Genting Hong Kong’s unfinished mega-cruise ship to be sold for scrap

After Genting Hong Kong Limited – a holding company that operates cruise and resort businesses, filed for bankruptcy June 19, 2022, the insolvency administration is seeking to liquidate some of the firm’s assets, including an unfinished mega-liner, Global Dream II, which was expected to become one of the world’s largest cruise ships.

According to insolvency administrator Christoph Morgen, some of the vessel’s systems and its engines will be resold, and the vessel’s unfinished hull, complete only in the lower area, will be sold for scrap.

The same fate is also looming over its nearly complete sister ship, the Global Dream, which is currently stuck at the MV Werften shipyard in Wismar on Germany’s Baltic coast.

The shipyard went bankrupt early this year and was acquired by ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems. The firm is expected to use the wharfage to build naval vessels, including submarines.

The giant Global Dream is about 80% complete and seaworthy, therefore it can be tugged anywhere in the world, according to the insolvency administrators. The administration has failed to find any buyers for the ship so far though. Swedish shipping company Stena was reportedly interested in buying the ship, but the prospective deal fell apart in May 2022.

Should the bankruptcy officials fail to find a buyer for the giant ship ‘in the coming weeks,’ it might end up in a scrap yard like its ill-fated sister ship.

The Global-class cruise ships were destined to become some of the world’s largest in terms of size, measuring about 208,000 gross tonnage.

The ships were expected to be able to take more than 9,000 passengers aboard.

The cruise line sector has been severely hurt by the global COVID-19 pandemic, with many cruise operators going bankrupt because of the coronavirus pandemic impact and the worldwide travel restrictions imposed it caused.

Giant cruise ships were hotbeds for COVID-19 at the start of the global pandemic, with both cruise passengers and crew members being infected with the virus en-masse in the confined environments of seafaring ships, which frequently became stranded offshore due to the onboard coronavirus outbreaks.