Yangzijiang Shipbuilding Very Large Container Ship Project Winds up

Wu Xiuxia

The fifth 12200TEU very large container ship “MSC CASSANDRE”,built by Jiangsu Yangzijiang Shipbuilding Group Limited for SEASPAN Company, recentl left the shipyard wharf and started its maiden voyage. So far, the five 12200TEU series very large container ships project built by Yangzijiang Shipbuilding for SEASPAN company has achieve a successful ending.

The ship has an overall length of 328.46m, a molded breadth of 48.2m,a molded depth of 27.2m, design TEU of 12200TEU, and the maximum height above the water surface is 49.8m. The project includes a total of five 12200TEU container ships built from second-hand ones.Among them, ship No.5 “MSC CASSANDRE” was transported from Zhoushan by deck barge in sections to New Yangzi Shipbuilding on May 8, 2021, and docked on December 7 of the same year, undocked on March 22 this year, unberthed for sea trial on May 16, and achieved “cloud delivery” on May 30.

At the end of February 2021,Yangzijiang Shipbuilding signed a ship acquisition agreement with Jinhai Heavy Industry Co., Ltd. Three ships will be built by New Yangzi Shipbuilding Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Yangzijiang Shipbuilding, and two by Yangzi Xinfu Shipbuilding Co., Ltd. From the towed arrival of the first semi-finished ship on April 8,2021, to the last ship leaving the shipyard on June 1, 2022, in less than one year and two months, the five very large semi-finished container ships completed the “gorgeous turn-back”, sailed out of the Yangtze River and reached the sea again.

After the launch of the project,the first batch of staff of New Yangzi Shipbuilding went to the Jiangnan Mountain Base of Jinhai Heavy Industry to carry out various towing preparation work. At that time, the Jiangnan Mountain base stopped production nearly 4 years before,the whole plant infrastructure was aging, in disrepair, no construction gas, only dilapidated and extremely limited number of lifting and transport equipment. With the strong support of various departments of New Yangzi Shipbuilding, 13 workshop and departments sent personnel to bring their own tooling and repair the existing facilities to meet the needs of safe production. Especially in the process of late ship renewal in the project,Yangzijiang Shipbuilding overcame a variety of difficulties including the towing length and the operation difficulty, extremely tight docking period, severe corrosion in inside and outside hull, huge workload of equipment inspection and repurchase,huge workload of unfinished item sort-out, huge workload of barge material gathering and distribution and classification and increasing the desulfurization tower system, improved the level of lean management by innovating the production organization structure, realizing “impossible”breakthroughs one after another,dubbed as “epic” operations.

Since 2018, the second-hand semi-finished renewed ship has become a new profit growth point for the Yangzijiang Shipbuilding main business. The company has continued the construction and successfully delivered 79,600 DWT bulk carriers and 157,000 DWT oil tankers. In 2021, Yangzijiang Shipbuilding clearly put forward the development direction of “one main business, four support and two strengthening” in its industrial positioning, among which the concept of “two strengthening”says: strengthening the expansion of semi-finished ships and secondhand ships, so as to form a new source and supplement for the main business of Yangzijiang Shipbuilding.The above five 12200TEU container ships renewal project is an important project to implement the group's“two strengthening” from the concept to the actual performance.All the ships of the project were finally completed and successfully delivered, which further verified the excellent production management ability and the technical level of large container ship construction of the Yangzijiang Shipbuilding, and laid a solid foundation for the company's subsequent business undertaking and development.