Context
A Northern European sailing yacht manufacturer with an established brand in the 35 to 55-foot performance cruiser segment — a category where buyers are sophisticated, specifications exacting, and the brand's word-of-mouth reputation in the European sailing community is the primary commercial asset. The company designed its boats in-house and sold through marinas and dealerships across Northern and Western Europe, but manufactured hulls and completed final assembly at a subcontractor facility in southern China. The arrangement, made a decade earlier for its margin advantage, was by 2023 failing on four dimensions simultaneously: Chinese labour-cost inflation had eroded the cost gap to the point where it no longer justified the operational complexity; finish quality had drifted across three production cycles, generating warranty claims and unflattering comments in the sailing press; a six-week ocean transit pushed the order-to-delivery cycle to eight to ten months against competitors delivering in four to six; and the production director was losing some forty days a year to supervision flights across nine time zones. Management concluded the China arrangement had to end — but had no clear answer to where a Europe-adjacent alternative might exist.
Our Mission
Identify the optimal alternative manufacturing location for a European sailing yacht brand in the 35 to 55-foot segment — Europe or a Europe-adjacent geography — assess the practical ecosystem requirements for yacht production at this scale, and present a recommendation with a realistic implementation path. The criteria: proximity to European customers and dealers, a viable marine component and materials supply chain within reach, an EU-market-compatible regulatory environment, a cost structure meaningfully below Western Europe, and the possibility of beginning production within eighteen months of a go-ahead.
Our Approach
MAXAM surveyed the candidate geographies — Portugal (mature but Western-European cost, no free-zone advantage), Croatia (motorboat and refit-focused), Montenegro (early-stage, thin industrial base), Morocco (cost-competitive but limited marine ecosystem and EU-export regulatory uncertainty), and Turkey's Antalya free-zone cluster. Antalya scored strongest on the weighted criteria: Turkey's customs union with the EU lets Turkish-made goods enter EU markets without standard import duties; the free zone adds fiscal benefits on exported production; and the geographic position compresses delivery logistics from six weeks to a handful of sailing days. Most decisively, Antalya had organically built, over more than a decade, a cluster of over 400 specialist marine subcontractors — canvas and upholstery, stainless and aluminium fabrication, teak decking, electrical and electronics, rigging, painting, composites — the difference between building a production capability from zero and plugging into an existing one. MAXAM's value was relational rather than analytical: its Turkish marine-industry network included direct relationships with the free-zone authority, established composite and fibreglass hull yards, and subcontractor principals across the key trades. MAXAM organised a decisive four-day site visit (free-zone authority briefing, two operating yard visits including a foreign brand that had relocated from abroad, and introductory meetings across the supply chain), then supported a structured due-diligence phase: regulatory and export-documentation requirements, full-landed-cost modelling against the China baseline, and preliminary qualification of three candidate hull-building subcontractors. Cost modelling confirmed Antalya production ran 12 to 18% above China at equivalent quality but 25 to 30% below Western Europe — and, once logistics, QC travel, warranty, and internal management overhead were included, was economically comparable to China on total cost while superior on every qualitative dimension.
Before & After Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Order-to-delivery lead time | 9 months | 5 months |
| Production cost vs. Western Europe | Baseline | -25 to -30% |
| Mid-production supervisory access | Intercontinental flight | 3-hour flight / by road |
| Mid-production change turnaround | ~3 weeks (China) | 4 working days |
"MAXAM didn't just tell us Antalya was viable. They showed us the people who were already making it work — the supply chain we would have spent five years trying to build in Asia, already existing, ten minutes from the yard gate."
Commercial Director
Commercial Director — Northern European Yacht Manufacturer