cruising sailboats and for Sterling Yachts
motor yachts and trawlers.
Scott Smith is a principal with Boston
Boatworks in East Boston, MA, a company of
about 42 employees that was established in
1996. Smith said his business has improved
over the level it was in 2010. “We actually
scaled back in July of 2008, about 20% of our
labor force, and a little over 5% in September
of 2009. We’ve hired back about 15% from
that point so we’re higher than we were at the
end of 2010. In our forecasting now we think
that there is higher likelihood that we will
scale up than scale down.”
“We’re very busy and we were very busy a
year ago, but it doesn’t take much for a
builder that builds one or two boats at a time
to be very busy. You’re either out of business
or you’re busy,” said Ed Roberts of Hodgdon
Yachts in East Boothbay, ME. “My take is that
the industry is starting to recover a bit and
that the better quality a boat that a company
builds, the more likely they are to have seen
some kind of recovery.”
Daniel Kubera, a spokesman for
Brunswick Boat Group in Knoxville, Ten-
nessee, said, “The last two years have been
very difficult.” He said that the market started
softening at the end of 2007, and 2009 was a
tough year, but things began to improve in
2010. “Operating leverage was outstanding,”
he said, adding that Brunswick’s revenue for
2010 was $627 million. Overall, Kubera is
optimistic about the future of boating, saying,
“Americans haven’t lost their love affair with
the water.”
Eric Kashion is director of marketing for
Hatteras Yachts in New Bern, NC. “2010 was
definitely up over 2009. What Hatteras has
done during the downturn is, we’ve tried to
right-size our business as a whole. We’re a
much smaller, more nimble organization.
We’re not looking so much toward market
share as we’re looking toward finding the
right group of customers that are still buying
and then building product that meets their
needs at a price point that is competitive in
the current marketplace. In a way, although
it’s been painful for everyone in the industry,
we feel we’re much stronger for it.”
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MEJ: Compare the high
end vs the lower end of the
market in terms of recovery.
Most boat builders agreed that larger,
higher-end boat sales weathered the recession
better than those of more moderately priced
boats. As Hodgson put it, “Lower-priced
boats were hit harder. The longer the boat,
the more insulated the buyer.”
Roberts explained that towards the middle
of 2010 most of the big-boat businesses “were
still doing fine because they were finishing
things that they had been building under
contract from some years before, because the
build time is so long, two or three years on
average for a super yacht. So they were all still
building and launching the boats that had
been under contract and under build for
quite some time. What was happening was
that they weren’t getting new contracts
behind them. And now that’s starting to hap-
pen; they are getting new contracts, but...
most of those big builders are relatively small
and one or two new contracts makes a huge
difference in their outlook.
“So if you’d asked a sampling of super
