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Kaohsiung — top ship business centre
HONG KONG: On the south west corner of Taiwan there lies the port-town of Kaohsiung. For many years ft was probably the noisiest place on earth. But In recent times it has gone silent, much to the dismay of two of the world's leading industries.
Kaohsiung was not a busy or a rich place in the 1950s, in . the wake of the Second World War and the Communist conquest on , the Chinese mainland. But over the next 20 years the harbour was extended to become Taiwan's biggest port.'
Steel, and chemical works were erected, and a high-tech container-handling facility was built to rival Asia's other bustling ports — Hong Kong, Singapore and Kobe.
Most curious of all, how ever, was the little group of family concerns that resolved to go Into the ship business. No. not building ships, because the families did not have the capital to build giant shipyards.
They scrap ships. Their business requires only a
stretch of beach to tic up the rusting bulks of superannuated vessels, some pontoons, to float Ihc crews about — and an army of tough men with tools lo burn, cut and the vessels lo bits.
In Ihe 1970s. a large number of very old ships had finally to bp taken off the cargo lanes. They were the famous wartime Liberty ships, together with many other specialised craft, such as the smaller tankers.
They had served the world well, but were now being superseded. Swift new freighters with improved diesel engines, and the new supertankers, were flowing out of the brand-new years of Japan. Spain. Korea and Brazil.
The Kaohsiung families offered cash on the nail for the old fleet, and somehow or other no other nation seemed to want to take up such a noisy dirty industry. So for 15 years Taiwanese beaches became the last call for thousands of ships.
Fleet owners would sail the vessels to a number of shel-
tered waters around Southeast Asia. Two areas became full’of them — the waters between Singapore and Malaysia and those around the north of Lantao Island In Hong Kong. Whole regiments of ships lay in long lines, with only skeleton crews aboard, awaiting the call from Kaohsiung.
Eventually they would be painfully sailed or towed to their last beach. In ragged plates' and chunks, their hulls and superstructures would feed the nearby steel mills, and the newly-made steel would then feed the shipyards. Thus the Liberty ships would be born again — as anything from police launches to supertankers.
But in the mid,-1980s all the activity began winding down. The second steep rise In the oil price had shocked world trade. Sales of all raw materials began to level off and then fall. World trade hesitated.
Shipowners competed hard for- shrinking cargoes, driving down the freight rates.
Ironically, this kept many older ships from being scrapped because owners figured that their written-down value was so low that they were "cheap to run." It was many newer and bigger ships that were laid up to await better trading times.
Thus Kaohsiung's scrapyards are now very vacant (and the steelworks and shipbuilding yards are not as prosperous as they were, either).
There were signs in 1991 that perhaps trade would revive after the Gulf War was over. But 1992 seems to have dashed those hopes. By August this year, freight brokers were saying that the shipowing business was once more in a bad slump.
However, shipbuilding orders have remained remarkably high. Over the last five years there has been a jump in orders for "bulk carriers" — those vessels with large dry cargoes of grains, mineral Ores and coal. — Depthnews Asia