SHIPBUILDING - A NUMBERS GAME

While experience grows among Indo-Pacific naval designers, order numbers remain crucial to keeping costs down and yards in business.

- Tim Fish

The Indo-Pacific region has a significant number of shipyards that have the capability to undertake naval shipbuilding. However, depending on the sub-region and the country, the extent to which that capability has developed enough to build more complex warships varies greatly.

Most of the highly developed naval shipyards in the Indo-Pacific region are clustered in North East Asia where China, Japan and South Korea have been building large and complex warships for some time and have a long history of naval construction. These three countries have the largest commercial shipbuilding enterprises in the world and contribute to the relatively small but important naval shipbuilding. However, it is only China’s shipyards that can build the full range of vessels for the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) from nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile submarines, conventional submarines, large hull aircraft carriers and amphibious ships, as well as surface combatants like frigates and destroyers. The industrial might of China means that is has been able to increase the size of the PLAN fleet by orders of magnitude over the past two decades and is the only country in the region that is close to the capability of the United States.

According to figures from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in the four years from 2014-18 China launched more tonnage for its navy (678,000t) than the total of tonnage of in-service ships for the French (428,000t) or Indian (529,000t) navies and almost as much as the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force (681,000t) or UK Royal Navy (692,000t).