Sri Lanka eyes slice of global boat & ship building market

• Local companies seek JVs with leading foreign firms 

Sri Lanka is seeking to scale up its boat and ship building industry, a heavy duty industry which requires a lot of engineering know-how, expertise and technology, as the country is talking with several leading foreign companies to forge partnerships or joint ventures.

To this end, Sri Lanka conducted a business meeting between Sri Lankan boat building companies and a boat building company in Denmark, followed by additional meetings with companies in different markets to actively explore the possibility of embarking on a collaborating business arrangement to scale up this highly potential industry. 

Meanwhile, there is an ongoing discussion to form a joint venture between a Turkish ship builder and a reputed Sri Lankan ship building company in the near future, the Export Development Board (EDB) said without naming the company. 

Further, proposals from Sri Lankan companies were also shared with an Omani party to explore suitable collaboration in the boat-building sector. 

Since the new government came into power in November 2019, they laid out their intentions clearly to change the country’s industrial policy by building new industries and re-building the abandoned ones with the aims of creating jobs for the country’s youth, generating foreign exchange via exports and attracting foreign direct investment.

The process gathered further momentum since the pandemic as countries around the world began to re-think their supply chain models. 

Central Bank Governor Prof. W.D. Lakshman recently said the country would revisit the neoliberal order espoused forty years ago, as it desperately failed to bring the envisaged economic prosperity.

Export earnings from boat building registered a quick turnaround in November with US$ 0.13 million, logging 225 percent increase over the same month last year, but the earnings for the eleven months were down 97 percent to US$ 2.16 million compared to US$ 65.28 million in the same period in 2019, EDB 
data showed.