The shipbuilding industry is unlikely to see any improvement this year, according to the Export-Import Bank of Korea on Monday.

The industry will most likely start to recover in 2017 and subsequently stabilize in 2018, as the global shipbuilding industry has continued to perform poorly in the first quarter of this year.

Compared with last year’s first quarter performance, the quantity of ship orders dropped by 71 percent to 2.3 million compensated gross tonnage -- an indicator of the amount of work needed to build a ship -- and the amount of orders decreased by 62.6 percent to $6.5 billion.

Faring far worse, the domestic market share of the global shipbuilding industry decreased from 30.2 percent to 7.4 percent. Furthermore, the domestic industry posted a 94.1 percent decrease in quantity of orders to 170,000 CGT and a 93.9 percent decrease in amount of orders to $390 million.

Meanwhile, the Korea Eximbank forecast that the total domestic quantity of shipbuilding orders this year will see an 85 percent drop of 1.6 million CGT, and the amount of orders will be worth a 15 percent drop of $3.5 billion.