After 1945, Howaldt was the only major shipyard in Kiel that managed to escape being totally dismantled. The yard was extended to Gaarden, now the only site, and profited from the "economic miracle" that took place in post-war West Germany. The company name was changed in 1968 after the merger of Howaldtswerke AG in Kiel and Howaldtswerke Hamburg AG with the Hamburg-based Deutsche Werft GmbH. At the peak of its development, the shipyard employed some 24,000 people in Kiel and Hamburg. But heavy government subsidisation of the shipbuilding industry in the Far East led to dumping prices with a severely adverse effect on shipbuilding in Europe, and the Howaldt concern was no better protected from the crisis than other yards. In the end, HDW concentrated its forces at the present site in Kiel-Gaarden and in 1990 rationalised and improved efficiency to make the yard one of the most modern in Europe. In the mid-1990s, the changeover to mainly computer-controlled production methods caused quite a sensation. Then at the end of the millennium, purchase of the Swedish shipyard company Kockums paved the way to Europe, which continued in 2002 with the acquisition of Hellenic Shipyards in Greece. Today HDW is part of the European shipyard concern ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, which also incorporates Emder Werft- und Dockbetriebe, Kockums and Hellenic Shipyards as well as the shipyard in Kiel.
The history of a shipyard is always reflected in the history of the ships it has built. In the case of Howaldt, a large fleet has developed over the course of more than 170 years of history. All kinds of ships - and many of them pioneers in their own fields. For example the polar research vessel "Gauss" (1901), which collected so much new research material from Arctic waters during a three-year voyage under the Imperial German Navy that scientists took more than ten years to evaluate the data. The age of diesel engines began as early as 1911 at the Howaldt yard, with the launching of "Monte Penedo", the world's second ship with an internal combustion engine.
The Transatlantic liner "Imperator" built in Hamburg (1913) was met with stares of amazement from contemporaries, as was the world's first supertanker "Jupiter" (1914). For the Russian Imperial Navy the ship "Okean" was built, a genuinely unique vessel with 17 boilers! The Tsar's Navy wanted the ship to train its young engineers. In 1936, Howaldt built the first floating aircraft carrier for Lufthansa's Transatlantic airmail traffic, the catapult ship "Ostmark".
Recovery of Howaldtswerke after World War II began with tankers, mother ships for whalers and fish-factory ships. In 1953, new sights were set by the 46,000 tdw tanker "Tina Onassis" for the shipping magnate Aristoteles Onassis, who also had the Canadian corvette "Stormond" converted to the luxury yacht "Christina" at the Howaldt shipyard in Kiel. In 1968, one of the few civilian nuclear-powered ships in the world, the nuclear-powered cargo vessel "Otto Hahn" was built in Kiel. The polar research vessel "Polarstern", built in 1982, became one of the most successful research vessels of all time. In the field of containership shipbuilding, HDW set standards for the world to meet. The yard played a leading role in developing the "ship of the future" concept, now used all over the world. Another innovative idea was that of open-top container ships. "Norasia Fribourg" built in 1993 was the first in a line of open-top container ships, including the largest cold-storage container ships in the world, built on the same principle, the "Dole Colombia" and "Dole Chile", nominated Ship of the Year in 1999. More recently, in 2002 the shipping owners and captains of six fast ferries delivered to the Greek "Superfast" line were loud in their praise of these ships for their speed, comfort and seaworthiness.