The boats gleamed and the champagne sparkled, but the atmosphere at the London International Boat Show this year was, disappointingly, just a little flat. Here was an industry displaying its finery at the ExCeL London close to Canary Wharf but becalmed under a stubbornly immovable recessionary cloud.
Visitor numbers (admittedly not helped by snow early in the week-long event) were down 18 per cent on last year and sales, many traders said, had been hit even harder. James Clarke, sales director at the Dorset-based Maritimo UK, whose boats cost from £850,000 to £3 million, has been coming to the show every year since 1991: this, he said, had been the quietest year he had seen and the company had been unable to justify the cost of a stand.
“Our main customers are retirees or people who own their own companies, but people with businesses are holding on to their money,” Mr Clarke said. “They are concerned that they might have to bankroll their own companies.”
Mike Gregory, the UK director of Selva, an Italian motor boat manufacturer, said that business had been “very quiet” since the recession hit. “Our customers tend to be middle class, the ordinary working man — the kind of people that have been hit hardest by the recession. We don’t get the bank bonus types here.” There had been “some good inquiries” over the week, but overall the show had been quiet. “Sailing is always something that suffers in a recession,” he said.
Luca Zucchetti, the company’s export manager, said that sales in Britain were down 20 per cent last year, whilst across Europe they had fallen by 20 per cent to 25 per cent compared with the year before.
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Not surprisingly, 2009 was one of the worst years in memory for many in the industry. More than 50 companies closed their doors between September 2008 and September last year. Moreover, according to Matthew Hornsby, a director of Williams Performance Tenders, an Oxfordshire business whose turbojet boats adorn many a “super luxury” yacht, 2010 is unlikely to be much better: “We think next year will be a very painful year and that we are likely to see more redundancies in the sector. The election is an issue: the City guys that are our customers — a change in the tax level can make a big difference to them.”
Mr Hornsby thinks that business will not begin to pick up until 2011. “There’s a lot of used boats on the market as people try to offload their boats, and there’s a lot of unsold stock,” he said.
Yet the boating industry has always been a playground of two parts: outside the show, in the marina, sat Tickled Pink, a 37-metre superyacht with two 12-seat dining areas, five 6ft fridges, two bars, five double bedrooms (plus room for staff) and a spa pool. Robert Braithwaite, the chief executive of Sunseeker, the maker of the craft (the most expensive in the show, at £12 million), said that business was going well.
“Life hasn’t been easy for anyone, but we’ve been fortunate as a company that we haven’t had to make any redundancies. Although a lot of people lost money, there’s still people with a lot of money, and they are starting to spend it again.”
The company based in Poole, Dorset, has a turnover of £310 million a year and, crucially, exports 99 per cent of its boats overseas. A weak pound has made British-bought superyachts more appealing.
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The British Marine Federation said this week that revenue across the industry had risen by 1.9 per cent last year to £3.16 billion “after one of the worst trading periods in recent memory,” but a rise in international trade thanks to the weak pound was largely the reason. International trade was up 13.6 per cent last year on the previous year, making up 39.5 per cent of the industry’s total revenue in the UK.
Closer to home, life is tough. Some of those at the ExCeL will have been hoping that bankers from the City and the nearby Docklands skyscrapers would ride to the industry’s rescue before the show closed yesterday, but many sellers said they had not seen them buying any boats.
“Bankers from Canary Wharf? Not as many as we would like, but we get a few,” Mr Stevens said.
“For most people, getting a loan is still very, very difficult. That inhibits growth and, until we can unlock that, it is going to slow this industry down. If you can’t get the funds, you can’t buy the boats.”