The report investigates the trends and restraints that are being seen across the globe affecting navies’ surface and subsurface vessel procurement. It provides a macro-level overview of how most modern navies operate and how concepts of operation are evolving. Taking these factors into account and using Frost & Sullivan data, the global shipbuilding market has been forecasted out to 2030, providing insight into major opportunities for both vessel designers and builders. A competition analysis provides an overview of portfolios of ship designs, focusing predominantly on the top 10 companies. Interceptor boats, landing ships, patrol boats, corvettes/frigates, guided missile destroyers/cruisers, aircraft carriers/amphibious assault ships, auxiliary, and submarines are analyzed and further broken down into subcategories such as landing platform dock and landing helicopter dock.

The market is being driven by global events and technological developments such as growing tensions in the Asia-Pacific region that have already resulted in an increased emphasis on naval modernization programs and a resurgence of submarine inventory proliferation by countries in the region as well as NATO and the United States. These tensions are predominantly generated by Chinese threats of expansionism into the East and South China Seas, especially over the “nine-dash line,” and a large majority of global maritime trade passing through the region. However, restraints on market growth have begun to show, such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted manufacturing and caused many countries to constrict their defense budgets and delay ongoing and future naval procurements.

With the global naval environment becoming increasingly complex and ships becoming multifunctional to cover a variety of threat scenarios, concepts of naval warfare operations are evolving. Increasingly, naval warfare will take place across a multidomain battlespace with further integration of air, maritime, and land-based domains. This is partly due to the transition from mission-specific platforms such as the Type 45-class destroyer (designed primarily for anti-aircraft and anti-missile warfare), and the Ticonderoga-class cruise (designed to be an element of a carrier battle group), toward a more multirole functionality that is seen on a lot of frigate classes. Designers must keep this in mind when offering future system architectures to provide a cohesive and comprehensive system through a network-centric approach to achieve complete awareness and control of the battlespace.