China State Shipbuilding Corp relocated its headquarters from Beijing to Shanghai on Friday, marking a new chapter in the company's history.

The world's largest shipbuilder is seeking to better serve the nation's major strategies, official sources said.

The relocation of CSSC headquarters to Shanghai signifies a new development pattern and Beijing's dissolution of non-capital functions, said Hao Peng, chairman of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

Hao was speaking at a ceremony to mark the relocation. "Shanghai is China's largest economic center and a vanguard of the nation's economic development, and the city is also the cradle of China's shipbuilding industry," said Hao, explaining the place of the new headquarters.

"CSSC's relocation to Shanghai should strongly promote China's shipbuilding industry's high-quality development, better serve the nation's goals of becoming a marine power, manufacturing power, science and technology power, as well as building Shanghai into a socialist modern international metropolis."

Gong Zheng, mayor of Shanghai, said: "Shanghai takes the relocation of CSSC as an opportunity to deepen the strategic collaboration between Shanghai and CSSC, and the municipal government will fully support CSSC's accelerated development into a world-class shipbuilding group."

According to Gong, Shanghai would consistently strengthen the functions of allocating global resources, exploring technological innovation features, leading high-end industries' advancement, and opening gateways, so as to better support enterprises with improved core competitiveness.

Lei Fanpei, chairman of CSSC, said: "To relocate our headquarters to Shanghai would accelerate CSSC's development into one of the world's best shipbuilding groups."

Shanghai is now the only city in the world to hold big-name corporate headquarters covering shipbuilding, steel, port machines, port, and shipping, which helps form a complete industrial chain and supply chain in the city.

"Such unique advantages would surely speed up CSSC in reaching its goal of becoming a world-class shipbuilder," Lei said, adding that Shanghai is the birthplace of China's modern shipbuilding industry and home to several national-level industries.

Born from the reorganization of two giant shipbuilding groups, or China State Shipbuilding Corp and China Shipbuilding Industry Corp, in November 2019, CSSC currently operates the nation's best and largest shipyards. The group has the research and development capability to build a wide variety of ships and affiliated products.

CSSC has delivered 194 vessels, or 16.04 million dead weight tons, this year as of the end of November, which means the group has exceeded its whole-year ship delivery task one month in advance.

It laid a solid foundation for CSSC to achieve its goals in the first year of the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25).

Taking a lead in terms of shipbuilding completion amount, orders received and handheld order amount, CSSC is truly the world's largest shipbuilding group.

With total assets of 877.6 billion yuan and 220,000 employees, CSSC currently has 106 member units, 35 scientific research institutes and 65 national innovation platforms.

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