Market Size

The main market for the Project will be the offshore support vessels plying their trade in the South China Sea, ships that call at Kuantan Port, naval ships based at the Kuantan Naval Based, and other vessels/ships owned by other government departments. The Project mainly caters for vessel/ships of less than 200m lengths.

a)         Offshore Support Vessels (“OSVs”) ; Various types of offshore vessels are employed to provide support services for the offshore oil & gas activities. The most common are Anchor Handling Tugs (“AHT”), Platform Support Vessels (“PSV”), Floating Support Vessels (“FSV”) and A float Work Boats (‘AWB”), Construction Support Vessels (CSVs), Dive Support Vessels (DSVs), tugs, and crew boats.

According to Malaysia Offshore Support Vessel Owners Association (“OSV Malaysia”), the South East Asian region accounts for about 20% of total global OSVs that are in operation comprised of about 400 anchor handling tugs (“AHT”) and platform supply vessels (PSV) and about 500 to 800 other types of OSVs such as construction support vessels (“CSV”), dive support vessels (“DSV”), tugs and crew boats. About 12% of these OSVs have past their economic useful life and approximately 21% of the remaining fleet is of 20-30 years old.

Members of OSV Malaysia (whose membership list amount to 20 members) own 200 OSVs of various types, which are estimated, to grow to 280 by 2016. Most of which are anchor handling tugs, supply support vessels, fast crew boats/vessels, and AW boats/barges. The average age of their fleet is 4.5 years as of 2011. If 40% of these OSVs operate at the East Coast Offshore Area and the balance at Sabah/Sarawak Offshore Area, the number of OSVs owned by members of OSV operating in East Coast Offshore Area is 80 vessels.

Thus, for mandatory certification requirement with interval of every 2.5 year, on average there will be one hundred and twenty (120) OSVs that need to undergo repair and maintenance work per year just to meet the mandatory certification. For other repair works, if it is assumed that on average, the OSVs are need to do repair works once in every six (6) months, the size of the market for repairs of OSVs is one hundred and sixty (160).

b)         Ships called at Kuantan Port ; The Project also targets to tap into the repair and maintenance needs of the ships that ply the international shipping that pass through South China Sea and Selat Melaka, in particular, those ships that call at Kuantan Port. The total number of ships that called to Kuantan Port in 2011 was 2440 ships. The port has seen a CAGR of 11.45% per year in the number of ships called over the past 10 years. The port recorded a sharp growth in the number of ships that called to in 2009.

Kuantan Port was built in 1974 and has served as the export and import outlet for its hinterland that includes most of Pahang, Terengganu and Kelantan. The port caters for all types of ships including container, dry and liquid cargo. In particular, the port serves as the main export point for the large palm oil production of the hinterland.

Comparatively, Kuantan Port is still very much smaller than other ports in Peninsular Malaysia in terms amount of Cargo handled. In term of number of ships, Kuantan Port ranked 7th with 2440 ships called while in terms of gross registered tonnage it also ranked the 7th place with or an average 8.890 million tonnes per ship.

c)         Kuantan Naval Base ; Kuantan also host one of the naval bases for the Royal Malaysian Navy. Though, the size of fleet based here is not as large as that based in Lumut and Sipanggar, Sabah, the Kuantan Naval Base provide a crucial logistic support for naval operation in the South China Sea therefore could be expanded.

                   

d)         Other Government Organisation ; Other potential market for the Project would include the various types of boats employed by other government organisations such as the Customs, marine police and fishery departments.

APMM is formed to perform maritime search and rescue, to prevent maritime pollution, to suppress piracy and to suppressing illicit traffic in narcotic drugs. The unit currently owns 2 OPV, 1 ship, 47 patrol vessels, and 27 boats. Of these, 13 of the vessels have lies less than 20 years lifetime, 22 vessels lies between 20 – 40 years lifetime, 15 vessels has been serviced for more than 40 years and 27 numbers of the boats have a lifetime of less than 20 in average.