In shipbuilding particularly, probably like any manufacturing but being more aware of shipbuilding, what we would call the order book in the economies of scale, in other words, the more you build the same ship, the more you're building ships, the better you get at it, the more you drive down costs, when we built the Canadian patrol frigates, the ninth ship was about half the cost of the first ship.
What happens with New Zealand is perfect timing for them to say our having modernized 12 of our ships, they de facto would like to be shipped 13 and 14. It speaks to the opportunity. We often have this discussion with many people about going offshore and why other jurisdictions are better at building ships. They've just been building more ships recently. I think what's happened with Lockheed Martin, in this case Vancouver Shipyards, is that New Zealand and the two ships they're upgrading are identical to ships that were built in Australia. The Australians I believe had eight of them. They've upgraded them as well.
That they came to Canada and not Australia I think speaks to Canadian industry: the complexity, the achievement, what's occurred. They're going to install pretty much the same combat management system. They are retaining some difference in sensors, so some change is required there. I think the way my colleague put it, it speaks to the kind of start-up.
As we get going, in each of these classes of ships, there is the potential, and we do hear from other allies saying that we've paid for the non-recurring engineering, paid for the design, and they would be interested in coming in at the end of it and picking things up. I think the New Zealand work is perfect for that. I think our minister has spoken to his colleague in New Zealand.
We at National Defence will provide some expertise around quality assurance. That's fairly typical with close allies, that we work in each other's country. We are reaching out government to government and navy to navy. Admiral Lloyd has recently visited New Zealand to try to make sure it's clear that we want them to be successful on behalf of Canada and our industry.