Well we need a couple, not just one.
Atleast 10
Should start selling small patrol crafts and corvettes to Africans and other poorer countries while increasing volume of medium size cargo freighters vessels. Since China, Korea and japan is entirely shifting to huge ones
Vietnam and India mostly make ships above 10,000 DWT size. Some West Coast yards in India (Goa, Gujarat) do make specialized ships for gulf oil derrick supply service (cargo carriers that look like large sea going trucks).
Vietnam, India are at the same labor cost level as us, but still quite a bit higher, Indonesia labor costs are double that of Bangladesh. China's and South Korea's costs are three and five times that of ours, respectively.
Labor cost however - is only 20% of the actual cost of building ships. The other costs are inputs like welding supplies, shipbuilding plates etc., which our Beqoob govt. still imposes heavy tariffs on. Those should be made zero, if proof is provided that they went into building ships for export.
CAD design wise Bangladesh is in a comfortable place. We have plenty of ship design CAD experts and a large wave simulation lab at BUET which can be expanded for actual ship design modeling. We have plenty of brilliant CAD/CAM talent available, thanks to freelance overseas CAD design work we do locally. I also have personally known a few people locally who are proficient at Finite Element Analysis (the way you simulate twisting and bending forces on a lattice structure of a ship virtually).
Bangladesh Govt. should provide incentives to teach more CAD/CAM talent locally which can be used for Apparel design, and of course ship and vehicle design, among a myriad other things.
Finally - Bangladesh Govt. should encourage with generous financial incentives the private sector, to build/expand half a dozen more yards capable of turning out at least 30,000 DWT ships (in modular assembly fashion), but we need to ensure first that.
a) Low interest loans for this purpose is available, and,
b) The shipbuilding orders come in first (proof provided by yard owners) before the loans are given.
The prime candidates will be Western Marine and three other larger yards in CTG, soon at Payra and maybe some also in Matarbari. Khulna is also a great place (closer to the coast down Pussur river) for setting up larger yards.
Yards at Meghna Ghat are not suitable to build over 10,000 DWT sea going vessels, they can only build coasters under that size or smaller naval patrol vessels which will be profitable. Ditto for yards closer to Dhaka, KeraniGanj or N'Ganj.
Those yards at Meghna Ghat can however open new and larger yard facilities at Payra or Mongla for building larger ships.
