MIIT: China's shipbuilding industry maintains global lead in 2025

China’s shipbuilding firms continued to lead the industry globally in 2025, with the three key performance indicators of vessel deliveries, new orders and order backlog accounting for 56.1%, 69%, and 66.8% of global totals respectively, according to the latest data released by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on February 1.

In 2025, Chinese builders completed vessels equivalent to 53.69 million deadweight tons (DWT), up 11.4% on year. The ministry did not give the ratio of ships for export and those delivered to domestic ship owners, however. New orders totalled 107.82 million DWT, slipping by 4.6% from 2024. By the end of last December, the