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Comment by DrNosferatu | Hacker News Reader

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Shipbuilding is strategic, but it's unglamorous and projects go wildly over budget. This is why the UK has so few ships in rotation now. In the US shipbuilding is anemic, particularly submarines. The "AUKUS" project was really an attempt at life support.

The work is really hot (or cold), dust and noise everywhere. Most people don't tolerate it for long. Recently a major contractor was caught for skipping required procedures for welds.

The USS Columbia was authorized in 2016, I haven't seen it or the new steam turbine that it is supposed to have. Grumman was awarded the turbine contract in 2014, it was supposed to be delivered in 2021, and it still isn't ready. They had to prepare a huge report to Congress. Each Columbia boat is estimated to cost $15.2 billion.

Trump keeps complaining about getting manufacturing back and we can't even build ships that are fully funded + incentive bonuses.

https://news.usni.org/2024/10/31/hii-fewer-than-2-dozen-ship...

https://news.usni.org/2024/04/10/late-turbines-have-major-im...

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41129

I think the biggest issue is that shipbuilding sucks as a business. Unless you are a large company with many shipyards, you are producing a small number of ships every year, and the ships take a long time to build. Any particular shipyard will likely have gaps between orders due to a number of essentially random factors. If you can't transfer the workers to other shipyards, you have to lay them off. And then you may have hard time getting new orders or hiring the people back once you have work for them.

If you are from a country with some shipbuilding, you've probably seen the same news cycle repeat from decade to decade. A shipyard gets a big lucrative order. It delivers a fancy new ship. This repeats for a while. Then the shipyard is in financial trouble, as there are no new orders. People get laid off, but the shipyard goes bankrupt anyway. And then some foreign company buys it, and the cycle starts again.

This!

Until you've visited an actual shipyard, you won't realize how much it sucks as a workplace

There's a reason the moment Japan became a developed country, shipbuilding left for South Korea, and then when SK became developed, it left for China. Now it's leaving for Philippines (Japan), Indonesia (SK), India (SK, UAE), and Vietnam (SK, UAE) after the Korean and Japanese players got pushed out of China.

> There's a reason the moment Japan became a developed country, shipbuilding left for South Korea, and then when SK became developed, it left for China. Now it's leaving for Philippines (Japan), Indonesia (SK), India (SK, UAE), and Vietnam (SK, UAE) after the Korean and Japanese players got pushed out of China.

The list of top shipbuilding countries is mostly wealthy, including SK and Japan at #2 and #3.

  1 China
  2 South Korea
  3 Japan
  4 Philippines
  5 Italy
  6 France
  7 Germany
  8 Finland
  9 Taiwan
  10 Russia

The share that Japan has today is a fraction of what it was at 50 years ago, and South Korea's is a fraction of where it was 20 years ago. Both Japan and SK's shipbuilding capacity shifted to China by the 1990s and 2000s when their keiretsus and chaebols like Mitsui and Hyundai began investing in CN (and Singapore's Temasek and GIC co-invested in port management and logistics), but both began shifting rapidly away from China in the mid-2010s due to the Senkaku Diaoyu standoff and the THAAD standoff respectively.

For example, Japanese shipbuilding conglomerates like Mitsui and Kawasaki began a large partnership with the Philippines to ToT much of their technology and invest in building an alternative capacity in Subic 15ish years ago [0] which helped increase PH's share. HD Hyundai and Hanwa began a similar expansion in Subic over the past 3-4 years as well.

HD Hyundai and Hanwha began doing something similar in Vietnam in the past 5 years due to the FTA and VN's industrial incentives for shipbuilding [1] and India's recent PLI over the past year [2][3]. The UAE has been playing a major role on this front as well because DP World has been co-investing in shipbuilding and port capacity in Vietnam (Saigon), India (just about every container port), and SK (BJFEZ) - the largest ports in all 3 countries are either owned or managed by DP World. One of the best strategies I've used in my career is to follow where and what Abu Dhabi and Dubai affiliated SWFs and SOEs invest or partner in - they have become similar to what Temasek and GIC were 20-30 years ago.

[0] - https://www.offshore-energy.biz/japanese-shipbuilders-encour...

[1] - https://www.mof.gov.vn/webcenter/portal/btcen/pages_r/l/news...

[2] - https://oceanpress.co.kr/news/article.html?no=26769

[3] - https://magazine.hankyung.com/business/article/202412269312b

I am not sure whether it sucks as a workplace. My memories from Greece were that shipyard employees were complaining they don’t get to build ships anymore. What sucks is probably the cost management that comes with the unique combination of capital intensive alongside specialist skills.

