Hengli Heavy Industries Emerges as a Winner of China's Shipbuilding Boom
China's state-owned shipyards are a dominant force in the shipbuilding industry, but their full orderbooks are creating opportunities for privately-held competitors as well - notably Hengli Heavy Industries, which in a few short years has expanded to become the world's largest single shipyard (by order backlog).
In its latest quarterly report, released August 24, Hengli Heavy said that it received 207 vessel orders in the first half of the year - a new all-time global record for a single yard. (State-owned goliath CSSC remains the world's largest shipbuilder overall, but its operations are distributed across China.) For reference, this is nearly twice the number of orders it received in all of 2025. Current backlog stands at about 380 ships through 2030, and production is running at about seven ships a month.
Three-quarters the orders were for tankers and boxships, reflecting demand patterns and the yard's stock in trade - batch series builds and on-spec construction.
Looking ahead, its managers are investing heavily in infrastructure and workforce, hoping to increase throughput and make room for more slots in the years ahead. Its recruitment objective is to hire another 100,000 people by the end of 2026 - about the payroll size of the entire U.S. shipbuilding sector - on top of the 110,000 people it already employs, according to eWorldShip.
The shipbuilding boom has been kind to Hengli, which only restarted operations a few years ago. Revenue rose 250 percent in the first half, and net profit rose by 450 percent to reach about $540 million.
Hengli Heavy's roots trace back to the last shipbuilding boom, two decades ago. Founded in 2006 by Korean conglomerate STX as STX Dalian, it saw considerable success in the boom years but the downturn of the 2010s put it in bankruptcy by 2015. It sat idle until 2022 when it was bought by the giant conglomerate Hengli Group. Under Hengli's ownership it relaunched in 2023, one of many Chinese private yards to reboot amidst an ordering boom.
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Hengli Group took the shipyard unit public in 2024-25 in a SPAC-style transaction by selling it to a Shanghai-listed subsidiary, Guangdong Songfa Ceramics Co. Ltd., a small-cap consumer tableware company. Hengli Heavy Industry's stock trades under Songfa's name.
