A flurry of Feadships

Following Feadship’s most recent launch of 44.2m motoryacht Moon Sand, the Dutch yard has a busy year ahead, with seven boats scheduled to be delivered in 2015. Commercial director Bas Nederpelt attended the Dubois Cup last week in support of the growing relationship between Feadship and Dubois and, catching up with SuperyachtNews.com at the event, is positive that while certain parts of the new build sector may be lacking in business the more established yards are profiting.

“There are a good amount of enquiries at the moment for us,” Nederpelt says. “In the new build market in general there may be a lot of enquiries but I don’t think there are many deals being done. But the market is good for the better builders with quality reputations and a solid financial situation.

“We always come out in statistics poorly because we only speak about projects that are currently in the outfitting stage and in their last year of production. But there is a very healthy number of projects going on at the moment, we have sold a few new projects and the order book is looking very healthy.”


In terms of future potential growth, Nederpelt explains that geographically the traditional markets remain the most fruitful. “The United States is an important market for us at the moment and western Europe is always very important because there are a lot of experienced yachtsmen there who want to continue with their hobbies,” he says. “Asia is growing gradually – yachting there is not for everyone but some yards are profiting from the building up of that market – and South America is a bit slow.”

However, Nederpelt does observe that the overall client profile is changing. “There has been a trend over quite some years that there is much more of a spread in the type of clients we have,” he explains. “It is no longer always the typical well-off older person. We are seeing more highly technical, 30-somethings talking about a very big boat or, at the other end of the spectrum, other people who have always wanted a boat but have only been able to do it when they are in their 70s.”

In terms of size, Nederpelt claims that Feadship will continue to position themselves in the full custom market between 40m and 100m. “We are not planning to focus in on one size range anytime soon but our largest yachts do tend to grow over time,” he adds. “Ten years ago we would not have talked about a 100m superyacht, but we made a big effort a couple of years ago to enable this and won a project just over 100m, and there is more to come. So we are very active in the larger end of the market but we don’t go for the 150m projects – it would take up too much of our capacity and physically it is difficult to build that size in Holland due to the location.”

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