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Our mission is to increase the diversity and participation in sailing and marine industry, to push beyond the stagnant growth that hamstrung the industry for at least a decade.
The maritime industry in the UK is one of the largest industries the UK, with a turnover of £40 billion in 2017 (Cebr 2017). This is a full £10 billion turnover more than the aerospace industry in 2015 and more than the defence and security industries combined. The maritime industry as whole employs approximately 823,500 people (Stebbings, Papathanasopoulou and Hooper, 2020).
Despite this position of strength, this headline turnover hides sections of the industry which are facing significant challenges, not solely due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the shipping, ports and maritime business services were all becoming increasingly profitable between 2010 and 2015, the marine industry was becoming less so (Cebr 2017).
The marine industry was a sector that was forecast to plateau in terms of growth at 1% annually, even before the COVID-19 pandemic (Cebr, 2019). This is due to increased costs and lower turnover, through a group of interacting challenges (Wilson 2019), not least the poor reach by industry and governing bodies (Department for Transport, 2015). To compound matters, since the COVID-19 pandemic, this estimate has been revised downwards dramatically to a sector contraction of approximately 2.5% (Wilson 2021).
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