Study On The Selection Of Shipping Registry For Shipping Company

The scale of the national fleet, to some extent, can reflect the comprehensive strength of a country's international shipping power. Since the reform and opening, China's shipping industry has made great progress that the fleet size expands constantly; however the phenomenon of overseas registration has become more and more serious. In 2007, the Ministry of Transport issued the policy - Tax-free on special registration of China holding ships , and such policy was extended in 2009 when the State Council proposed Advices on speeding up the development of modern service and advanced manufacturing industry in Shanghai, to building an international financial centre and an international shipping centre which aims to attract the return of China's international ships to register in China, to expand the number and the total tonnage of shipsunder the flag of PRC. Though after 3 years'implementation, 31 international vessels have enjoyed such policy and change their flag back to five-star red flag, for most ship owners, such policy holds less attractive and does not achieve the desired effects. Under the background mentioned above, this paper, standing on the owner's point of view, analyzed the main factors that should be considered when choosing shipping registration country from the aspects of economics, society and politics; then found out the reasons why Chinese shipping companies prefer to register their vessels overseas, looking forward to propose a few effective recommendations that can help our country attract these vessels to register back in China.The article first introduced the international ship registration system, especially that in several major shipping countries. Include analyzing the recent international and domestic ship registration status, the effectiveness of the implementation of tax-free policy and the overall process of ship registration under different circumstance.Secondly, this paper provided a comparative analysis of registration-related cost between the ships registered in China and those in other countries, expecting to find out the main factors that ship owners considered when they selected registration country from the perspective of capital. Cost differences generated by different registration countries during the process of registration and operation have been emphasized.At last, on the basis of economic analysis, AHP (analytic hierarchy process) was employed together with the unquantifiable registration-related factors to comprehensively evaluate the registration system in China under the current ship registration system, flag of convenience registration system and Tax-free policy. Then carefully investigated the reasons why ship owners do not like to register their ships in China and effective implementations to attractive international vessels back to China would be offered according to these reasons.