Bruno Thivoyon, Managing Director of the Bénéteau Group, answers Boatindustry's questions on what he has described as a second "house of brands" around activities outside new boat construction. The Group has made several recent investments.
Among the Bénéteau Group's recent investments, the most recent, in the summer of 2023, was in Yacht Solution. Can you explain the background to this investment?
Yacht Solution is our neighbor in Bordeaux. The company works with customers to equip their boats in specific ways. This isn't possible in standard boat building, yet we have a demand, particularly in the real estate segment, where boats are fitted out like houses. For its part, Yacht Solution needed to structure itself. We therefore took a minority stake in the company. Yacht Solution is already working with Lagoon, and is due to join Prestige.
In addition to services during the life of the boat, how does the Bénéteau Group think about the end-of-life of boats, their recycling or re-use?
There are two aspects. We have co-invested with Chomarat in the start-up Composite Recycling, which works on recycling composites at the end of a boat's life. Initially, the company is working mainly for APER, which is in charge of end-of-life boats for the industry. Eventually, however, we hope to develop equipment for in-house recycling of composite parts.
The other question is that of reuse and refit. We're trying to see under what conditions it's possible to bring a 10-year-old boat back to life, with electricity and new technologies. We need to see what size boat we're talking about. A customer is ready to invest if he has a new propulsion system and a cabin as good as new.
At present, we're working a lot on the recycling of boats at the end of their life. Today, we over-design boats rather than creating an optimum for use. With our Seanapps application, another of our services, we have an ultra-rich database for designing the optimum balance.
How far have you got with diversifying into yacht charter?
We're where we want to be. This will evolve over time. Today, these are use cases for understanding boats. For that, we don't need the 10,000 boats on the market.
