Qualla: Rauma shipyard

Rauma shipyard: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tadeáš Bednarz, CC BY-SA 4.0. In September 2013, STX Finland announced it was closing the Rauma shipyard, and six hundred people in a town of fewer than forty thousand were put out of work. Four months later the town bought the shipyard. The City of Rauma paid eighteen million euros in January 2014 for a facility a South Korean-owned corporation had just written off, which sounds either like sentiment or like recklessness. It turned out to be neither. Rauma has been building ships since the sixteenth century, and the people who knew how were all still standing on the same peninsula. By the end of 2025 the yard had four warships on the water or on the blocks and a contract worth 1.12 billion US dollars to build icebreakers for the United States Coast Guard.

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Image: Tadeáš Bednarz | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rauma shipyard: Ships, Then No Ships, Then Ships

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tadeáš Bednarz, CC BY-SA 4.0. Shipbuilding in Rauma runs back to the 1500s and carried on until the sail era ended in the 1890s, at which point the trade essentially died. It came back in 1945 in the least joyful circumstances imaginable. Finland had lost its war against the Soviet Union and owed reparations,...

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Image: Tadeáš Bednarz | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rauma shipyard: Where the Ships Ended Up

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tadeáš Bednarz, CC BY-SA 4.0. Follow Rauma-built hulls around the world and the map gets strange fast. The research vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh, finished by Hollming at the end of 1980, later carried the deep submersibles Mir-1 and Mir-2, added in 1987. Those were the craft that took James Cameron down ...

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Image: Tadeáš Bednarz | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rauma shipyard: Six Hundred Names

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amckern, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hollming and Rauma-Repola merged in 1991 as Finnyards, which passed to the Norwegian group Aker Maritime and then, from 2008, to STX Finland, a subsidiary of South Korea's STX Corporation. Ownership moved further away with each transfer, and the 2013 closure decision was made a l...

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Image: Amckern | CC BY-SA 4.0

Rauma shipyard: Grey Hulls

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MKFI, Public domain. Rauma has been the Finnish Navy's yard for four decades. The Valas-class transports came in 1979–81, the Kiisla-class patrol boats in the mid-1980s, the Rauma-class missile boats in 1990–92 — Rauma, Raahe, Porvoo and Naantali — followed by the Hämeenmaa-class minelayers and then ...

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Image: MKFI | Public domain

Rauma shipyard: The Order From Washington

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tadeáš Bednarz, CC BY-SA 4.0. In October 2025 the presidents of the United States and Finland signed a memorandum of understanding covering medium icebreakers for the US Coast Guard, designated Arctic Security Cutters. Rauma Marine Constructions joined a consortium led by Bollinger Shipyards of Louisiana, and...

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Image: Tadeáš Bednarz | CC BY-SA 4.0