Harland & Wolff's failure to win the £400 million Cunard contract could bring to an end almost 150 years of shipbuilding in Belfast.
Located on Queen's Island at the very eastern edge of the city's harbour, the yard is built on land reclaimed from the river Lagan. Its two huge yellow cranes, Samson and Goliath, are an integral part of the city's skyline. H&W began building ships in 1853 but adopted its current name only in 1862. Since then, it has constructed more than 1,700 vessels. In 1870, the company built its first vessel, the Oceanic, for White Star liners. This spelt the beginning of a boom period of almost 50 years for the yard in which it was said that there was not a single day on which H&W was not working on a White Star ship.
White Star's biggest order came in 1907, when it entrusted H&W with building three cruise ships, the Titanic, the Olympic and the Britannic. At the time of their construction, the yard employed around 15,000 people, who worked a 49-hour week and received about £2 in weekly wages. The sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912, which resulted in the loss of over 1,500 lives, has become part of Northern Ireland's cultural and social history.
Ironically, recent plans to transform part of Queen's Island into a "Titanic Quarter" and offer themed tours for tourists could become the yard's last raison d'etre.
H&W's workforce reached a peak during and after the second World War when it employed more than 35,000 people, most of them Protestants.
During the war years, it built 140 navy and an equal number of merchant ships - an average of almost a ship a week. The company constructed its last cruise ship, the Canberra, in the 1960s.
Since then it has moved into the construction of oil rigs and other vessels used in offshore exploration. It also has an extensive ship repair division, one of its most recent "patients" being the Sea Empress, the stricken tanker which spilt over 72,000 tons of oil off the Welsh coast four years ago. With growing competition from the Far East, in particular South Korea, shipbuilding has been on the decline throughout Europe since the 1970s.
While actual figures are not available, the British government is understood to have invested billions of pounds to keep H&W afloat over the past three decades.