The shipbuilders' union urged the government not to sell warships to Pinochet, even though losing these contracts could threaten their own jobs.
It expects production to begin early next year, and plans to license designs to other shipbuilders soon thereafter.As yet, few shipping companies have adopted air lubrication, in spite of results like these.
So it is no small irony that, from October 1st, harbours, shipbuilders and other maritime ventures in the developing world may be partly owned by none other than Uncle Sam.
That the shipbuilders are national champions in an industry deemed strategically important makes their crisis an even more serious challenge to the leaders' resolve.In this section Start-up spring Untraditional choice Accord, alliance or disunity?
Shipbuilders, restaurants and shops all want to hire people, but would-be workers have nowhere to live.
The European yards have led the way in refining this block system and in streamlining the arrival of the millions of components that make up a ship.Another competitive advantage is what Jorma Eloranta, Kvaerner-Masa's boss, calls the "network effect" created by the shipbuilders' reliance on specialist subcontractors.
Even the shipbuilders in nearby Rostock, a former East German port that became notorious in the 1990s for unsavoury attacks by neo-Nazis on asylum seekers, are successful.There is a chance that the present Polish government will be able to mop up the mess left by its predecessors.
Notably, they have brought new jobs for women; there weren't many female shipbuilders.
America, for instance, has only two big naval shipbuilders with six yards, while fragmented Europe has no fewer than 21 firms with 23 yards.
At Komsomolsk, a depressed town in the neighbouring region of Khabarovsk, 1,000 shipbuilders have been kept in work this year building a specially reinforced base to enable the first Sakhalin-2 rig to operate in Arctic conditions.
The firm points out, not unreasonably, that it has to buy Chinese ships because Brazilian shipbuilders are incapable of making vessels that are big enough for its needs.
