We've spoken about shipbuilding a couple of times on The Daily Brief and we now got a chance to sit down with Ishmohit from SOIC, who's spent a lot of time thinking about this sector; it felt like the right moment to do a proper deep dive.
You see, shipbuilding sounds industrial and boring until you look at the numbers. Nearly 95% of India's trade by volume moves through the sea, and most of it moves on ships we don't own. In FY20, India paid about $85 billion in sea freight, roughly $75 billion of which went to foreign shipping companies. That's not a one-time cost—that's a recurring forex outflow. Meanwhile, China, South Korea, and Japan produce about 95% of global shipbuilding output, with China alone crossing 50% of world capacity for the first time in 2024. When a country can build and deploy ships at that scale, shipbuilding stops being a sector and starts being strategic leverage.
So in this episode, we broke the whole thing down. What a shipyard actually does and why it's not one business but several — factory, fleet-owner, niche builder, maritime services. Why commercial and defence shipbuilding run on completely different contract logics. What indigenization actually looks like when you move past the slogans — the shift from importing and operating to becoming a system integrator, and which parts of that staircase are doable and which are deep-tech hard. How to read shipbuilding financials without getting hypnotized by peak margins on long-cycle contracts. And the idea of proxy plays — buying suppliers instead of yards — and why that only works if shipbuilding is actually a meaningful chunk of their revenue.
The big takeaway is that shipbuilding is a bet on whether India can build a real maritime industrial base — yards, suppliers, skills, financing — so we're not permanently outsourcing the pipes of our own trade. The world isn't getting calmer, and in that world, this capability is less about pride and more about resilience.
If you have made it this far, you will enjoy the full conversation for sure.
And if you prefer video, check it out here: https://youtu.be/tmt5UAWb0bo?si=880lSL7a7PU1L0MI
