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Loomer Unleashed recently reported [ [link removed] ] that Weichai Group, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate that was founded to make rifles for the People’s Liberation Army, had seized control of Ferretti Group, one of the biggest yacht builders in the world. I told you that Weichai executives had talked openly about moving Ferretti’s production technology to a new marine hub in Qingdao, the city that hosts the headquarters of the PLA Navy’s Northern Theater Command and a submarine base.
Now I can show you the shipyard with exclusive images.
Loomer Unleashed has obtained satellite images of Weichai’s Qingdao facility, along with construction photographs and footage that Weichai and Chinese state media released inside China and never intended for an American audience to see. The images show that Communist China has already built a full-scale shipyard with an 80-meter production line, ship lifts, and a 458-meter outfitting facility. It is finished, and it is sitting almost empty, waiting for Italian technology to arrive.
The facility is officially called the Weichai (Qingdao) High-End Marine Equipment Manufacturing Center. It sits at 269-5 Changjiang East Road in Xuejiadao, on the west shore of an inlet in Qingdao’s West Coast New Area. The operating company is Bostar Marine Technology (Qingdao), which was incorporated on January 19, 2022 [ [link removed] ]. Three weeks later, on February 8, 2022, Weichai broke ground on the site [ [link removed] ] as the headline project in a batch of 125 spring construction projects announced by the local government [ [link removed] ].
Building out some of the facility was contracted to China Construction Port and reported by Qingdao’s municipal media as a public infrastructure project [ [link removed] ]. According to Qingdao Daily [ [link removed] ], the specification called for a 458-meter outfitting quay (a specialized waterfront dock where new vessels are finalized) with six outfitting berths. In other words, the Chinese state helped build the dock for a yacht company it would later take over.
On March 10, 2025, Weichai Power published a 98-second promotional film [ [link removed] ] titled “‘New’ Heavy Industry,” presented by a young employee walking through the plant. Weichai said the steel and aluminum boat-building halls were basically complete and that the plant would be ready for production by the end of March 2025. The film is the only published look inside the facility.
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The “first vessel” Weichai is building in Qingdao is a bare aluminum catamaran hull – a far cry from a luxury yacht – with the form and wheelhouse of a crew-transfer or wind-farm service vessel. Weichai’s narrator describes a wheelhouse module in the same hall as “mainly used for the daily operation and maintenance of offshore wind turbines.”
Then the camera pans to an empty production line. The caption reads: “This line can build vessels of up to 80 meters.”
Eighty meters is 262 feet. That is not a yacht line for the Chinese middle class. That is superyacht and patrol-vessel territory, and it is the exact size range where Ferretti’s expertise lives. Ferretti’s CRN brand builds custom steel superyachts of 50 meters and more, and its FSD division builds fast patrol boats and interceptors [ [link removed] ] for the Italian Navy, Coast Guard, and police.
The film closes with a rendering of a planned research and commercial center, and the narrator says Phase 2 is “also in planning.”
To confirm what Weichai’s own footage shows, Loomered.com obtained Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite imagery of the site on four dates: April 21, 2022, May 17, 2024, July 29, 2025, and August 2, 2026. The imagery confirms the construction timeline in the Chinese press record. It also adds what the state-controlled Chinese press didn’t provide: a look at the entire facility after the shipyard was commissioned.
By May 2024, the halls and pier were complete. By August 2026, the pontoon berths had been added and a few small craft were tied up alongside. But in every single pass, there is no hull and no large component anywhere outside the halls. The vessels at the pier are small craft of the kind that would serve a marina, not a shipyard.
Communist China built a shipyard with an 80-meter production line and a half-kilometer quay, and more than two years after the halls were finished, nothing of any size has come out of it. Why would a state-owned company build that much capacity and leave it idle?
Because the yard was never built for what Weichai knows how to make. It was built for what Ferretti knows how to make.
Weichai has said so itself, repeatedly, on its own corporate website. On December 16 and 17, 2023, Tan Xuguang, the chairman of Weichai who at the time was also chairman of Ferretti, chaired a meeting in Hong Kong on Ferretti’s 2024 budget and five-year business plan. According to Weichai’s own account [ [link removed] ], he told Ferretti’s management that the group should move rapidly to land the Ferretti brand in China by “seizing the opportunity of the Weichai Qingdao marine equipment manufacturing project entering production,” so that Ferretti would become “the undisputed pearl” of the yacht industry.
That is the most direct link on the public record between the Qingdao plant and the Ferretti brand, and it was made by the man who was chairing both companies at once.
On May 18, 2024, Tan went to Ferretti’s headquarters in Milan and chaired a working meeting on yacht and propulsion-system integration. Weichai’s account of that meeting [ [link removed] ] has him calling for the “deep industrial and technological value” of the Weichai-Ferretti reorganization to be fully exploited, and inviting Ferretti’s Italian specialists to Weifang for face-to-face technical exchange with Weichai’s engineers, in order to build core technical advantages “that others do not have.” The same release reports that Ferretti’s then chief executive committed to adopting Weichai high-power-density engines and silent generating sets across Ferretti’s range.
None of this is new. When Weichai first bought into Ferretti in 2012, its acquisition announcements stated that Ferretti would set up a research and development center and a component-supplier system in China, bringing “the world’s leading boat-development technology and Italian industrial design technology” into China to develop luxury yachts, government service craft, and commercial vessels for the Chinese market. A “government service craft” is code for a military vessel.
Weichai was the exclusive title sponsor of the 2025 Qingdao International Yacht Conference, held July 11 through 13, 2025. Its release for the event [ [link removed] ] states that Weichai marine diesels and silent generating sets are already fitted to Ferretti’s F580 and INFYNITO 90, and that vessel models from Changzhou Fiberglass Boatyard, Bostar’s parent company, were exhibited alongside them, with Weichai-powered craft in service as yachts, leisure boats, passenger vessels, and “government service boats.”
Qingdao supplies the venue. Ferretti supplies the product. Changzhou Fiberglass supplies the building capacity. And the Chinese state supplies the money and the dock.
Remember who Weichai is. It was founded in 1946 to make rifles for the PLA. It has built tank engines for the PLA since the 1970s. Its engines power the PHL-11 rocket launcher [ [link removed] ] that the blacklisted arms giant NORINCO supplies to the Chinese military. Its parent, Shandong Heavy Industry Group, answers to SASAC, the Chinese state asset commission that appears 74 times in the Pentagon’s Section 1260H list [ [link removed] ] of Chinese military companies.
A company with that pedigree now controls a European builder of naval patrol boats and interceptors, holds eight of nine seats on its board, and has a finished shipyard with an 80-meter line sitting empty in the home port of the PLA’s Northern Theater Command. This is what China’s “military-civil fusion” strategy looks like in a satellite photo: buy the company, build the yard, move the technology, and feed it to the PLA.
If Washington does nothing, the next thing these satellites photograph will not be Italian yachts; it will be Chinese military vessels built with advanced European technology.
Indiana GOP Senator Jim Banks has already asked [ [link removed] ] Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to add Weichai to the 1260H list. Secretary Hegseth should grant that request, and American companies, brokers, and buyers should stop doing business with Ferretti Group until the Italian government removes Weichai from control of the company.
Communist China does not need to fire a single shot to take what it wants from the West. It just needs us to keep looking the other way while it builds its super Navy.

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