Cantiere delle Marche (CdM) recently announced the sale of Deep Blue 43 to a repeat client. The owner is an experienced seafarer and a superyacht enthusiast who has previously owned vessels from shipyards including Feadship, Lürssen and Blohm+Voss, he intends to cruise extensively with his friends and family. The yacht is already under construction and is due to be delivered in 2021.

“I am delighted and proud with this milestone sale,” begins Vasco Buonpensiere, CdM’s co-founder and sales & marketing director. “The trust this owner confirmed in CdM gives us the highest reason of pride. It is a statement of appreciation for both our yachts and ourselves as a team that is always committed to the owner’s satisfaction.

“We follow each and every step of the project from A to Z, from phase one throughout the project’s development, building process, delivery and afterwards, maintaining a close and friendly relationship with all our clients - helping and assisting them with a comprehensive, 360-degree assistance and guidance. This is, indeed, a key element of our vision and mission as explorer yacht builders.”

One of the keys to CdM’s recent success has been the shipyard’s ability to develop a high-quality, cost-effective product. During a tour of the yard’s Ancona facility, Buonpensiere explained that when the shipyard first began delivering superyacht projects, in order to build a customer base, they had to deliver “good superyachts at a super price”. The business model that evolved out of this has allowed CdM to keep its prices lower than one might expect.

“We subcontract all the steel and aluminium for the projects to another company,” explains Buonpensiere. “However, the owner of that company is also a 35 per cent owner of the CdM shipyard; this allows our pricing to be very competitive.

“Secondly, we contract 100 per cent of the building work. CdM itself has production managers, foremen and so forth, but the work itself is subcontracted,” continues Buonpensiere. “Subcontracting has two major issues. You can’t really control the quality because the makeup of the subcontractor may change, or its personnel. Also, how do you guarantee that the subcontractor is sending you the best people?”

In order to counterbalance these issues, CdM came up with an intelligent solution that saw it cherry-pick the best individuals from the highest quality subcontractors and then help them to set up their own businesses.

“For the main subcontractors, the ones who do the interiors, the paint work etcetera, we actually created those companies by offering the best guys from the biggest companies our support, in terms of using CdM’s fiscal consultants, legal consultants, labour consultants and so on,” says Buonpensiere. “Now these subcontractors work almost exclusively for CdM. We don’t negotiate the rates on every project; we have made a general agreement with them for every single department. We guarantee three superyacht projects at a time, but luckily, we always have more projects than this so we can guarantee that they have work far into the future. Therefore, we pay less because we grant them the work and we also grant them the reputation that comes with working with a brand like CdM.”

It is a model that is clearly paying dividends. According to The Superyacht Agency, since the launch of its first 30m-plus vessel in 2015, CdM has delivered two superyachts per year. However, this figure is expected to grow to three in 2019 and six in 2020.

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