World-Wide Shipbuilding Industry

WORLD ORDERBOOK AT YEAR-END - 2009

Commercial Shipbuilding - World Orderbook 2001

Gross Tonnage 1,000 and Above as of September 30, 2001 (Thousands)

SOURCE: Lloyd's Maritime Information Services, World Shipbuilding Statistics (London: July 2001).

• South Korea and Japan account for 69 percent of the gross tonnage of ships on order as of July 2001.

• Gross tonnage on order in 2001 was 37 percent higher than a year earlier.

The United States Shipbuilding Industry is a dichotomy. The US builds the world’s most technologically advanced warships but remains non-competitive in the large commercial vessel international market. High labor and material costs and low productivity have essentially erased the global market share for large US-built commercial ships. On the other hand, cheap labor and materials, smart business practices, and heavy government investment have led to substantial market shares for the Asian rim.

Despite the current economic slump, the worldwide market for navy ships is expected to grow, market analysts said. Visiongain, a London-based firm, predicts global expenditures to rise 5.2 percent annually, doubling from $75.5 billion in 2011 to $124.6 billion in 2021. "In spite of the declining defense spending in the West, the procurement of major naval vessels is likely to continue," the firm's Warships and Naval Vessels Market, 2011-2021 report predicted.

Daniel Harrison, industry analyst manager at Visiongain, told National Defense that there is a clear East/West divide when it comes to the naval market. Lower cost labor and materials required to build hulls is found in non-U.S. and European countries. "In contrast, the advanced western technologies that transform any hull into a formidable war fighting vessel are still predominantly supplied by western contractors. The retraction in defense budgets globally - which has had the effect of slowing the procurement of new platforms and shifting to lower cost retrofitting and upgrading or even converting existing platforms - has clearly created stronger market opportunities in this area," he wrote in 2011.