What Cochin Shipyard Actually Builds, and Why the World Started Ordering
It built INS Vikrant, it builds the Water Metro boats you ride, and in February a French shipping giant placed an order for six vessels with it. A look at the Kochi institution most of us drive past without noticing.
A few kilometres south of Marine Drive, on the Ernakulam waterfront at Perumanoor, sits the largest shipbuilding and maintenance facility in India. Cochin Shipyard is the biggest thing this city makes, and most of us treat it as scenery.
It is worth knowing what actually happens in there, because the answer changed considerably over the last two years.
What has Cochin Shipyard built?
The headline answer is the largest warship India has ever constructed. INS Vikrant, the country's first indigenously built aircraft carrier, was designed by the Indian Navy's Warship Design Bureau and built here. Her keel was laid in February 2009 and she was commissioned at Kochi on 2 September 2022, putting India in the small group of countries that can design and build an aircraft carrier at home.
Closer to daily life, the boats on the Kochi Water Metro came out of the same yard. CSL signed a contract worth Rs 175.70 crore in October 2019 to design and build 23 electric-hybrid ferries, each carrying 100 passengers, and had handed over 18 of them by April 2025. They are aluminium catamarans running on batteries, with diesel generators aboard as backup. If you have taken the boat across to Vypin and noticed how little noise it makes, that is a locally built vessel on India's first water metro.
The yard got a great deal bigger
Two large projects were inaugurated on 17 January 2024, at a combined investment of roughly Rs 2,769 crore, and neither got much attention outside the trade press.
The first is a new dry dock at the northern end of the existing premises, built at a cost of around Rs 1,799 crore. It runs 310 metres long, 75 metres wide narrowing to 60, and 13 metres deep, with a stepped floor engineered to carry 600 tonnes for every metre of its length. In plain terms it can take aircraft carriers larger than Vikrant, along with jack-up rigs, drill ships and large dredgers. It is one of the largest dry docks in India and the third at this yard.
The second is the International Ship Repair Facility on Willingdon Island, spread across 16.9 hectares with 850 metres of water frontage. Its centrepiece is a ship lift that can pick a vessel of up to 130 by 25 metres and 6,000 tonnes clean out of the water and shift it to one of six repair workstations. It began commercial ship repair work in August 2024.
What can the yard actually handle?
| Facility | Dimensions | What it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Repair Dock No. 1 | 270 x 45 x 12 m | Ships up to 1,25,000 DWT |
| New dry dock | 310 x 75/60 x 13 m | Aircraft carriers, rigs, drill ships |
| ISRF ship lift | 130 x 25 m, up to 6,000 T | Feeds six repair workstations |
| Quays | 1,128 m of waterfront | Alongside repair and fit-out |
Lifting is handled by gantry cranes of 600, 300 and 150 tonnes, with smaller level luffing cranes along the docks.
Why a French shipping line came to Kochi
On 18 February 2026, CSL and CMA CGM concluded an order worth about 360 million dollars, covering six LNG-powered container ships of 1,700 TEU each. CMA CGM is the third-largest container line in the world. The two sides had signed a letter of intent in October 2025, and February formalised it.
The significance is not the size of the cheque. These are the first LNG-fuelled container ships ordered from an Indian yard by a top-tier global carrier. Indian shipbuilding has lived on naval and government work for decades, and that has not changed yet: defence accounts for roughly 65 per cent of CSL's order book, largely anti-submarine warfare shallow water craft and next-generation missile vessels. The order book stood at about Rs 21,100 crore at the end of June 2025.
A note of caution before anyone gets carried away
An order book is a set of promises, not a fleet. Shipbuilding runs late nearly everywhere, and Indian yards have a longstanding reputation for delivering slower than Korean and Chinese ones, which is exactly the reputation this contract has to overcome. Six ships is also a modest order in global terms, given that CMA CGM operates hundreds of vessels. Treat it as a foot in the door, not a takeover.
Still, it is a real shift, and it is happening a few kilometres from Marine Drive. Kochi sells itself on backwaters and Fort Kochi sunsets, and the industrial half of the city gets left out of the brochure entirely, which is a shame because it is the more interesting half. For a fuller picture of what the local economy runs on, our guide to Kochi as a business hub is a good place to start, and you can browse local firms in our business directory.
Written By
Haila Kochi Editorial Team
Part of the Haila Kochi editorial team, covering the food, business, lifestyle, and people that make Kochi what it is.
