Northrop Grumman Corp. will close its Avondale, La., shipyard in 2013 and likely part with its entire shipbuilding sector, the company announced Tuesday.

Future Gulf Coast shipbuilding will be consolidated in its Mississippi facilities, Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman said in a press release.

"Recognizing our company's long-term strategic priorities, we foresee little synergy between shipbuilding and our other businesses," Wes Bush, chief executive officer and president, said in a news release. "It is now appropriate to explore separating shipbuilding from Northrop Grumman."

The Avondale shipyard employs about 4,600 people. Northrop Grumman employs about 11,000 people in its Pascagoula shipyard, including 2,400 Alabama residents.

Northrop said in its release that the Avondale yard will finish two amphibious transport dock vessels before closing in 2013. Some Avondale workers will be offered transfers to Pascagoula, the release said.

Northrop declined further comment Tuesday.

U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Bay St. Louis, said he believes that the Avondale yard will probably continue to operate under different ownership.

"Northrop Grumman has very good business people who aren't just going to padlock the place," Taylor said. "They're going to sell it to somebody who can use that yard for making offshore supply vessels or oilrigs."

Analysts said Northrop's announcement bodes well for shipbuilding in Pascagoula. Most of the U.S. Navy's ships are built by six shipyards dependent on defense contracts. Closing one will mean more work for the others.

Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, said the skyrocketing costs of Navy ships meant the Navy is building fewer and fewer, ultimately starving shipyards of work.

"(The shipyards) will be quite happy with ever fewer yards to spread the wealth," he said.

In a 2006 report, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces found that a single yard -- Northrop's facility at Newport News, Va. -- was capable of handing "all current naval construction." But other five are also major employers, so Congress insists they get a share of the Navy's workload.

In addition to the Pascagoula, Avondale and Newport News shipyards, where Northrop builds aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, the company has smaller facilities in Gulfport, Virginia Beach, Va., Tallulah, La., and San Diego, Ca. Altogether they employ 40,000 people.

In 2009, Northrop shipbuilding posted an operating profit of $299 million, less than one-fifth of the company's $1.7 billion total profit.

The shipbuilding division's profit margin was 4.8 percent, compared with 10.3 percent for aerospace, 12.6 percent for electronic systems and 7.3 percent for information systems.

Rumors have been persistent for some time now that Northrop would shutter Avondale and divest itself of shipbuilding.

"It's no surprise," said Tim Colton. The Florida-based shipbuilding analyst said Northrop might already have a buyer lined up.

"It's a huge announcement to make without having some understanding of where you're going," he said.

If Northrop sells off its shipbuilding unit whole, there would be a limited pool of potential buyers, Colton said.

General Dynamics Corp., which owns the other three large shipyards, would probably be blocked from gaining too much of the military shipbuilding market, he said.

Raytheon Co. and BAE Systems PLC seem to be the only defense companies large enough to purchase the unit and interested in getting into shipbuilding, Colton said.

Colton said that if the shipbuilding unit is sold whole, he believes that BAE will be the buyer. He said and later posted on his blog that sources have told him that Bush, before being promoted to CEO at Northrop, had negotiated a sale of the shipbuilding sector to BAE but the sale was vetoed by then-CEO Ron Sugar.

British-based BAE on Tuesday announced that it had finalized its purchase of Atlantic Marine's four Southeast shipyards, including one in Mobile, from JFL-AMH Partners, LLC, an arm of the private-equity firm J.F. Lehman & Company, for $352 million. BAE didn't respond to calls for comment.

Wheeler called Northrop "the leading edge of our decay" in shipbuilding and said the company is "absolutely, totally uncompetitive with the private sector. They are a producer that's so attached to the teat of federal spending that they're incapable of competing."

Wheeler said he hoped that a shipbuilder from Taiwan or South Korea might be able to buy an American yard and rejuvenate the American industry, but doubted that would happen.

Taylor said he had no knowledge of a foreign company's interest in purchasing the sector from Northrop.

"I would prefer that all of our defense industries were American owned," said Taylor, who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee's Seapower Subcommittee.

"But VT Halter is based in Singapore and they've been a very active participant in the south Mississippi economy," he said. "They've been great corporate neighbors and they employ a heck of a lot of people."

(Staff reporters Jeff Amy and Cherie Ward contributed to this report. Updated at 8:34 p.m.)