Despite the recovery of the new shipbuilding market in the first half of the year, the number of hand-held orders for new global vessels began to decline for 23 consecutive months at the end of August 2008.

At present, as of the end of July, global orders for handhelds were 1.4473 million corrected gross tonnage. This was a decrease of 12.1% from the 1.6473 billion corrected gross tonnage at the end of last year.