Austal opens US$100 million steel shipbuilding yard

Perth international shipbuilder Austal has opened the company’s new state-of-the-art steel shipbuilding facility in Mobile, Alabama (pictured), enabling the simultaneous production of both aluminium and steel hulled ships. The first vessels to be built in the new steel facility will be two Navajo-class Towing, Salvage, and Rescue Ships (T-ATS) for the United States Navy, which…

The cost of offshoring now being paid – by John Broadbent

By John Broadbent Do you remember when some Australian manufacturers off-shored their production to lower-cost labour countries, mostly in SE Asia? In most cases, the labour issue was because the equipment on which they worked was ancient history, a relic, fully-depreciated and being sweated so much, it was dripping. Rather than use the depreciation tax…