By Andrea Hargraves 
said Jorge Martins, founder of Neptune Devotion, a company with offshore shipyards in Aveiro.
Jorge Martins, who left the CEO position of the multinational consulting and technology firm Capgemini Portugal nearly four years ago to devote himself to customizing 55-foot-tall recreational or sports vessels, was speaking in a discussion about the present and future of the homeland. The Maritime Industry, within the scope of Porto Maritime Week, an initiative promoted by Transportes & Negócios and which runs until tomorrow, in the city of Invicta.
With the Portuguese shipbuilding industry registering a sales volume growth of 26% in 2020 compared to the previous year, to around €250 million, the sector faces some related challenges, such as “lack of qualified labour, aging workforce, manufacturing infrastructure”, and regulations that have excused time and the impact of environmental issues, competition from countries with low production costs and unfair international competition rules,” Transportes & Negócios reported.
said Francisco Barbosa, general manager of Navaltagus, the shipyards of the ETE Group, to which Navalrocha also belongs.
The same manager said: “We are looking for new market niches to reposition ourselves and grow further, but we know that the competition is great, especially in the field of shipbuilding, with competition from Turkish shipyards, which have much cheaper qualified labor.” .
Luis Braga, Lisnavi’s commercial director, also noted that the main difficulties faced by the Portuguese company are related to the lack of qualified labor and competition from shipyards capable of offering lower prices.
“For whom Lisnav loses the most reforms is Turkey. But there is another type of competition that is not talked about much. It may be Lisnav, for now, that is training more qualified labor in the country and people who get the degree later on hand migrate to places where They get paid better, that is, to Holland. We try to keep in the field of training and recruitment to have more qualified people preferably Portuguese, but the fact is that 20 people made up us, we only managed to keep one.”
“Most clients choose only the cheapest solutions and that is why they choose shipyards in the Middle East, such as those in Turkey,” he concluded.
“We also have the same problem as Lisnave in terms of training technical personnel,” said Vitor Figueiredo, director of West Sea, the company that embodies the marine industry for the Martifer Group.
“But this is not just a matter of pay — there are other factors, such as career advancement, among others,” Figueiredo said.