A couple thoughts. I would suggest that shipbuilding is precursor to automotive manufacturing, in developing Asian economy ecosystem.
The reason is simple. It takes a long haul of marketing and product development in Automotive to get established globally. In the 1970s, Datsun, now Nissan, and Toyota were generally considered inferior. Honda invested in the US. But Japanese commercial tanker and freighter shipbuilding requires not mass marketing but focused marketing on a few handful of customer.
Customer access is much easier to sell big ships than cars.
Second. Shipbuilding develops important industrial machining, tool and die making and factory/manufacturing engineering. This is the foundation education for automotive.
Japan, then Korea, then China all followed this progression.
Very interesting thanks. I wonder how much of the objections to consolidation, even when the government got involved, came from the political problems of moving shipbuilding out of existing cities, where the (presumably mainly-Labour) voters were?
An observation, the demise of UK shipbuilding seems to be the attitude they took on innovation, but it also seems to be the segmentation of the industry in such a manner that squeezed out their unique value add. In a world without planes, there might be a place for custom ships, but that avenue was taken out by another technology. Meanwhile, the commercial segment optimizes for cost... which is another optimization point where the limitations of the shipyards were a big constraint. I am surprised that the UK is not a bigger player in custom yachts.
Thanks a lot - well prepared report with the interesting details
A couple thoughts. I would suggest that shipbuilding is precursor to automotive manufacturing, in developing Asian economy ecosystem.
The reason is simple. It takes a long haul of marketing and product development in Automotive to get established globally. In the 1970s, Datsun, now Nissan, and Toyota were generally considered inferior. Honda invested in the US. But Japanese commercial tanker and freighter shipbuilding requires not mass marketing but focused marketing on a few handful of customer.
Customer access is much easier to sell big ships than cars.
Second. Shipbuilding develops important industrial machining, tool and die making and factory/manufacturing engineering. This is the foundation education for automotive.
Japan, then Korea, then China all followed this progression.
Some reading and a fun resource on ship shapes!!
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/m/merchant-ship-shapes.html
https://www.cna.org/archive/CNA_Files/pdf/d0006988.a1.pdf
Very interesting thanks. I wonder how much of the objections to consolidation, even when the government got involved, came from the political problems of moving shipbuilding out of existing cities, where the (presumably mainly-Labour) voters were?
lovely... well done... learned something .....
An observation, the demise of UK shipbuilding seems to be the attitude they took on innovation, but it also seems to be the segmentation of the industry in such a manner that squeezed out their unique value add. In a world without planes, there might be a place for custom ships, but that avenue was taken out by another technology. Meanwhile, the commercial segment optimizes for cost... which is another optimization point where the limitations of the shipyards were a big constraint. I am surprised that the UK is not a bigger player in custom yachts.
Bruh, are you daft? UK lost Naval superiority when they ran out of coal. You don't even mention this...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-output-uk-tonnes