Italy’s Saipem has exercised its option to amend its bareboat charter deal with Norwegian rig owner Deep Value Driller for the namesake drillship.

The Milan-listed offshore engineering and construction giant has fixed the 2014-built Deep Value Driller for 365 days from July 1, and secured options to extend the drillship’s charter by an additional year within the first six months of the initial contract.

The deal will bring in between $54m and $55m to Deep Value Driller, assuming no idle time or other periods where reduced rates may apply, the Oslo-listed company said.

Saipem was granted an option to amend the bareboat charter in March, together with an option to purchase the vessel, which has now also been firmed up. If exercised within 180 days of the initial period, Saipem will pay $300m for the seventh-generation drillship plus the remaining hire, according to last month’s release.

UK consulting and engineering firm Wood has received a non-binding conditional takeover proposal from Dubai-based company Sidara.

The possible offer is for 35 pence per Wood share in cash to acquire the entire issued and to be issued share capital of Wood. Dar Al-Handasah Consultants Shair and Partners, otherwise known as Sidara, would also inject $450m into the UK company.

A tranche of $250m would be given upon approval of the offer by Wood, while the remaining $200m would be granted upon completion.

In late February, Sidara restarted talks with would regarding a takeover of the company following four failed attempts. At the time, the final offer was 230 pence per Wood share, valuing the company at around £1.58bn ($2bn).

This new offer is worth around £242m ($320m) and includes taking on Wood’s outstanding debt of approximately $1.1bn, which the company is looking to refinance.

Wood stated that, even though it is looking at a range of alternative refinancing options to provide the company with an appropriate and sustainable long-term capital structure, the possible offer represents “the better option for Wood’s shareholders, creditors, and other stakeholders”.

With that in mind, the Wood board has informed Sidara that it would recommend such an offer to shareholders if a firm offer were to come in. Sidara has confirmed that it has made “significant progress” with its due diligence on Wood and that it will “take all required, necessary or advisable steps to satisfy all antitrust and regulatory conditions to the offer”.

The conditions for the offer are the publishing of its financial results for 2024, which are currently being audited by Deloitte, legally binding agreements regarding debt modifications, final approvals and approvals from both companies’ boards.

According to Wood, the combination with Sidara would create “a leading global engineering consulting company with enhanced scale, capability, and diversification”, and for the company’s employees, this would offer opportunities across a global network of brands.

Vasi Shipping, a small Singaporean containership operator, has filed for bankruptcy.

The company, founded 13 years ago, has $19m of debt owed to creditors. Previously, it operated on intra-Asia routes on three owned ships, all of which it has sold recently to try and pay back debts.

“The gap between charter rates and freight rates remain too wide and has claimed its first casualty,” analysts at Linerlytica reported in a new report.

A creditors’ meeting has been scheduled to take place in Singapore on April 28.

The chart below created by Linerlytica highlights the containerlines most exposed on the transpacific by the ongoing trade war initiated by Donald Trump, the American president, against China, that has effectively brought most business between the two largest economies in the world to a halt.

Hede, Matson, SeaLead, TS Lines, and COSCO are most at risk from the immediate fallout, according to research by Linerlytica, who suggest between 30% and 40% of transpacific container imports are still effectively halted by the tariffs.

“The US-China standoff continues to keep container market sentiment poor with US tariff concessions far from sufficient to restore Transpacific volumes with cargo bookings in the next 3 weeks reported to be down by 30-60% in China and by 10-20% in the rest of Asia,” Linerlytica noted in its most recent weekly report.

Upcoming Labour Day holidays are likely to further dampen cargo demand in May, possibly forcing carriers to cancel additional sailings over the coming weeks in order to stop further freight rate erosion, Linerlytica suggested.

Clarksons Research data suggests that 6% of global container trade in teu is accounted for by US imports from China – the world’s two superpowers – which will now be charged at elevated tariff levels of at least 145%. A further 8% is at the 10% baseline level. 

