A pure electric inland container vessel being built for French shipping giant CMA CGM began construction in June at the Jining facility of Shandong Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding Co., Ltd. (hereinafter "Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding"). This marks the first time a Chinese-manufactured pure electric inland vessel has secured an overseas order, representing a groundbreaking milestone. The ordered vessel measures 79.9 meters in length, 15 meters in width, with a 3,500-ton capacity, featuring a battery energy storage system provided by Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (300750.SZ). With an annual transport capacity exceeding 50,000 TEU, the vessel can reduce annual CO2 emissions by 778 tons. CMA CGM plans to deploy the vessel on the green route from Binh Duong Province to Cat Lai Port in Vietnam in 2026, as part of its commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

At the groundbreaking ceremony, Matthieu Courtois, CMA CGM's New Shipbuilding China Regional Site Manager, stated: "This advancement of green inland fleet construction in Asia is not only a market choice but also recognition of China's technical capabilities in inland new energy vessels." Ding Mingshi, Chief Engineer of Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding, responded with a parallel statement: "The commencement of this order vessel is not merely the starting point of one ship's construction, but a declaration of inland new energy shipbuilding forces stepping onto the international stage."

**Breaking New Ground, Seizing First-Mover Advantage**

Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding, a subsidiary of Jining Energy Development Group established in 2022, is considered a "new face" in the shipbuilding industry. To stand out from competition with other established peers and win over the French giant, Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding relied on strategic positioning in the new energy inland vessel track, breaking new ground and achieving a breakthrough.

Traditional vessels have high carbon emissions, and oil spill risks threaten the safety of waterway systems along routes, representing long-standing "pain points" for inland waterway transportation. New energy vessels represented by pure electric and LNG power can specifically address these challenges. Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding precisely identified this opportunity and deployed accordingly. Its new energy shipbuilding manufacturing base was jointly created by Jining Energy Development Group in partnership with CIMC Group, CATL, and Wuhan University of Technology, forming a formidable consortium.

The project is being built in phases, designed with production capacity for 400 inland vessels of 2,000-5,000 tons annually, plus repair and modification of 100 vessels. Compared to the labor-intensive traditional inland vessel manufacturing model, Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding proposed benchmarking ocean-going vessel production processes from the factory's inception, adopting innovative intelligent manufacturing solutions and building digitalized workshops and intelligent factories.

By introducing modular construction and automotive assembly line concepts, Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding can improve shipbuilding efficiency to twice that of traditional models, essentially building ships like manufacturing automobiles. This represents a more advanced manufacturing concept and has become a key advantage in winning customers.

Currently, domestic inland operational vessels are still primarily driven by traditional energy sources. The nation has over 300,000 inland vessels, with more than 60,000 "old, outdated, small" vessels operating on the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, and Jining has over 7,000 vessels. There remains a significant gap in green, intelligent, and standardized aspects compared to green and low-carbon development needs, urgently requiring upgrading and transformation.

This indicates that a domestic inland vessel new energy transformation and construction market with considerable potential is rapidly emerging, and Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding, leveraging its late-mover advantage, has seized the initiative.

**Inland Waterway Transportation: A Grand Strategy**

Jining, where Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding is located, serves as an important node city on the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, with the canal running through the entire territory. From an aerial perspective, China's waterway transportation presents a "two horizontal, one vertical, two networks, eighteen lines" pattern. The "two horizontal" refer to the Yangtze River shipping mainline and the West River shipping mainline, while "one vertical" refers to the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, which continues to play an important waterway transportation role today.

Water transportation offers advantages of large capacity, low cost, and low energy consumption, and with its significant economic benefits—water transport costs are only 50%-60% of railway, 12%-15% of highway, and 4%-6% of air transport—it plays an increasingly important role in domestic economic operations.

Currently, China leads the world in inland waterway mileage, facility scale, transport capacity, and transport volume, with related construction continuing to gain momentum. Research statistics show that since 2018, China's inland waterway construction fixed asset investment has exceeded coastal construction investment.

