Commercial shipbuilding is a much-misunderstood industry, and that lack of understanding makes strategy difficult.
Significant volatility and the length of the cycle (around 30 years) are troublesome. Each time the cycle has repeated it has tended to be viewed as the first time and major swings in price and demand have generally come as a shock. A second issue is that the shipbuilding market does not exist - it is a set of inter-related sectors. A strategy must be predicated on as close a definition of the relevant sectors as can be achieved. There is no single strategy for all shipyards, and the appropriate strategies will change over time – as will investment and governmental priorities for support.
Understanding Commercial Shipbuilding has been written at a time of great change in trade, global economics and geopolitics. It should be anticipated that shipbuilding will also change. Only by understanding the past and the underlying market mechanisms can we hope to try to understand what might happen in the future.
This book takes the long view and elucidates principles on which the markets and the industry work, including sections on: demand, supply, price and competitiveness.
Understanding Commercial Shipbuilding is published free of charge. The motivation for this is to move the sector forwards in terms of understanding. Strategic Maritime (strategicmaritime.co.uk) has been created to provide free resources to promote the understanding of shipbuilding and its teaching at University level: a subject that is increasingly scarce in engineering curricula.
Download below as a digital pdf for reading on screen or a print pdf.
If you would prefer to read online as a web book, please visit: https://pressbooks.pub/catalog/paul1
For library cataloging the ISBN for the web book is: 978-1-0369-8866-1 . The ISBN is currently in process of registration. I will notify when it is available for use.