India & Bangladesh under pressure from smaller ship-breaking peers Turkey & Pakistan

Data provided by industry watchdog NGO Shipbreaking Platform says that the top countries saw a decline in the number of ships coming for breaking while both Turkey and Pakistan saw an increase. In 2023, a total of 166 ships were decommissioned in India. This number dropped to 124 in 2024. Similarly, Bangladesh got 173 ships in 2023, but the number dropped to 132 ships in 2024.

Turkey’s number increased substantially to 94 in 2024 versus 50 in 2023. Similarly, Pakistan’s number increased to 24 ships in 2024 as against 15 in 2023. However, industry sources say India and Bangladesh attracted large ships while smaller countries saw a spurt in decommissioning and recycling of smaller ships.

Kiran Thorat, Trader of the Global Marketing Systems, India and Bangladesh India and Bangladesh have capacity to recycle the big ships, which Turkey does not have. Basis LDT figures Bangladesh is the number one followed by India and Turkey, he told businessline. Nearly 80 per cent of the global tonnage scrapped last year was broken on the beaches of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan (negligible numbers). In other words, 409 ships were dismantled globally in 2024, of which 255 ended up in South Asian yards. Bangladesh remains the shipping industry’s first choice with India a close second, a report by NGO Shipbreaking Platform said...With passage of every month, Alang seems to be slipping to new lows. In the first nine months of this financial year i.e between April-December 2024, only 82 ships came to be broken. This is 15 percent less than the 97 ships that came during the same period last year, show data sourced from state-run Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB) that manages and monitors activities at Alang.

The Shipbreaking activities hit a peak in 2011-12 --when a record 415 ships with 38.5 LDT had come to be broken and recycled. The performance of the yard has only slipped thereafter. Unable to attract ships in the last few years, another ship-breaker Haresh Parmar had shut down his ship-breaking yard three years ago. In January 2025 he tried to reopen his business, but failed. “I tried to reopen my yard this January by trying to get a ship anchored off the coast of UAE. But it went to Pakistan at a higher rate,” said Parmar who is also the honorary secretary of Ship Recycling Industries Association (SRIA), India. “Ship-breaking at Alang has almost come to a standstill. Of the total ship-breaking plots at Alang, only 20-25 odd plots have ships for breaking. Others are lying empty. One major reason is that ship-breakers in Bangladesh and Pakistan are able to purchase the ageing ships at higher rates than us... In comparison, both Bangladesh and Pakistan allow TMT bars to be made directly from scrapped steel and so they also procure old ships at higher rates than us. Secondly, due to the Red Sea crisis and tensions in Israel, the freight rates have gone up. So the shipping lines are not sending their old ships for breaking, but are rather using them to ferry cargo...