A 24,000-TEU containership built by Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Co was delivered in Shanghai on Jun 22, 2022 Photo: Courtesy of Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Co

A ship able to carry 24,000 standard containers, built by China State Shipbuilding Corp (CSSC), was delivered to the client in Shanghai on Wednesday. It's the world's largest containership.

The ship was independently designed by Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Co, a subsidiary of CSSC. Hudong-Zhonghua owns the ship's intellectual property rights, according to a statement sent to the Global Times by the company.

The ship will serve routes from the Far East to Europe. The megaship, measuring 399.99 meters long, is more than 60 meters longer than the world's current largest aircraft carrier. It is 61.5 meters wide and has a deck area of 24,000 square meters, about the size of three and a half soccer fields.

With a depth of 33.2 meters, the cargo hold can carry 240,000 tons of goods. The maximum stack of containers can be up to 25 stories high, equivalent to the height of a 22-story building, said the statement.

The ship uses the world's latest hydrodynamic optimization technology to achieve high speeds and low fuel consumption while carrying heavy loads. Compared with traditional bunker-fueled ships that can carry 23,000 containers, the new ship can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 38 tons per day.

Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding Co has orders for nine such ships, with six in production and three scheduled to be delivered this year.

China has become one of the front-runners in the world shipbuilding sector, with mature industrial chains, Zheng Ping, chief analyst of industry news site chineseport.cn, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

From manufacturing low value-added and small ships to building extra-large container ships, LNG carriers and ecofriendly ships, Chinese shipbuilders have come a long way, and they're constantly setting new records, Zheng said.

In addition to making larger ships, China's shipyards have made great achievements in technological innovation. For instance, ships have become more environmentally friendly, and there are more and more intelligent applications, Zheng said.

Chinese shipbuilders topped the three major metrics used by the global shipbuilding industry in 2021, with the highest number of received orders, according to data released by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in January.

Chinese shipbuilders accounted for about 50 percent of the global production volume, with CSSC, the nation's largest shipbuilder, surpassing South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries to become the world's largest shipbuilder, according to media reports.

Large cruise ships, LNG vessels and aircraft carriers are known as the three "pearls" in the "crown" of the shipbuilding industry. Now, China has acquired the ability to design and manufacture all these types. It has demonstrated the independent innovation of China's shipbuilding industry, experts said.