Evergreen yard shelved

Taiwan?s container liner Evergreen Marine’s parent, Evergreen Group, has shelved a plan to invest in a Chinese shipyard due to weak market conditions. Evergreen had intended to form a shipbuilding joint venture in the southern Chinese port city of Quanzhou with the local government. A spokesman for the company said that, with the change in the market, current timing is not good to diversify into shipbuilding industry and, as a result, the plan to invest in a shipyard has been shelved.

The planned shipyard reportedly would have had the capacity to build ships up to 350,000 dwt and would have been ready to start production in 2011. However, orders for new ships slowed worldwide in the past year as rising energy prices and increasing capacity put pressure on the margins of global container shipping firms. The market outlook is expected to worsen in the second half on rising costs and global economic uncertainty, analysts and industry executives say.