for emerging local requirements such as Sri Lanka Navy and Port Authorities’ requirements.

As at today, we have built many vessels such as 14 meter petrol boats, 20 meter petrol boats, landing crafts, 40 meter off-shore petrol vessel and it was the first Sri Lankan company to built 40 meters off-shore petrol vessel.

All these vessels are built by the Colombo Dockyard according to our unique designs,” Yapa said.

Apart from that we are doing a number of maintenance in the ship industry. However, we have been able to bring the cost down and play a vital role in the shipbuilding and maintenance industry, Yapa added.

“The challenges we see in the industry is the ship building industry is not growing within the country very fast. Even though we are having the capacity and the potential to grow, it is always a limiting factor since the markets are growing very slowly, Yapa said.

We have successfully stepped into the Indian, Maldives and Singapore markets and also our boats are operating in Africa, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps we will consolidate our boards further in these markets.

We still have not planning to expand our business in European market since sill there is an economic down turn and this is not the time to expand the business in instability markets.

“The current economic down turn has a clear adverse impact on any sea-going trade. However, by positioning the companies strategically in the market, we still can survive profitably.

Our capacity is full up to next 2011 and the current economic crisis is not thrashing our budgets unconditionally.

Our success during this recession is our flexibility such as changing the ship building into ship repair and adjusting according to the market conditions,” he said.