An opportunity is showing up for Bangladesh to promote an emerging sector and make it a largely successful one in a short period of time and earn a bounty in foreign currencies on a sustainable basis.
This is the country's budding ship building industry. Already, two private sector shipping companies have made their mark in this field by getting orders from European countries to make small and medium sized ocean going ships. They are now doing path-breaking work in this sector and other potential entrepreneurs can take on shipbuilding tasks by emulating their example and adding sinews to this sector. The situation now is much like the early seventies when Bangladesh was just starting to launch itself in the readymade garments (RMG) sector. The RMG sector then quickly flourished to come to the state it has reached today. A similar feat is possible in the very hopeful shipbuilding sector. The world market for ordered ships is growing annually by six per cent and if Bangladesh can even get two per cent of the market shares in this sector, it can start earning the equivalent of foreign currencies in the neighbourhood of Taka 560 billion in the near future. The earnings are only one side to the multi-faceted spin-offs. In the event of such a success, hundreds of thousands of people will be employed in this new industry and its linkage ones as it will be semi-labor intensive in the Bangladesh context. There are indeed great possibilities for the shipbuilding sector to be tapped in a conducive policy environment. It is largely up to the government to help timely in the creation of it so that this industry can take-off faster.
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