The steep learning curve America faces if it wants to return to previous shipyard glory days

The stats surrounding the steep learning curve the US faces if it wants to claw back any market share in shipbuilding are astonishing.

Donald Trump, the American president, is taking steps to try and build back the country’s shipyards, creating a shipbuilding office in the White House, and last week signing an executive order creating a Maritime Security Trust Fund to provide sustainable funding for initiatives that strengthen US maritime capabilities. This includes using funds from tariffs, fines, fees, or tax revenues with Trump also expected to rule on penalising Chinese-built tonnage calling at US ports soon.

“We’re way, way, way behind,” Trump said last week, speaking in the Oval Office. “We used to build a ship a day, and now we don’t do a ship a year, practically, and we have the capacity to do it.”

Overseas shipbuilding firms, notably from South Korea, are busy investing in American infrastructure in recent months.

The US accounts for less than 1% of global ship output. Putting the scale of how far behind American shipbuilding is to its Asian rival, China manufactured more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than US shipyards have built since the end of World War II.

Labour force-wise, Americans long ago ditched shipyards as a career, as data from Greek broker Ursa shows (see chart below).

During the 1950s and 1960s, roughly 1 in every 400 non-farm workers in the US was employed in shipbuilding. Today, it is around one in every 1,000.

Global Times, a state-run Chinese newspaper, lambasted the American plans last month in an OpEd, arguing: “The chasm between American and Chinese shipbuilding is fundamentally a gap in industrial infrastructure. The forces of globalization swept away America’s steel mills, machine shops and skilled labor force, leaving behind rusting supply chains and a hollowed-out manufacturing base. Shipbuilding, a quintessential heavy industry, requires a robust industrial foundation. When that foundation crumbles, shipbuilding inevitably follows.”