Is the wind power industry no longer profitable? Behind the 12-billion-yuan shipbuilding order of Dajin Heavy Industry lies the collective anxiety of leading wind power enterprises.
Dajin Heavy Industry extends its shipbuilding business relying on existing production capacity to pursue growth across different sectors.
Foresee Energy notes that Dajin Heavy Industry recently disclosed that the company has signed a total of 24 new ship construction orders, with a total contract value of about 120 billion yuan. Its on-hand orders exceed 100 billion yuan, and the delivery period is mainly scheduled from 2027 to 2030.
Among them, many leading shipowners from the Netherlands, Greece and Norway have placed orders with this offshore wind power foundation equipment manufacturer from China's Bohai Bay. The ship types have expanded from 210,000 DWT bulk carriers to multi-purpose heavy lift ships, and Dajin Heavy Industry has entered the mainstream ship construction market from an offshore engineering equipment supplier.
Against the backdrop of the overall slowdown in the growth of the wind power industry and the continuous pressure on the price of offshore wind turbine units, this is not just an individual choice of one enterprise. Many offshore wind power enterprises are breaking away from their traditional main business of equipment manufacturing and expanding to tracks such as ship construction, commercial aerospace, energy storage, and seawater hydrogen production. Whether Dajin Heavy Industry's shipbuilding path is feasible depends on whether its understanding of its position in the industrial chain is accurate.
01
The Matter of Shipbuilding
Its Starting Point Is Earlier Than The Public Perceives
The core business of Dajin Heavy Industry is offshore wind power foundation equipment, and its products include basic structural parts of offshore wind turbines such as monopiles, jackets and towers. Calculated based on the sales amount of monopiles in the first half of 2025, it is the number one supplier of offshore wind power foundation equipment in the European market, and its market share has increased from 18.5% in 2024 to 29.1%. The company has deployed three offshore engineering bases in Penglai, Caofeidian and Panjin in the Bohai Bay. The common feature of these bases is that they are built along the sea and equipped with 100,000-ton deep-water terminals.
It is understood that Dajin Heavy Industry initially engaged in shipbuilding to solve its own transportation problems. The foundation of offshore wind power monopiles can weigh thousands of tons, and their transportation depends on special vessels. When the public shipping capacity is tight, the scheduling and freight rates are not under its own control.
In this dilemma, Dajin Heavy Industry independently developed and built KING series and EMPEROR series special transport vessels, and the fuel consumption of KING series is one third lower than that of traditional vessels. With its own fleet, Dajin Heavy Industry's delivery mode has been upgraded from offshore FOB to onshore DAP, and customers receive the complete products delivered to the terminal.
According to the financial report, in the first half of 2026, the company's export gross profit margin reached 39.36%, an increase of 8.7 percentage points year-on-year. The research report of Guosen Securities attributes the improvement of gross profit margin to the increase in the proportion of offshore engineering export revenue, the expansion of DAP delivery mode and the added value brought by the implementation of self-operated shipping business.
In other words, the pricing power brought by its own fleet is the key starting point to understand Dajin Heavy Industry's subsequent shipbuilding decision.
For example, Dajin Heavy Industry's Panjin base is positioned as a marine engineering ship manufacturing base, with an annual launching capacity of 6 vessels at present. While designing and building self-use transport vessels, the surplus production capacity has begun to take external orders. This can also be understood as the enterprise's "capacity filling".
02
Why European Shipowners
Place Orders With A Wind Power Enterprise
As mentioned in the introduction, since 2026, Dajin Heavy Industry has successively signed construction contracts for bulk carriers and multi-purpose heavy lift ships with shipowners from Greece, Norway and the Netherlands, covering leading shipowners in multiple markets such as Greece, Norway, the Netherlands and South Korea.
It needs to be clarified that the construction standards, classification society regulations and delivery acceptance procedures of bulk carriers and heavy lift ships are very different from those of offshore engineering equipment. Passing the factory inspection and audit of leading European shipowners proves that Dajin Heavy Industry's shipbuilding capacity has passed the strict test of the international market.
Behind this is a market structure that is easily overlooked. The annual production capacity of local offshore wind power foundation suppliers in Europe is limited, and the production capacity of large monopiles with an outer diameter of more than 11 meters accounts for less than 40% of the total capacity, which is difficult to meet the demand for large-diameter monopiles under the trend of large-scale wind turbines.
The research report of CITIC Construction Investment also points out that the gap in Europe's offshore wind power foundation industry will further expand to about 1 million tons by 2030. Dajin Heavy Industry has deployed 4 mother port terminals in Germany, Spain and Denmark, covering the core offshore wind resource zones of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea in Europe.
Those shipowners who need to transport wind power foundations are also potential purchasers of Dajin Heavy Industry's offshore engineering products. The customer network of the shipbuilding business overlaps with that of the offshore engineering business, which is a practical consideration of Dajin Heavy Industry beyond the logic of "capacity filling".
