MHI, Chengxi Shipyard Collaborate for BWTS Retrofittings

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) and Chengxi Shipyard (Xinrong) Co., Ltd. in China have agreed to collaborate in the ship repair business through installation of ballast water treatment systems (BWTS). The two companies signed the agreement on April 26.

Based on the new agreement, the two companies will closely collaborate throughout the BWTS retrofitting process: from BWTS marketing, system selection and design to actual installation work with customer needs. MHI is to provide the drawings necessary for undertaking retrofitting work of BWTS. It will also dispatch supervisors to the site in China when necessary and conduct training in Japan for engineers of the Chinese shipyard at its Yokohama Dockyard & Machinery Works, where MHI performs ship retrofitting, maintenance and repair work. The talks toward collaboration were conducted with the cooperative assistance of Mitsui & Co., Ltd.

MHI said that going forward, when an order is received calling for retrofitting of BWTS on multiple ships of the same type, engineers from Chengxi Shipyard (Xinrong) will participate in work on the first ship at MHI's Yokohama plant, in order to acquire the necessary know-how. Subsequent work on the other ships will then be undertaken primarily at the Chinese shipyard. This arrangement will enable work to be performed on more ships in a short period at lower cost.

Chengxi Shipyard Co., Ltd is a subsidiary company of China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), one of China's two largest state-owned shipbuilding-related groups. Its main office and plant are located in Jiangyin and Jingjiang, Jiangsu Province, along the Yangtze River.

Full implementation of a new convention on ballast water management (BWM) is slated to begin in 2017, at which time both new and existing ships will be required to install a system to purify ballast water prior to its discharge from the ship.

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