China's shipping charts green course

China's maritime industry is embracing digitalization in order to improve efficiency in shipping logistics, and is achieving some important firsts along the way.

Backed by recent policy reforms, a push to expand digitalization, the country's greater environmental goals and more international cooperation, on June 23, the container ship Yuanhai Zeda became the first vessel in China to complete its registration using a ship technical parameter certificate instead of the traditional bulky paper inspection documents.

What's more, the process of registering the 15,000-metric-ton vessel, which would have previously taken days, took less than a day to complete.

The swift registration is an example of reforms driven by the Hainan International Ship Registration Authority, which has embraced digitalization and innovative policy changes.

By slashing required paperwork from 32 documents down to 15 and fully digitizing the approval process, registration efficiency has soared by over 60 percent, said Li Fangcao, a staff member in the registration service department.

"It's like using an electronic ID instead of paper documents," Li said, adding that the entire application can be submitted online, which saves companies significant time and costs.

On April 9, another vessel, Shengchang 777, submitted its paperwork in the morning and had received 18 certificates by the afternoon. Thanks to cross-department collaboration and the streamlined system, foreign ship re-registrations that once took 30 days now require just a single day.

Cai Yinghong, director of the Hainan International Ship Registration Authority, said, "Our goal is to build an internationally aligned ship registration service system."

Cai noted Hainan has pioneered several nationwide firsts, including a unified ship registration system covering the entire island, a two-level review process for international ship registrations, and a temporary ship ownership registration system.

These innovations have increased the efficiency of ship registration by over 90 percent, he said. The implementation of a "non-stop certification" service has allowed vessels to complete certification without interrupting their voyages, resulting in annual savings exceeding one million yuan ($139,000) per ship.