Ship & Offshore Structure Company

Kawasaki has two shipyards, one is at Kobe and the other is at Sakaide (Kagawa Prefecture). The backbone of ship development, construction, and maintenance at Kawasaki are high value-added ships, such as submarines and LNG/LPG carriers. Kawasaki has long history in shipbuilding, extending as far back as the company's 1878 foundation as the Kawasaki Dockyard Co. The company also builds ships as parts of the Nantong COSCO KHI Ship Engineering Co., Ltd. (NACKS), and Dalian COSCO KHI Ship Engineering Co.,Ltd.(DACKS), joint ventures in China.

Role and value of "ship" in our society

Our group runs the transport manufacturing business including ships, railway vehicles, planes, and motorcycles. And single word "transportation" has different social roles and values for each of them. For example, the role required for ships is to transport "large volume of loads safely at a low cost." The fact that people can obtain articles from all over the world at low prices is one of the benefits brought by shipping industry, and I take pride in this characterisitic of the ship brought the promotion of the globalization.

History and prospect

Among the carriers, the ship has the longest history of several thousands years. The material used for ship structure has also evolved from a log to wooden board, steel plate, aluminum, and FRP. While the propulsion system has also evolved from paddling by hand, wind power(i.e., sailboat), steam, diesel engine, turbine engine, and LNG fuel. Before a little, ships carried all kind of cargo, but now, ships are more specialized and diversified into, such as, container ship, pure car carrier, tanker, ferry, and luxury cruise ship. You may think a ship is based on low technologies, however, it is actually an aggregate of innovations and I believe that it will further evolve at a high pace over the next decade, including automatical operation.
Currently, lower emission of NOx and SOx (we called "Green Shipping") is one of the important requirements for ships. We now have line up dual-fuel ship using LNG and oil and are in pursuit of hydrogen carrier which seems to be ultimate eco-friendly fuel. Only the leading shipbuilding companies with high technologies and expertises can develop and build such high value-added ships, and we consider Kawasaki also has a duty to meet the expectation.
We are based in Kansai Area and have production base in China. In addtion, we are the front runner in the field of defense industry. Many universities in the Kansai Region have the shipbuilding course, and many students wish to join our company. This is another strong and charactaristic point of us.

With our employees

One of the most attarctive point of a shipbuilding company is the moment of starting the engine and delivering the completed ship, the largest carriers, from the shipyard. The members of our bases in Kobe and Sakaide (Japan) as well as those of Nantong COSCO KHI Ship Engineering Co., Ltd. (NACKS) and Dalian COSCO KHI Ship Engineering Co., Ltd. (DACKS), jointly invested by China Ocean Shipping Group Company (COSCO) can share this pleasure of shipbuilding. The main shipyard in Japan is the Sakaide Shipyard in terms of the shipbuiliding of Merchant Ship, such as gas carriers which we seems high-valued ships. In China, container ships, tankers, and bulk carriers are mass-produced by the abundant workforce.
20 years have passed since the launch of the joint corporation in China. The first base was in Nantong and I am proud that no one in first generations has left the company while labor liquidity is excessive in China. In the first period, many Kawasaki engineers stayed there and instructed the local employees with great care in technology and production management, so that the local employeers took remarkable progress in a short time.
I hope the Japanese employees to work more globally and go abroad to experience various ways of thinking. For this purpose, I make almost every general manager involved in general merchant ships to be posted in China. In the management histories in NACKS for 20 years and DACKS for 10 years, respectively, 60 to 70 persons have experienced residence in China so far. As each shipbuilding base has a different role, I hope all of them grow up further by cooperating and stimulating with each other.