In January 2016 it was announced that Bas Nederpelt, commercial director for Feadship, was unanimously voted in as the HISWA Holland Yachting Group’s new chairman of the board. SuperyachtNews.com speaks with Nederpelt to discuss the yachting groups ‘new course’.

“Traditionally we had one programme for all of our members, of course some events are more suited to builders and others to suppliers,” starts Nederpelt. “So we got all the members together and initiated separate brainstorming sessions for builders and suppliers to discover what both factions desired.”

The HISWA Yachting Group’s new course is focussed on promoting the Dutch superyacht industry in new, targeted directions, as opposed to the one size fits all approach that the superyacht industry is, on occasion, guilty of.

Bas Nederpelt

These new avenues include various events for different Dutch yachting sectors, excursions abroad to encourage the exportation of Dutch products, the investigation of non-yachting events and a plethora of new media channels.

“We may go beyond activities in the yachting industry to promote our yacht building companies beyond the typical shows,” explains Nederpelt. “We want to find new routes to promote yachting but most of all we want to promote the beautiful products we can create in Holland. The whole yachting group is primarily about doing everything possible to aid Dutch exports.”

There has been much said and written about the need to attract UHNWIs to the yachting market. What Nederpelt and his yachting group have identified is that the route to these individuals may well be found through other industries.

This is not an entirely new concept to the superyacht industry, a number of brokerage houses utilise strategic partnerships to find new clients. Equally, superyacht designers benefit from the business they garner from land-based projects. Perhaps it is time this attitude was built upon by other parts of the superyachting community?

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