HDW: The future lies ahead
About 2,300 employees in Kiel ensure that HDW continues to stand for state-of-the-art technologies and production methods to meet the highest demands in shipbuilding. The shipyard is the competence centre for construction of the world's most modern non-nuclear submarines and leader in the installation of fully matured fuel cell propulsion systems. In the field of high class non-military shipbuilding, HDW also exceled with experienced construction work and attention to detail.
Since January 2005 HDW has formed part of the ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) shipyard concern, which incorporates six locations in Germany, Sweden and Greece.
The company is known all over the world - but that was not always so. On 1st October 1838 - at a time when Kiel still belonged to Denmark - the "Weekly Gazette in Support of the Poor in Kiel" reported that Johann Schweffel and August Ferdinand Howaldt "joined forces on the first of this month under the name of Schweffel & Howaldt in a company combining the mechanical engineering plant located on Rosenwiese (literally: "the rose meadow") with an iron foundry". The company was not initially set up as a shipyard. In those days it was steam engines, steam boilers, agricultural machinery, ovens and cooking utensils that left the premises. And the first step on the road to shipbuilding was mainly the result of chance. During the German-Danish war, in 1851 Schweffel & Howaldt were only asked to build the first submarine designed to modern principles, "Brandtaucher", because the Danish troops had advanced too close to its originally intended construction site in Rendsburg.
Shipbuilding under the name of Howaldt began in 1865 with a little steamer named "Vorwärts" ("Forwards"). At the time, it was a typical name for a small ship; today it sounds more like a symbolic prediction of the shipyard's future. By the turn of the century, Howaldtswerke was already one of the more important shipyards in Germany. By then, the yard had built some 390 steamers of all kinds. A wide range of civilian and a few naval ships (in smaller series) left the docks in Dietrichsdorf. World War I was followed by a period of crisis culminating in near-bankruptcy in 1926 with subsequent rescue. Then the yard expanded to Hamburg, incorporating an existing shipyard from 1930 as a new, partly independent branch of the company (which lasted until 1985), until the yard was temporarily taken over by the wartime German Navy in 1937.