U.S. Secretary of the Navy Wants Maersk to Order American-Made Ships

 

In a meeting in Denmark last week, U.S. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro had an unusual suggestion for A.P. Moller-Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc, one of the world's most prominent shipowners: Del Toro recommended that Clerc buy American-made ships to join Maersk's exclusively foreign-built fleet. 

The call is in line with Del Toro's attempt to attract allied help to "renew the health of [America's] broader seapower ecosystem." Del Toro has invited Korean shipbuilders to acquire or open shipyards in the U.S. market, hoping to fix over-budget, behind-schedule naval shipbuilding programs. A signal of demand from a large private shipowner might spark business interest in modernizing American shipyards, he suggested. 

"With some of the world’s most technologically advanced shipbuilders already heeding our call to invest in integrated commercial and naval shipbuilding facilities in the United States, the next step in our maritime statecraft strategy is to attract the world’s foremost commercial shipping firms to signal their demand for new ships built in American shipyards," Secretary Del Toro said.

While meaningful for national defense, the move would be unusual for Maersk, and Clerc has not commented publicly on Del Toro's proposal. The secretary's office said that Maersk's team would continue the discussion during a visit to the U.S. in the weeks to come. 

U.S.-built boxships are typically used on domestic or partially-domestic routes, where they are required, and all are below 4,000 TEU in size. Maersk Line owns more than 330 cellular container ships and charters another 380 vessels, ranging in size up to 24,000 TEU. It has a U.S.-flagged division, but this business unit operates foreign-built vessels, like other participants in the U.S. Maritime Security Program (MSP). 

Del Toro has been working with the U.S. Department of Energy, the Maritime Administration and Congress to look for ways to make American shipbuilding more financially attractive for foreign owners. The secretary's office highlighted the DOE's Title 17 clean-energy financing program, which offers low-interest loans for dual-fuel commercial vessels built in the United States. 

"Our calculus is that bringing a larger portion of the newbuild orderbooks of the world’s biggest shipping firms to American shores in the coming years will offer significant returns to Navy shipbuilding and sealift," said Del Toro in a statement.