“For the smaller niche carriers, the trade war is particularly destructive,” analysts at Sea-Intelligence warned on Sunday. “Most of them rely on large volumes from China on their services and are not well equipped to suddenly switch to alternate non-Chinese origin cargo. For some of these, we can potentially expect full-service closures for the duration of the trade war.”

Global carriers are tipped to concentrate port calls at fewer American ports in the coming months while switching some China calls to other Asian manufacturing centres. 

The trade war is beginning to show up in port numbers with China’s transport ministry reporting today that for the week April 7 to 13, container throughput at China’s ports dropped 6.1%.

State-run China Merchants has completed the acquisition of its seventh shipyard, Qingdao Yangfan Shipbuilding, in the northeast of the country.

The yard, one of China’s oldest, has been rebranded CMI Qingdao Shipyard.

The yard is best known for building large bulk carriers and containerships in its two drydocks.

The shipyard can trace its roots to 1949. It filed for bankruptcy in 2016, and was then taken over by a local Qingdao company, before China Merchants moved for it in recent months.

Shipowners left scratching their heads about the potential financial penalties they face from the new net-zero framework agreement penned at the International Maritime Organization last week have been given a solution.

Employees at Singapore’s Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD) worked overtime this past weekend to develop a free cost and compliance calculator to help contextualise the penalties and start building intuition.

Shipping is set to become the only sector in the world with the first-ever global price on carbon emissions following last week’s 83rd gathering of the Marine Environment Protection Committee at the IMO’s London headquarters.

Simply put, from 2028, shipowners who do not meet certain emission targets will have to pay a penalty, buy carbon credits or use credits purchased earlier.

While it won’t fully close the current price gap between green and fossil fuels, this first-of-its-kind regulatory framework will bring them closer in an effort to accelerate a transition to cleaner fuels.

Ships missing the IMO emission tougher target would initially have to pay $100 annually for every tonne of CO₂ emissions that exceeds this goal.

Those falling below the weaker target would have to pay up to $380 for every tonne of emissions above this level.

Ships could pay that money to the IMO or buy credits from vessels that meet both targets by running on lower-carbon fuels.

The IMO can use these revenues to compensate ships using low-carbon fuels, while investing in decarbonising the maritime sector, and addressing any negative impacts of the measures on food security.

GCMD’s new calculator is available for trial by clicking here.

Like they did belatedly during the last great shipbuilding boom, South Korea’s largest three shipbuilders are finally looking overseas for expansion.

During the shipping boom of 2003 to 2008, Korean yards expanded belatedly massively at home and overseas, only to be hit by more than a decade’s slump in the wake of global financial crisis.

Now, with their orderbooks pushing into the late 2020s, HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering (HD KSOE), Hanwha Ocean and Samsung Heavy Industries are all looking at foreign facilities to fuel expansion.

Officials from HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering, who run the Hyundai chain of yards, have been in the US recently signing agreements to help develop American yards while also expanding its Vietnam subsidiary. Most interestingly, however, has been its moves at Subic Bay in the Philippines, where the conglomerate has leased a dock from what was the old Hanjin Heavy yard there – a Korean shipbuilder that ran into difficulty a decade ago.

Cido Shipping, a Hong Kong-based, Korean owner, has just signed for four aframaxes which will be built at HD KSOE’s Philippine facility with delivery scheduled for 2028.

Four bulk carriers, ordered by Japan’s Nissen Kaiun, have also begun construction at the Subic Shipyard.

Hanwha Ocean, formerly Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME), is also looking at overseas acquisitions, recently buying a 9.9% stake in Australia’s Austal, to go alongside the acquisition last year of Philly Shipyard in the US, as well as the take over of Singapore offshore yard Dyna-Mac Holdings.

Samsung Heavy Industries, meanwhile, is syphoning off more and more work to China, both to its own block manufacturer as well as to PaxOcean, a shipyard in Zhejiang province. Samsung Heavy is also understood to be eyeing further partnerships in Southeast Asia.

