In a major boost to trans-Pacific industrial collaboration, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) and HD Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) have entered into a partnership agreement to strengthen US commercial and military shipbuilding capacity. The pact, signed at the APEC 2025 forum in Gyeongju, South Korea, lays the foundation for a long-term alliance focused on distributed ship production and shared R&D investment.
The agreement includes plans to jointly pursue auxiliary ship programs for the US Navy, leveraging HII’s long-standing naval construction expertise and HHI’s leadership in commercial vessel manufacturing. The companies will also cooperate on engineering, research, and advanced production technologies, emphasizing automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to modernize shipyard processes and accelerate delivery schedules.
Beyond construction, the partnership will strengthen vessel sustainment and lifecycle support capabilities for US Navy assets deployed across the Indo-Pacific, improving regional repair and maintenance operations. The collaboration aims to boost the resilience of the US maritime industrial base while expanding opportunities for technology sharing between American and South Korean shipyards.
The announcement follows several months of growing cooperation between the two shipbuilders. Earlier this month, HII and HHI jointly submitted a proposal for the US Navy’s Next-Generation Logistics Ship (NGLS) program, designed to field smaller, agile support vessels for distributed maritime operations. In April, the firms signed an MoU to exchange best practices in construction efficiency, and HHI also offered to build Aegis-class destroyers for the US, reflecting deepening industrial alignment between the two nations’ shipbuilding sectors.
