Japan wins £4.9bn deal to build Australian warships
It marks Tokyo's most significant defence sale since ending a military export ban in 2014 and signalling a notable shift from its post-war pacifism.
Under the deal, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will supply the Royal Australian Navy with upgraded Mogami-class multi-role frigates from 2029.
Designed to hunt submarines, strike surface ships, and provide air defences, these highly automated warships can be operated by just 90 sailors – less than half the crew needed for current vessels.
Australia plans to deploy the new ships to defend critical maritime trade routes and its northern approaches in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, where China has been increasing its presence and activity.
"It's going to be really important in terms of giving our navy the capability to project, and impactful projection is at the heart of the strategic challenge," Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said on Tuesday.
For Japan, the frigate sale is a further step in its efforts to forge security ties beyond its alliance with the US as it seeks to counter China's expanding military power in Asia.
"The benefits include enhanced joint operations and interoperability with both Australia and the United States. This is a major step forward in Japan's defence cooperation efforts," Japan's Minister of Defence Gen Nakatani said at a briefing in Tokyo.
The successful bid helps ease the sting of 2016, when Australia rejected a Japanese submarine programme in favour of a French design.
Canberra scrapped that project in 2023, opting instead to build nuclear-powered submarines with the United States and Britain under the AUKUS pact.
The initial contract for three Japanese-built frigates will be Australia's largest naval purchase since the nuclear submarine agreement, while the remaining eight ships are expected to be constructed by Austal ASB.AX in Western Australia.
"The broad-based participation of industries from both Japan and Australia in general-purpose frigates is expected to strengthen human resource development in science and technology, as well as the foundations of the defence industry, in both countries," MHI, which also designed the submarine rejected by Australia in 2016, said in a press release.
Shares in MHI rose more than 3 per cent and Austal shares rose more than 5 per cent.
Pricing, sustainment, and the transfer of production to Australia remain key issues for further negotiation, officials from both countries said. They said they aimed to conclude a contract early in 2026.
MHI's Mogami frigate was selected over German company ThyssenKrupp TKAG.DE Marine Systems' MEKO A-200 in a meeting of the Australian government's national security committee.
The upgraded Mogami-class frigate can launch long-range missiles, and has a range of up to 10,000 nautical miles, compared to Australia's current Anzac Class frigates, which can sail around 6,000 nautical miles, Mr Marles said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
18 minutes ago
- New York Times
Does Japan Want American Cars? Trump's Push to Open Foreign Markets Faces Test.
Last month's pledge by Japan to open its markets to more American cars allowed President Trump to declare victory in a goal he had chased for decades. For Mr. Trump, the ubiquity of Japanese car brands in the United States is aggravating, when Japan buys virtually no American cars. The disparity has long fed his conviction that the openness of the U.S. economy is not fairly reciprocated, contributing to a persistent trade deficit. Now, in his second term, Mr. Trump is raising tariffs steeply and pressuring other countries into dismantling barriers that range from taxes on American beef and soybeans to car-safety and local-content requirements in Japan and Indonesia. Some trade experts question this strategy's efficacy. They say that countries have in some cases agreed to address specific grievances of Mr. Trump's, like sales of cars in Japan, that are unlikely to result in a flood of new American exports. Automotive experts and industry veterans who have worked for U.S. carmakers in Japan said the pledge to remove trade barriers might do little to boost sales. But in the view of supporters of Mr. Trump's policies, dismantling foreign obstacles to American trade — a longtime goal shared by both Republican and Democratic administrations — is overdue for a more forceful approach. 'Big trade partners have long had rules and regulations in place that lock us out of the market,' said Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce during the first Trump administration. 'The president knows he can go a lot farther than we went last time to rectify those,' he said. Since World War II, American car companies have never managed to gain a significant foothold in Japan, which hasn't put tariffs on imported vehicles since the late 1970s. Ford Motor pulled out of Japan in 2016, citing no path to profitability. Last year, American brands like General Motors made up less than 1 percent of sales. Mr. Trump blames unfair regulations in Japan for making it 'impossible' for American companies to sell cars in the market. These include Japan's unwillingness to accept vehicles that pass U.S. safety standards, which are different than international ones. Mr. Trump sought to change this in his first term. Late last month, he succeeded. In exchange for a 15 percent across-the-board U.S. tariff on its goods — lower than the previously threatened 25 percent — Japan agreed to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States. Mr. Trump was keen on another concession. 'Perhaps most importantly,' Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post, 'Japan will open their Country to Trade including Cars and Trucks.' That means Japan would allow the import of American-made cars without the unique safety standards and testing it usually requires, the country's chief trade negotiator said at a recent news conference. Mr. Trump made a similar declaration last week when announcing a trade deal with South Korea. He said that, in exchange for the same 15 percent tariff rate as Japan, South Korea would begin accepting more American cars and trucks into its market without imposing duties on them. In South Korea, similar to Japan, American brands make up a very small percentage of sales. In Japan's case, industry analysts say that safety and testing requirements can add up to tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of American cars imported into the country. However, some industry experts said they doubt that changes to the standards and testing requirements will boost sales. In Japan, where streets are narrow and often congested, most consumers prefer small, fuel-efficient vehicles, typically with steering wheels on the right. Domestic brands like Toyota, Honda and Nissan offer a wide array of such options. For American carmakers in Japan, 'trade barriers have never been the problem,' said Tsuyoshi Kimura, a professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, who used to work at General Motors from the late 1990s through the early 2000s. Japan is a relatively small and already saturated car market, he said, so most American automakers have not put effort into designing models for the country. The lineups of American manufacturers are packed with bulky sports-utility vehicles and trucks in part because they struggle to make smaller cars profitably. 