Queensland’s ship design group Seatransport and Houston-based Deployable Energy are collaborating with Lloyd’s Register (LR) to develop nuclear power generation for different applications, including strategic response vessels in remote areas.

Using micro modular reactor (MMR) technology, two to five MMRs of 1MWe capacity each will power a 73 m amphibious vessel, designed for emergency response and disaster relief duties in remote areas. This will enable the vessel to operate for eight to 10 years without refuelling, and it can feed power into the shore grid of affected areas and whenever docked at port.

Last month, LR along with insurer NorthStandard and London nuclear specialist CORE POWER issued a report calling for UK action on maritime nuclear power.

“As nuclear technology advances toward maritime applications including Floating Nuclear Power Plants, global regulatory alignment is crucial. Existing frameworks must be updated to reflect modern reactor designs and operational needs. The UK has the expertise to lead these efforts at the International Maritime Organization (and with the International Atomic Energy Agency, setting the foundation for safe, insurable, and scalable nuclear-powered shipping,” commented Andy McKeran, LR’s chief commercial officer.

The stats surrounding the steep learning curve the US faces if it wants to claw back any market share in shipbuilding are astonishing.

Donald Trump, the American president, is taking steps to try and build back the country’s shipyards, creating a shipbuilding office in the White House, and last week signing an executive order creating a Maritime Security Trust Fund to provide sustainable funding for initiatives that strengthen US maritime capabilities. This includes using funds from tariffs, fines, fees, or tax revenues with Trump also expected to rule on penalising Chinese-built tonnage calling at US ports soon.

“We’re way, way, way behind,” Trump said last week, speaking in the Oval Office. “We used to build a ship a day, and now we don’t do a ship a year, practically, and we have the capacity to do it.”

Overseas shipbuilding firms, notably from South Korea, are busy investing in American infrastructure in recent months.

The US accounts for less than 1% of global ship output. Putting the scale of how far behind American shipbuilding is to its Asian rival, China manufactured more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than US shipyards have built since the end of World War II.

Labour force-wise, Americans long ago ditched shipyards as a career, as data from Greek broker Ursa shows (see chart below).

During the 1950s and 1960s, roughly 1 in every 400 non-farm workers in the US was employed in shipbuilding. Today, it is around one in every 1,000.

Global Times, a state-run Chinese newspaper, lambasted the American plans last month in an OpEd, arguing: “The chasm between American and Chinese shipbuilding is fundamentally a gap in industrial infrastructure. The forces of globalization swept away America’s steel mills, machine shops and skilled labor force, leaving behind rusting supply chains and a hollowed-out manufacturing base. Shipbuilding, a quintessential heavy industry, requires a robust industrial foundation. When that foundation crumbles, shipbuilding inevitably follows.”

The International Labour Organisation’s Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) has been updated, following lengthy negotiations last week in Geneva.

Under ILO’s Special Tripartite Committee on the MLC, governments, shipowners, and unions met last week to review and adopt crucial updates that reflect the evolving needs of seafarers and the maritime industry.

Among the suite of amendments agreed to improve the working and living conditions of seafarers onboard ships were provisions for seafarers to be designated as key workers; strengthened requirements to support seafarer repatriation; new mandatory measures to ensure that they have access to shore leave without needing a visa or special permit; and enhanced protections against bullying and harassment.

Helio Vicente, director of employment affairs at the International Chamber of Shipping, a shipowner lobby group, said the amendments were “potentially transformational”.

Corinne Vargha, director of the International Labour Standards Department of the ILO, commented: “At a time when the spirit of multilateralism and the added value of tripartism are called into question, the STC demonstrated that tripartite dialogue and multilateralism work can deliver effective solutions to global challenges.”

The new measures adopted are expected to be rubberstamped in Geneva, during the 113th Session of ILO’s International Labour Conference at the start of June, coming into force in December 2027.