MarineDex attended the Amico & Co new marina and shipyard launch in Loano Italy. They put on a great event with the help of the Superyacht Events Agency. The event was well planned in a beautiful club Zelo’s overlooking the bay with all the boats preparing for the Monaco Grand prix. Loads of prizes where given away including watches and gift vouchers to the new shipyard. It was a great night out and which I’m sure was enjoyed by all; with an open bar, bucking bull, disco music and more.

I had a chance to speak to some of the organisers and even flew past the new marina on the way to Genova last week. It seems to beautiful new marina largely designs for yacht less than 40m about 30mins from Genova. I did ask the question to the owner of Amico & Co on why they would buy into another shipyard so close to their main yard in Genova. The response was mixed with a number of ideas including maintaining this yard for smaller yachts focusing the Genova yard for 40m +. I personal think there are good and bad points to what they are trying to do in my eyes. The good things are they will be able to take the skills and name of an already established yard in Italy to maintain a great level of service. The bad points are the area between Genova and Monaco could become the battle ground as Monaco to La Ciotat has become with Monaco Marine. With large companies and monopoly come one major issue, price control.

With the lack of competition due to the yards knowing that they going to get the business on that coast in one of their facilities they can control prices forcing owners to pay prices higher than normal labour and storage costs. Labour Prices in the Med from Palma to Italy have already seen increases over the last few years as yards decrease workers and relying more and more on subcontractors to fill in the gaps. With most yards charging 15% on sub-contracted invoices with additional fees for project management it is becoming more and more difficult to control quality and budget for yard periods. Unfortunately I feel this will become or is an industry standard forcing the annual costs of running a yacht higher, pushing budgets for expenses and crew salaries to breaking points.

Time will tell if the investment in the new shipyard will be worth the return to Amico & Co and whether their presence is a positive or negative for the industry in Italy. We wish both the shipyard and the marina all the best but feel that they won't find it difficult finding work especially with an already well established reputation in the industry and more and more boats being produced while few marinas are equipped to handle the demand.

Check out our Facebook page for photos' of the event.

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