Can Indian shipbuilding industry compete with its foreign counterparts?
Is there a threat from China? With rising labour cost shipbuilding has slowly moved away from “high wage” countries to countries with a lower wage structure. Therefore, we have observed the decline of shipbuilding capacity in Europe coinciding with the growth of Japanese shipbuilding in the past. However, with rising labour cost in the late 1980s, Japan was forced to scale down its shipbuilding activities and Korea emerged aggressively. As per latest reports, China is taking away an increasingly larger market share of the new building contracts. Unfortunately for reasons already discussed earlier, Indian shipbuilding has just not been able to cash in on this trend even though its wage structure as well as available technical expertise, geographical location, etc., should have made it one of the major players. Unless the government acts speedily to support the shipbuilding industry, it will be very difficult to compete with foreign counterparts. China has already got a head start over I