'Thinking about the basic needs of the market, their cars just don't fit,' Mr. Kimura said. 'Even if it's been declared that Japan's opening its car market, it's unlikely that American cars will sell.' Mr. Trump's fixation on American car sales in Japan echoes his past trade negotiation tactics such as his emphasis on U.S. dairy exports during his first-term formulation of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, according to Alan Wolff, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 'What could have been negotiated could have been far-reaching, and perhaps more important,' Mr. Wolff said. For example, addressing topics such exchange rates, he said. However, he added, securing agreements to open specific export sectors have 'political salience' for Mr. Trump. 'They matter to him, and therefore they matter to the United States,' he said. Mr. Ross, the former commerce secretary, agreed with this sentiment. He spent years as chairman of the Japan Society, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening U.S.-Japan relations. He said he doubted that regulatory changes would sell customers on American cars. Still, for Mr. Ross, removing trade barriers in countries like Japan was a matter of principle. He likened the situation to a negotiation he had with a European Union official during Mr. Trump's first term about the trade bloc's ban on U.S. chicken sterilized with chlorinated wash. 'I asked, why do you have these trade barriers, and she said 'Oh, Europeans will never eat those foods,'' Mr. Ross recalled. 'I said, well, let's put them on grocery shelves and clearly mark them and if you're right, then Europeans won't eat them, we'll stop selling them, and we won't have to argue about it.' The current Trump administration has continued to pressure the European Union to buy American chickens. As part of its recent trade deal, the European Union agreed to work to address 'barriers affecting trade in food and agricultural products,' without detailing further. For others in Japan, these latest trade negotiations feel somewhat like a rerun of the 1980s and 1990s, when the United States and Japan seemed on the brink of a trade war, in part over the issue of American versus Japanese car sales. In 1995, Japan agreed to several measures, including encouraging greater dealership access for foreign cars. American sales in Japan ultimately didn't budge. But Japanese automakers at the time were investing heavily in producing vehicles in the United States and discussions about autos largely faded from U.S.-Japan trade talks. Around that time, Glen S. Fukushima, then an executive at AT&T and a vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, was leaving a meeting with Walter Mondale, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, when the diplomat noticed that Mr. Fukushima's company car in Tokyo was a Nissan. Given the recently concluded agreement aimed at securing more market access for American automakers in Japan, the ambassador suggested to Mr. Fukushima that his driver really should be driving an American car. Mr. Fukushima took the suggestion and tried out a Cadillac Fleetwood. However, it proved much too large for the turns near his Tokyo residence. He ultimately went back to his Nissan Cima and returned to Mr. Mondale to explain the situation. 'He was a reasonable man,' Mr. Fukushima said. 'He understood.' Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.
TechCrunch
an hour ago
- TechCrunch
Hacker used a voice phishing attack to steal Cisco customers' personal information
A cybercriminal tricked a Cisco representative into granting them access to steal the personal information of users, the company said on Tuesday. Cisco said it discovered the breach on July 24, blaming the incident on a voice phishing or 'vishing' call. The hackers accessed and exported 'a subset of basic profile information' from the database of a third party cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system, according to the company's disclosure. Cisco said that the stolen data included the customer's 'name, organization name, address, Cisco assigned user ID, email address, phone number, and account-related metadata,' such as the account creation date. The networking tech giant did not specify how many users were affected by the breach, and company spokespeople did not respond to that question when TechCrunch reached out on Tuesday. As Bleeping Computer noted, this breach could be another one in a string of attacks that targeted companies' Salesforce data, including U.S. insurance giant Allianz Life, luxury retailer Tiffany and Co., Australian airline Qantas, and others. Cisco is a known customer of Salesforce, according to the cloud giant.
UPI
an hour ago
- UPI
Mitsubishi Heavy to build new Australian naval fleet
Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will build Mogami-class frigates, like the one pictured here, for Australia's naval fleet. File Photo by Keizo Mori/UPI | License Photo Aug. 5 (UPI) -- The Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Group announced Tuesday that the Australian government has chosen it to build a new fleet of warships for the nation's navy. The Japanese shipbuilder said in a press release that Australia selected the upgraded version of Mitsubishi's 4,800-ton type Mogami-class frigate for its new general-purpose frigates. "We believe that the decision made by the Australian government is based on its evaluation of our frigate's proven performance, reliability, technology, and capabilities, multi-functionality suitable for various roles including anti-submarine, anti-aircraft, and anti-surface warfare, as well as reduced manpower requirements compared to conventional frigates, and scalability to easily enhance capabilities in the future," Mitsubishi said. The first three frigates are slated to be built in Japan, under a contract worth more than $6.4 billion, but the rest of the 11-vessel order is expected to be constructed in Australia. Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Richard Marles said during a press conference that the Mogami-class frigate was chosen due to its stealth capabilities and can operate with nearly half the crew currently aboard the Australian Navy's Anzac-class frigates, which have been in use since the end of World War II. "It's all part of our $55 billion investment in the Navy's surface combatant fleet," Australian Defense Industry Minister Pat Conroy posted to X Tuesday. "And it means tens of thousands of well-paid, highly skilled jobs here at home." "It's a decision months ahead of schedule, and a decision that means our first frigate will be delivered in 2029," Conroy also posted.
