According to SuperYacht Times iQ, the 40 to 50-metre market is off to a good start in 2020 so far. These figures reflect the optimism shared by the industry professionals SuperYacht Times has spoken to during the pandemic. With this in mind, Sanlorenzo’s Antonio Santella, Vice President of Sales and Marketing shared his thoughts of the yard's current sales and activities during the Covid-19 crisis.
As we all know, the yard was closed for the lockdown period. But we were soon back open with a full workforce and remain on track to launch four new units: a 44-metre, 52-metre, a 47-metre explorer and a 46-metre. We really feel the pressure to try and recuperate what we have lost in terms of timing to ensure they are delivered in time for the summer to their owners. Our workers are working day and night in three shifts.
Nothing has been stopping us! We have sold two new 44-metre yachts during this period. We seem to have had more communication with customers because most of them were stuck inside their houses and had plenty of time to stay in touch with us. Those who needed to have been able to fly to the Swiss border on a private flight to continue our discussion. We have been lucky to have had permission from the government to receive foreign people for a period of 72 hours without any kind of quarantine and so we welcomed a client from the Far East who was happy with the chance to make a quick decision! Business in the Far East is going well - at the moment there is a 57-metre deal in discussion, whereas in the States, all our deals have been put on hold for the time being.
We have 17 yachts under construction, 12 of which are sold and five are speculation builds - because of these numbers I think that we will maintain our sales figures so we are not worried. I believe that the summer season will be quite normal now that people can go boating again. People want to forget this terrible period as soon as possible and being on a yacht gives a sense of security. For wealthy people it is one of the best ways to spend time away safely, so I'm optimistic that later on in the year everything will be somewhat normal.
As you know, we put Sanlorenzo on the Italian stock exchange and it became big news. So we have found that we cannot do anything secretly! We have due diligence to check everything about Perini Navi and have a couple of months to do so and then, we decide whether to go ahead or not. At the moment we are just checking everything.
Yes. SYBAss is trying, but there are still many different ways of communicating to wealthy people that we need to continue our efforts. For Sanlorenzo, it is very difficult to meet new customers as 80% of our owners are repeat clients. 