The world’s shipyards are heading for a serious delivery bottleneck in 2027 and 2028. Orders have piled up far faster than the industry can build, according to the latest Shipping Market Review from Danish Ship Finance.
The numbers
- Orderbook growth: up about 3.5 times since 2020, while shipyard capacity has grown only around 30%
- Order cover: 3.7 years of work today, against 1.4 years in 2020
- Orderbook vs fleet: new orders equal 19% of the existing world fleet, up from 7% six years ago
- Yard utilisation: production running at 86% of capacity
- Top yards in 2028: booked at 164% of their available capacity
Separate figures from Clarksons Research earlier this week put the global orderbook at a record 226.1 million compensated gross tonnes (cgt), just above the previous peak set in September 2008. The backlog is worth roughly $700bn, and Chinese yards hold 68% of it.
Why delays look almost certain
Yards have signed more tonnage than they delivered in every year since 2021, even though output at active yards has risen 69% over that time. Looking at five years of individual ship schedules, Danish Ship Finance found that about 78% of contracted tonnage is delivered in the year planned, around one sixth slips to later years and roughly 5% is cancelled.
Even after allowing for that track record, scheduled work for 2027 and 2028 would fill 84% to 89% of global yard capacity before any late ships from earlier years are added. The financier estimates that 10 to 11 million cgt could slip each year. If 2027’s late deliveries roll over, 2028’s workload could reach about 60 million cgt, or 107% of available capacity.
What it means for shipowners
- In the VLCC, suezmax, capesize and large gas carrier segments, scrapping every ship older than 20 years would still not balance the ships on order.
- That points to pressure on the value of older ships as the new tonnage arrives.
- Clarksons is tracking about 225 shipyard expansion projects worldwide, more than three quarters of them in China, with new yards opening and idle ones being revived.
At the Maritime CEO Forum in Monaco last week, several shipowners questioned how capable some of the new yards are and warned that the flood of new ships could leave markets such as dry bulk oversupplied.
Based on reporting by Splash247, 6 November 2026.
Photo: Representative image: a shipyard in Dalian, China. Tyg728 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
