Digital Shipyard Market Trends

Growth Drivers

• Increased Use of Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) – The number of IoT devices is estimated to grow to 20 billion by 2020, up from 8.4 billion in 2017.
• Enhanced Implementation of Robotic Technology – Robotic process automation drives rapid, significant improvement across industries such as shipyards around the world during the forecast period. Besides, robotic process automation easily matches workload and responds to big demand spikes. In 2021 the sea service requested a budget of USD 550 million in funding for research and development of large and medium unmanned vehicles and USD 61 million for core technologies of extra-large unmanned vehicles.
• Decrease in Production Cost– With sophisticated seismic data processing and sensor utilization, increased use of digital technology applications potentially results in production cost reductions of 10% to 20%.
• Rise in Seaborne Trade– The number of merchant ships trading internationally to transport every kind of cargo was over 50,000.
• Digital Twin Technology Adoption –In 2018, the U.S launched a20-year Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP) worth USD 21 billion, as an initiative to upgrade all 100-year-old public shipyards.

Challenges

• Displaces Workers and Lowers Morale – To reduce costs, shipyard staff are not being transferred or terminated from their existing positions. Instead, a position is carefully examined to determine whether it is withdrawn and handed to the waterfront to boost the number of employees working directly to assist a project when one employee goes on, whether via promotion, retirement, finding a job outside the shipyard, or other ways. As per OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) data, 14% of jobs are at risk of automation technology in 2021.
• Need for High Capital Investment
• High Maintenance Cost and Expensive Software