1,000 ships on paper: where Greek shipowners are placing their bets
One in six cargo ships under construction worldwide is Greek-owned. Tankers dominate, and container ships have quietly overtaken bulk carriers.
6We read 6 sources, 3 in Greek, so you can read this in 2 minutes. See the sources ↓
At a glance
- 1,005 ships on order at the end of September: 16.7% of the global orderbook in the four main cargo segments.
- 463 of them are tankers, 28% of all tankers on order worldwide.
- Container ships on order (233) now outnumber bulk carriers (210).
From the day a shipowner signs with a shipyard to the day the ship is delivered, years usually pass. Until then the ship exists only on paper. Add all those contracts together, the so-called orderbook, and you get the best guide there is to what a fleet will look like in a few years' time.
For the Greek-owned fleet, that guide has just crossed a symbolic line. According to a count by Xclusiv Shipbrokers, September closed with 1,005 ships on order across the four main cargo segments: tankers, bulk carriers, container ships and gas carriers.12 A later update from the same firm puts the figure at 1,003.3
One in six
The 1,005 ships make up 16.7% of the global orderbook in those four segments.35 Put simply, almost one in six cargo ships leaving the world's shipyards over the next few years will have a Greek owner.
And these are not just old orders working their way through. In 2026 alone, Greek owners placed 408 new orders, about 21% of all orders worldwide.35 Their share of new orders, in other words, is even larger than their share of the orderbook as a whole.
The 1,005 ships, square by square
Greek-owned ships on order by type, end of September 2026. Each square ≈ 5 ships.
The tanker bet
The largest category is tankers: 463 ships, or 28% of the global tanker orderbook by number of vessels.124 More than one in four tankers being built today will end up in Greek hands.
Among them are 105 VLCCs and 130 Suezmaxes.12 VLCCs, very large crude carriers, are the giants of the trade: each one holds about two million barrels of crude oil.6 Once delivered, the 105 on order could carry around 210 million barrels between them in a single voyage, by our calculation.
More than one in four tankers being built today will have a Greek owner.
The shift nobody is talking about
The most interesting number sits lower down the table. Greek owners now have 233 container ships on order, against 210 bulk carriers (209 in the later update).13 As reporter.gr puts it, container ships "now exceed" dry bulk carriers in orders, in our translation.2
The gap is small, but it shows where the market is heading: Greek owners aren't just growing their fleet, they're changing its mix.
We don't call the figure a "historic record", because only one outlet says so. All fleet figures come from a single shipbroker's count, Xclusiv Shipbrokers, and were confirmed in at least two published reports.
What we don't know yet
- The total value of the orders. We found no recent figure confirmed by two sources.
- Where the ships are being built. The latest breakdown by country we found is from February 2025, too old to use.
- Orders by individual owner. The available figures come from different dates and sources, so they can't be compared.
Sources
Every figure in the text links to its source. Our own calculations are marked as such. Translations from Greek are ours. Archived copies are snapshots saved on the Internet Archive when we published.
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