Investing in Couach

The head of the French investment firm Nepteam that bought the Couach shipyard last year explains his strategy of buying into the superyacht market and his focus on new technologies.

Florent Battistella admits he is still learning about superyachts and the marketplace that trades in them. But the thinking he’s bringing into the industry with his investment vehicle, Nepteam’s investment in French firm Couach is fresh, informed, experienced. Battistella—who sold Converteam to GE in for a reported US$3.2 billion—may be new to yachts, but he’s not stepped into the shipyard business to build one for himself. He’s stepped in to build them for others—in a way that’s smarter, better for the yard, and ultimately, better for the superyacht market.

“I want to get to the point that when clients and brokers and advisors talk about Couach, they say, ‘those guys are the masters at building GRP superyachts,’” Battistella told me when we met recently. “We’re investing in R&D so we develop even better techniques and features that we’ll be able to offer the clients. I want this manufacturing technique to be our core. I need an engineering department that fully understands how noise and vibration move through the hull from the machinery and HVAC systems. There are great companies out there that subcontract that work, but if we don’t understand it, then we’re not in the core business. If we don’t understand the physics of the engines, that’s fine. We’re not building engines. But we must be experts in our core manufacturing skills.”

“There’s a lot of great yachts and features out there. We looked at evolving our concepts to include some of what was working for our competition, but pretty quickly, we saw that the designs were no longer Couach. So we’re very clear that we need to keep the DNA of Couach, and that’s about sea-keeping, about deep-V hulls, about glass-Kevlar and about the designs that these features enable. And let’s be clear, we’re also very much focused on increasing the final quality of our yachts as well. That has to be part of our goal: to increase the quality of the design, manufacture and finish.”



At the Global Superyacht Forum this past November, where Battistella spoke on a panel with some of the leading investors in the superyacht market, he remained frank, open and honest about the fact that that Nepteam’s investment is ambitious and that what he hopes for and what has been achieved so far are two different things. Right now, he and the team at Couach are focused on perfecting their designs and injecting Couach with a new managerial culture that can leverage existing assets into successful sales and deliveries.



Giving the 116 year old Couach shipyard in Gujan Mestras the tools and investment needed to succeed, while further developing success with the Couach subsidiary International Marine Shipyard (IMS) in Toulon will certainly be keeping Battistella and Nepteam busy. The plan to separate the two companies makes clear sense, and with development of the St.Mandrier naval yard site for IMS in Toulon working its way through regulatory approvals, there’s a clear sense of great potential for the investment.

Recent conversations with the yard suggest they're close to signing a deal for a second 50m 5000 Fly model, the first of which was launched this year ahead of the Monaco Yacht Show.

---

Click here to become part of The Superyacht Group community, and join us in our mission to make this industry accessible to all, and prosperous for the long-term. We are offering access to the superyacht industry’s most comprehensive and longstanding archive of business-critical information, as well as a comprehensive, real-time superyacht fleet database, for just £10 per month, because we are One Industry with One Mission. Sign up here.