I'm not sure about the labor conditions in European shipbuilding hubs like Greece, but in SK labor and safety laws remain fairly laggard. When I visited the Ulsan port a decade ago it was fairly common to see migrant workers from China, Thailand, and Vietnam working in not great conditions (low pay, long hours, weak unionization, and a surprising lack of safety equipment like harnesses)

It's something I noticed a lot in Korean manufacting to be honest - once you scrape behind the Hallyu Wave you can see standards remain laggard, as was seen with the battery factory explosion a couple months back.

The parent comment was flagged???

Why on earth why?

Please do explain.

PS: Actually the parent of the parent (could only comment here)

I've never seen a convincing explanation from the laissez-faire neoliberal crowd how their view of the world squares with the fact that all the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state intervention. They generally handwave it away and try to change the subject as quickly as possible.

When you have the blueprint of what to build with a large export market ready to buy, it's easier to plan an economy.

Modern economies, unfortunately, don't have that. The capital markets are already mature. What ventures left are uncertain. When governments pick winners there, the pie really doesn't grow.

Well regulated fair markets remain the best system in history to find a way forward to grow the pie.

Unfortunately, regulators have a habit of becoming captured by winners. The markets become no longer fair. Then real growth stagnates.

Nothing works forever.

You mean like integrated circuits?

All industry everywhere is government subsidized. Germany has always had auto tariffs, and all of German industry heavily benefited from the long term, very cheap piped natural gas deals with Russia.

America's remaining industries are subsidized or protected with significant non trade barriers- medicine, rockets, agriculture, light truck manufacturering, financial services.

Software services are the one industry that mostly seems to stand on its own two feet, but there was a ton of nurturing of that in the past, as well as onerous export controls on cryptography.

> all the Asian miracles-- Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore-- involved heavy and widespread state intervention.

Hong Kong didn’t. Counter example disproves rule.

It’s really not surprising that people followed a successful model, given that people are fashion followers. See how there was so little variation in COVID response across countries.

Hong Kong operated as a highly independent special economic zone for doing business in China (at it was very close to the Shenzhen SEZ). Its success was due to the way China partially opened up, and the role it played as a crossroads into China.

In 1980 when the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone was founded Hong Kong had a GDP per capita of $5,700 as compared to $8,400 for the UK. Hong Kong was a first world country before China opened up for trade. Shenzhen was a fishing village of approximately 30,000 people. Hong Kong was a city state of 5 million. China didn’t become Hong Kong’s main source of imports until 1982.

HK wasn’t an “Asian Miracle”. It was a trading hub with the benefit of being a British protectorate. That’s very different to the other named countries which built industrial bases.

Poland also didn’t and it’ll surpass Japan in GDP per capita this year.

Hong Kong could only be Hong Kong because others could not: its place as a gateway to China was the driver for economic growth, not the “correctness of neoliberal economic ideas”.

I mean, the simple answer is that people in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China are all poorer than the US and EU. Japan had decades to catch up and failed to do so. The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives.

Now, we're in a new era where national industrial capacity will at times take precedence over quality of life, and we have to make tradeoffs. But frankly it wasn't obvious that would happen again — China's policies over the past decade made it a reality.

Taiwan and South Korea are both richer than the EU on aggregate measured by GDP (PPP) per capita. So are Singapore and Hong Kong, but it’s not fair to compare city-states. Even in nominal terms, Taiwan and SK are right in the middle of the EU member states between Slovenia and Czechia.

I genuinely think an average person in Japan has "richer" life than a person in NA. No real data points, just vibes. I lived in NA, EU and Japan. It is so relative that, I haven't been able to take GDP per capita statistics seriously. The most awful thing for an average, is the work ethics. But that has been rapidly changing in the last 5 years, I think.

Japan, Taiwan and SK aren’t noticeably poorer than EU or the US: https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/

> The laissez-faire approach gave people happy, low-stress, and materially rich lives.

The usual schtick conveniently ignoring the absolute marauding of resources from non-western countries and the effective slave labor extracted from Asia.

You can't wax poetic about the merits about turning your own workforce into "slave labor" (the entire OP point), and then complain about countries buying things produced by the slave labor.

You have no idea what you’re talking about:

The social safety net and access to basic resources like housing and education in Asian democracies, makes the average citizen there much, much, better well off than the average citizen in the geographical “West”.

PS: China is completely different - makes no sense throwing it in the comparison.

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