This is a summary of an opinion article by an outside author. The views are the author’s, not Maritime News BD’s.
The argument
In The Business Standard on 26 December 2025, Captain Sayeed M Hassan, a retired Bangladesh Navy officer and adjunct faculty at Bangladesh Maritime University, argues that as the Bangladesh Shipping Corporation (BSC) resumes buying ships, the question is how to buy them so that demand builds domestic capacity. Buying finished ships abroad, he writes, creates jobs and industrial activity overseas and keeps Bangladesh dependent on foreign yards.
The figures he cites
BSC’s MV Banglar Progoti, a 63,000 DWT bulk carrier bought at delivery stage from China’s Nanyang yard, began commercial operation on 27 October 2025, paid for with $76.69 million (Tk934 crore) of BSC’s own funds. BSC plans roughly one ship a year and five more by 2030, while private owners have acquired more than 60 seagoing ships since 2018. Citing UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport 2025, he notes that China, South Korea and Japan hold 95.15 per cent of global shipbuilding, and that local yards can build vessels of up to about 10,000 DWT.
His proposal
Pointing to how China, South Korea and Japan moved from importing ships to building them, he argues that steady demand from BSC and private owners justifies a larger, deep-draft shipyard, ideally through joint ventures with foreign builders that include technology transfer. Without such policy choices, he writes, fleet expansion remains “only a sourcing exercise”.
Sources
- The Business Standard (opinion): “Leveraging fleet expansion to build national shipbuilding capacity” (26 December 2025)
File photo: a bulk carrier at sea (not a BSC vessel). Photo: Calistemon / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This article was prepared by Maritime News BD from the report(s) and documents listed above; it was not independently reported by Maritime News BD.
