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COATINGS
Owners and operators have not only had problems obtaining crews for their ships, but also getting spaces in shipyards to carry out maintenance work, including painting and hull repairs
ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE Coatings suppliers such as Nippon Paint Marine have been highlighting the the difficulties of operating in an environment where freight rates are high, workforce is limited and covid-19 restrictions are affecting capacity in shipyards, particularly in Southeast Asia. According to Nippon Paint Marine, the region’s ship repair capacity could be more than 25% down on pre-pandemic levels. “In 2019, a total of 516 vessels totalling 28m dwt drydocked at Singapore shipyards for paint jobs, but numbers dwindled to 296 ships in 2020 and 316 the following year as the world responded to the covid-19 pandemic. Similar shortfalls are forecast at repair yards across Southeast Asia,” says Bill Phua, managing director, Nippon Paint Marine (Singapore). “We expect the number of vessels drydocking in the Asia Pacific region for a new coating to be 680-800, slightly up on the previous two years but still only 6070% of the number of vessels that docked in 2019, which had a combined tonnage approaching 76m dwt.”
C L E A N S H I P P I N G INTERNATIONAL – Spring 2022
Having returned from visits to yards in Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore and the Middle East, Phua noted that strict virus safety measures and travel restrictions in place to deal with the omicron variant are impacting the availability of workers to carry out the work. “There’s still this limitation in place, restricting some yard’s achieving full capacity,” he says. High freight rates are also expected to continue to affect repair volumes, as shipowners postpone scheduled drydockings to keep vessels trading. “It does create planning problems, especially at Chinese repair yards where there are very strict quarantine protocols in place. Drydockings are taking considerably longer. We are seeing ships diverted to Vietnam, Dubai,” he explains. The increase in the number of vessels applying more fuel-efficient hull coatings, however, is expected to prove a boon for repair yards and coatings companies over coming months.
