AUSA 2025 — The head of Hanwha Global Defense said “everything is on the table” moving forward as the company aims to increase ship production capacity inside the United States, including both expansion at its new Philadelphia shipyard and acquisitions of other existing yards.
“We would like to recreate the capacity we have at our shipyard in Korea, in the United States,” Michael Coulter, the company’s CEO and president, told Breaking Defense in an interview Monday. “We are all-in on Philly, and we’re looking at expanding even in and around Philly Shipyard, but ultimately, it’s a geographically isolated island where there’s not enough space to do everything that we’d like to do. So, we are looking at other opportunities.”
Asked specifically if that includes further acquisitions, Coulter said “We’re looking at everything. Everything’s on the table.”
Since closing its $100 million acquisition of Philly Shipyard last December, the South Korean conglomerate has aggressively expanded its presence in the United States to include recruiting Coulter, a former Leonardo DRS executive, in his current role as the head of global defense.
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The shipyard is currently building National Security Multi-Mission Vessels (NSMV) — platforms being purchased by the Transportation Department for mariner training — and commercial tankers ordered by Hanwha Shipping.
While the contracts to build NSMVs pre-date Hanwha’s acquisition of the shipyard, Coulter said the theory behind the company ordering ships from its own shipyards revolves around training the workforce.
“We are in the process already of hiring the right workforce [and] transferring the technology, but it’s going to take a little bit of time to get there,” he said. “The idea is a lot of that work is going to end up happening for the first ship or two in Korea. But we’re bringing workforce from the United States to Korea to understand how it’s done. … As we proceed through the ship class, we’ll do more and more work to ultimately build them here in Philly.”
Separately, Coulter said that Hanwha is actively approaching other American shipbuilders to become an outsourcing partner for larger programs, a concept that major primes and the Pentagon have described as “distributed shipbuilding.”
“I wouldn’t say they’ve [talks] progressed very far, but I would say we have put the offer on the table, both with the US government, US Navy, and all of the major shipbuilders in the United States that we’re interested in being a partner,” he said. “We believe we have technology that can help the United States solve its shipbuilding problem, and we’re interested in having those conversations.”
Since Hanwha acquired Philly Shipyard, several other international companies have moved or shown interest in making similar purchases inside the United States. Reuters reported in September that South Korea’s HD Hyundai Heavy was considering such an acquisition, and Canada’s Davie is working through the process of purchasing facilities in Texas where it plans to build icebreakers.
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