A flagging U.S. industry looks for new life in a Philadelphia shipyard

Part of the answer is modernization and automation. The Philly Shipyard employs around 1,800 workers, including dozens of experts and workers from Hanwha’s Korean facilities, to build production efficiency and train over 170 apprentices.

Kim said Hanwha has added hundreds of jobs since it bought the yard in December.

The facility builds one and a half ships a year; Hanwha plans to outfit it with “smart yard technology” to speed up manufacturing so it can churn out as many as 10 ships annually and raise sales tenfold, to over $4 billion a year by 2035.

Hanwha’s subsidiary Hanwha Ocean is among the largest shipbuilders in South Korea. Its yard in the country’s southwest produces 40 ships a year.

East Asia dominates commercial shipbuilding. Chinese shipbuilders have built 6,765 commercial ships in the last 10 years, with 3,120 more coming from Japan and 2,405 from South Korea, according to data from BRS Shipbrokers. U.S. shipbuilders have delivered 37.

But with the administration pushing “made in America” manufacturing, U.S. lawmakers hope to bolster the industry, with the bipartisan SHIPS for America Act proposing subsidies for shipyards.

“Every ship that this yard is building is an incremental ship that’s being built in the U.S.,” Kim said. “So that’s jobs that are being created here, that’s supplier work that’s happening here, as well.”

At the shipyard, Hanwha is bringing in technology from its Korean facilities, including computer-aided design, welding robots and virtual-reality training models. Under a model it calls “cobots,” robots work alongside workers like computer-aided manufacturing and design coordinator Kyle Pernell, with human workers in charge of operating, repairing and programming the robots.