According to the goals established in the Ministry of Transport's "Inland Waterway Transportation Development Outline," by 2035, China's inland thousand-ton waterways should reach 25,000 kilometers, with inland freight turnover accounting for 9% of total social turnover.

This represents a grand vision, under whose guidance the development strategy of "strengthening channels, connecting water systems, radiating extensions, and reaching seaports" is steadily being implemented, with major projects including the Ping-Lu Canal and the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal north of the Yellow River resumption project under continuous research and advancement.

It is precisely against the backdrop of inland waterway transportation welcoming strategic opportunities that Jining, leveraging its geographical advantage of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal "golden waterway," has proposed an ambitious goal: to build a northern inland waterway transportation center.

**Port Industries Rising with the Tide**

The development of inland waterway transportation and basin economic growth are recognized as having a mutually causal symbiotic relationship. Basin economics drives inland waterway transportation development, determining the scale and level of inland waterway transportation development, while inland waterway transportation in turn promotes basin economics.

By the end of 2024, Jining Port possessed 156 productive berths with actual throughput capacity of 120 million tons and container throughput capacity of 1 million TEU. In 2024, it completed cargo throughput of 96.655 million tons, a year-over-year increase of 37.9%, firmly holding the top position among Shandong Province's inland waterways.

A series of port-related industries have consequently grown locally. These include the Yuejin Port Area Intelligent New Steel Manufacturing Base project's shared processing center becoming operational with three processing workshops under construction; Jizhou Port Area's Jiangbei Grain Logistics Park establishing a complete industrial chain system integrating grain, trade, warehousing, processing, and logistics services with total storage capacity of 167,400 tons; and Liangshan Port Area's Coal and Steel Logistics Park possessing annual processing and storage capacity for 1 million tons of steel, production capacity for 30,000 TEU containers, and 10,000 specialized transport vehicles.

As the largest inland port north of the Yangtze River, Liangshan Port sits at the golden intersection of the Wari Railway and Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, occupying a strategic chokepoint for west-to-east coal transportation. It serves not only as the main force ensuring Shandong's coal supply but can also reach the Yangtze River via the canal, radiating to Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, becoming an important logistics hub connecting western coal source regions and the Yangtze River Delta economic zone.

Liangshan Port has therefore built Asia's largest steel-structure coal storage shed, with 11 berths of 2,000-ton class, equipped with the nation's first "all-vehicle-type" double-flip unloading machine, the country's most advanced automated bucket wheel stacker-reclaimer, sphere machines, unmanned weighing rooms, and LNG vehicles and vessels, leading the nation in building the first intelligent center among inland ports.

At Taiping Port Area where Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding is located, as LNG-powered ships and electric-powered ships successively begin construction and launch, a 10-billion-yuan inland green intelligent shipbuilding industrial cluster is quietly forming.

Looking back to the end of 2023, when Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding officially began production, the domestic new energy vessel market had not yet exploded. Through research, Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding identified a differentiated market entry strategy, focusing on demand for small and medium-sized inland vessels and new energy vessels such as LNG and pure electric. This now appears to have been a strategically superior decision.

In 2024, Zijin Mining Group Company Limited (601899.SH) planned to conduct mineral transportation in Tanzania, Africa, requiring four 2,000-ton bulk carriers suitable for shallow inland waterways. Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding immediately established a special project team and developed a construction solution. Due to insufficient overseas transportation conditions, Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding adopted modular construction technology for this project, building ship sections separately and shipping them via bulk cargo and 40GP containers by sea to Tanzania for hull assembly, while establishing an overseas office in Tanzania, building cooperation networks with local agents, and dispatching technical teams to guide ship assembly and provide remote operation and maintenance support.

It is precisely Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding's demonstrated capability to "connect rivers and seas" that brought it into the view of international shipping industry giants like CMA CGM. Today, Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding has established sales networks covering Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

In a certain sense, Xinnenghuan Shipbuilding represents Jining's opening move in "redrawing" the inland waterway transportation industrial landscape, and it is precisely the right stroke.