There are 11 signal stations along the western bank of the Canal, each of which is about 10 km apart from the other, to follow up the traffic; in addition to a traffic in Port-Said and Port Tawfik and the main office in Ismailia. These offices are to control traffic and facilitate pilotage operation. In addition to the maintenance of the Suez Canal for ship's safe navigation, the activities of SCA are:
･ Ship repair, ship building, general engineering works and manufacturing of spare parts
･ salvage works, underwater welding and cutting
･ Dredging the Suez Canal Area for widening and deepening
･ Tugging
1.3 Ship-Breaking Industry in the World
1.3.1 Ship breaking volume by principal countries
Tab.1.3.1 shows the list of principal countries that had started a ship breaking business in the past. As shown in Tab.1.3.1, Taiwan extended the ship breaking business in 1970's, due to an extended demand for steel constuction material because of a suitable geographical feature for ship breaking and superior cheap labor force. In 1982, the total volume of vessels scrapped in Taiwan was 7.83 million GT and its share in the world reached to 60%. However, as an environmental problem related to the ship breaking business became serious since 1988, the ship scrapping yard had been converted to a container yard. As a result, there has been scarcely the volume of ship breaking in Taiwan since 1990.
Korea had increased the volume of ship scrapped and it reached approximately up to 4.15 million GT in 1984. The share of volume in the world reached about 23% and the rank was the second in the world at that time. However, in 1990's, an environmental problem similar to the one occurred in Taiwan and a change for the worse of feasibility of scrapping business let Korea withdraw from ship breaking business.
China had started the ship breaking business and began to construct the ship breaking yard at various places since around 1983. The volume had reached about 5.02 million GT in 1985. After that, the raise of import duties made the feasibility of the ship breaking business down and then the volume of scrapping dropped approximately to 100,000 GT in 1996.
On the contrary, India had started to grow a ship breaking business in 1990's due to increase of steel consumption and a withdraw of the competitive countries from ship scrapping business. The volume of scrapped ship in India had reached approximately 4.92 million GT and its share in the world was about 51% in 1996.
Bangladesh and Pakistan had grown the ship breaking business since 1992 and the volume of ship scrapped was about 2.54 million GT and about 2.17 million GT in 1995 respectively.
