The central province of Quang Ngai will have the biggest steel vessel ever in the coming time, to provide logistics services for fishing vessels operating at sea.

The Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Agribank)’s Quang Ngai branch will provide a 20 billion VND (952,380 USD) loan to the project under a credit contract inked on December 10 with the ship’s future owner, the Ly Son Fisheries Joint Stock Company.

This is the first deal on building logistics service ships in the province.

The ship, 45.6m long and 7.5m wide, costs 25 billion VND (1.19 million USD) in total.

It can reach a speed of 12 nautical miles per hour while carrying 680 tonnes of seafood and 50 tonnes of necessaries to supply offshore fishing ships. It will also be equipped with a processing line.

The ship is being under construction at the Vietnam Fishery Mechanical Shipbuilding Joint Stock Company in the northern port city of Hai Phong and expected to be launched in the second quarter of 2015.

The building of the steel ship is in line with the Government’s Decree 67, which provides a full, systematic and synchronous set of basic policies to encourage fishermen building high-capacity steel ships capable of fishing offshore.

Under this decree, Quang Ngai plans to build 189 new vessels for fishing and logistic services by 2016 at an estimated cost of 1.6 trillion VND (76.19 million USD). Over 1.4 trillion VND (66.66 million USD) is expected to come from bank loans and local fishermen will dole out 200 billion VND (9.4 million USD).-VNA