Domestic High-End Marine Steel Orders Booked Until 2028

In recent years, robust growth in automobile exports has driven sustained demand for high-end vessel types such as car carriers. These ships require steel with high precision and ultra-thin plates to control the center of gravity and ensure navigational stability. A steelmaker based in Nanjing forecasts that its total output of premium marine steel products in 2024—including crack-arrest steel, wide and thin plates for cruise ships, high-strength shipbuilding plates, and polar low-temperature ship plates—will exceed 2 million metric tons. Its current backlog of long-term orders is already scheduled through 2028. Buoyed by strong downstream demand, the average market price for shipbuilding plates has risen from RMB 4,100 per ton to approximately RMB 4,300 per ton. Shipbuilders commonly adopt fixed-price contracts to hedge against raw material price volatility. Despite their high consumption volumes and premium pricing, these advanced steel products continue to offer attractive profit margins. In recent years, domestic steel producers have developed multiple grades of steel tailored for various vessel types, achieving internationally leading standards in critical quality metrics such as stability, uniformity, and thickness tolerance—thereby supporting the transformation and upgrading of China’s shipbuilding industry.