JAPAN¡¯S yard orderbooks shrank by 27% year on year in October.

The Japan Ship Exporters¡¯ Association said members aggregated 27,931,784gt of outstanding orders as at 31 October, down from the 38,280,716gt in the same period last year.

New orders for the month rose by just 5.6% y/y to 902,790gt. Japan¡¯s yards received 17 orders: two PCCs, 14 bulkers and one tanker.

October orders were down by 0.64% from September¡¯s 908,639gt.

As for payment terms, 21.4% is in yen, from 42.1% in yen during October 2011. This reflects customers¡¯ desire to mitigate the strong yen.

In October Japanese yards delivered 27 ships of 978,063gt, up from 24 ships of 949,263gt in the same month of 2011.

In the first 10 months of the year, deliveries from Japanese yards have totalled 309 ships of 13,802,953gt, compared with 309 ships of 14,065,432gt in the same period last year.

From January to October, new orders totalled 134 ships of 6,569,456gt, down from 172 ships of 6,989,762gt in the corresponding period of 2011.