Analysis Of BIMCO's Standard Shipbuilding Contract

In responding to the new developing trends of maritime security and environmental protection, and to meet the needs of "Green Shipbuilding Revolution" in the internation-al range, BIMCO began drawing in 2005, and published a new standard shipbuilding contract, that is the NEWBUILDCON text. On the one hand, BIMCO is the world's largest, the most diverse-operating and the most extensive-influence self-management organization, and the standard contracts with 3/4 or so drafted by her have been pro-moted in the international maritime area. On the other hand, NEWBUILDCON inte-grates into the new features of times and new theoretical elements, trying to provide a clear, modern, comprehensive and balanced contract text. Based on this, we should stu-dy the NEWBUILDCON.NEWBUILDCON is divided into two parts. The first part, using BIMCO's tradi-tional grid layout, guides the contract articles with the coding of the pane. The second part divides the 48 articles into 6 sections (ship, finance, production, delivery, legal matters and supplemental articles) with the chronological order of the shipbuilding, the articles refer to themselves via the coding in the pane or the articles. Besides, there are some specific definitions of the contract terms listed before the body text, and the text makes use of the common standard dictions of international shipping industry, which, f-irst makes the contract text clear and definite, and improves readability, leading to subscribe the contract fastly, second expands the scope of application and reduces the legal risk caused by the controversy over the contract terms.NEWBUILDCON follows era progress, improves the quality of the construction of ships, maintains maritime safety and marine environmental protection, more important-ly corrects the strong position of builder under The SAJ text, with making some contr-actual arrangements such as improving ship construction standards, aggravating the ob-ligations of ship delivery and sea trials, increasing the responsibilities for quality war-ranty etc. To sum up, it holds the rights and obligations of the parties to reach a balance-d state. But, there is suspicion of overkill somehow. The paper makes a detailed analysis on the rights and obligations of the parties, and comes an conclusion that we can apply the NEWBUILDCON text, but must go through substantial changes, to response the risk of the disadvantages for our yards. In addition, the article also studies the common articles in shipbuilding contract by taking into account of the NEWBUILDCON text, such as Entire Agreement Clause, Options Clause, Assignment Clause, Dispute Resolu-tion Clause.At present, China's shipbuilding capacity has surpassed Japan, ranking second in the world. And the "ship industrial restructuring and rejuvenation program" approved by the State Department in 2009 puts forward that China will realize the change from the big to strong in the shipbuilding industry. However, China has no national standard shipbuilding contract text, which is extremely inconsistent with China's reality. There-fore, the paper suggests that we could make selective reference, such as arrangement of layout, advanced policies, ideas and technology of the NEWBUILDCON text, to esta-blish our national shipbuilding contract as soon as possible.