At present, the delivery period of Dajin Heavy Industry's ships is concentrated from 2028 to 2030, which just staggers the release window of spillover orders for European offshore wind power around 2027. The two businesses complement each other in time. This is not a deliberate design, but objectively forms a buffer in the business rhythm.
It is reported that in September 2026, Dajin Heavy Industry signed a design contract for offshore foundation installation vessels with Norwegian ship design enterprise Ulstein. This type of vessel can install super-large monopiles with a diameter of 16 meters and a weight of 4,600 tons, which fills the last link from manufacturing to transportation to installation.
03
Is It A Second Growth Curve
It Depends On What You Compare It With
If the second growth curve is defined as a new business independent of the main business with independent customers and revenue sources, Dajin Heavy Industry's shipbuilding business has already begun to generate independent returns financially.
Financial data shows that in the first half of 2026, the net operating cash flow of the company reached 15.33 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 544%. However, the profit contribution of the shipbuilding business has not been separately disclosed in the financial report, and more data is needed to judge how its gross profit margin level compares with that of the main offshore engineering business.
What is more noteworthy is that Dajin Heavy Industry's shipbuilding decision is placed in the transformation map of the entire wind power industry, and its path choice is significantly different from other enterprises. For example, Goldwind holds 4.1412% of the shares of Landspace through a wholly-owned subsidiary, which belongs to financial investment at the capital level and does not involve industrial synergy. Mingyang Smart Energy plans to acquire 100% equity of Dehua Chip, pointing to the technical closed loop of the photovoltaic industry chain. Yunda Stock has won the bid for the 200MW/800MWh independent energy storage project in Ulanqab, extending from wind turbine units to energy storage system integration.
In addition, many wind power enterprises are focusing on "going to the space". Haili Wind Power has transferred 1 billion yuan of wind power project funds to invest in commercial aerospace, but its revenue in the first half of 2026 was only 186 million yuan, down 90.85% year-on-year, and the net profit attributable to owners was 93.4493 million yuan in loss. The company attributed the sharp drop in revenue to the temporary reduction in the construction scale of offshore wind power. The Dongtai base of Taiheng Wind Power has been completed and put into operation, and the first rocket tank qualification part has been offline at the same time.
The common background of these transformation cases is the ongoing structural adjustment of the wind power industry. In the first quarter of 2026, China's new installed wind power capacity reached 15.8GW, a year-on-year increase of 7.9%, but the competition pattern of offshore wind power is far more fierce than that of onshore wind power.
It is understood that when the 400MW offshore wind turbine project of Jiangsu Datang Dongtai opened for bidding, a complete machine enterprise quoted a low price of 2937 yuan/kW, setting a new low for the bidding price of Jiangsu offshore wind turbine centralized procurement since 2023. Compared with the winning bid price of 3854 yuan/kW including the tower for Jiangsu Dafeng offshore wind power project in 2023, the price has dropped by more than 20% in total.
In general, complete machine enterprises such as Goldwind, Envision Energy, Mingyang Smart Energy, Sany Heavy Energy and Windey are competing for bids in clusters, and the industry's model of seizing orders at low prices has already laid obvious industrial risks.
Compared with other enterprises, Dajin Heavy Industry has not left the offshore wind power industrial chain, but moved upstream along the line of "manufacturing - transportation - delivery - installation". It uses idle production capacity and its own terminal conditions, and applies the steel structure processing capacity accumulated in the domestic market to the European ship market with higher profit margins and more certain demand.
According to the report of Securities Times, the cross-sector diversification of offshore wind power enterprises is essentially an active choice for the industry to transform from scale competition to value competition. In comparison, Dajin Heavy Industry's shipbuilding business is closer to industrial chain extension, rather than direct track switching.
04
Orders Have Locked In The Window
Delivery Is The Hard Constraint
As mentioned earlier, the delivery period of Dajin Heavy Industry's shipbuilding orders is concentrated from 2027 to 2030, and the release window of the gap in the European offshore wind power foundation industry is also in this period. The coincidence of the two time windows gives the shipbuilding business a reasonable strategic foothold.
However, turning orders into profits still needs to cross several thresholds. The capacity ramp-up speed of the Panjin shipbuilding base determines whether the orders can be delivered on schedule. The bidding rhythm of European offshore wind power projects determines whether the revenue growth of the main offshore engineering business can continue, and the resource allocation of the two businesses in terms of production capacity and capital is a problem that the management needs to balance continuously.
For the diversified transformation of wind power enterprises, some are heading for completely unfamiliar tracks, while others choose to dig deep in the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. Dajin Heavy Industry belongs to the latter.
For it, shipbuilding is not a way to escape from the wind power industry, but a tool to make the wind power delivery chain more complete. Whether this tool can continue to generate returns depends on whether it can straighten out its production capacity, delivery and customer relationships before 2027. The orders have been signed, and the next four years will be a tough battle at the execution level.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Foresee Energy", author: Wang Mengjiao, published with authorization from 36Kr.