Monaco Yacht Show
Monaco annually hosts a significant event in the world of the yachting industry – a yacht show. Only luxury yachts take part in it, so for those who are not members of the list of billionaires, the role of the audience in the luxury museum is exclusively for them. In 2009, the Monaco Yacht Show was held from September 19 to 22, and gathered a lot of eminent and wealthy people from around the world. The largest representatives of yachting – designers, entrepreneurs and athletes also gathered.
But the global financial and economic crisis has affected the luxury yacht show. Which, however, is not surprising, because in the global shipbuilding market the global crisis lasted a whole year, and the market is just beginning to recover from such a blow. However, a number of glamorous brands, travel agencies, insurance companies and hotels, which in recent years held colorful presentations on yacht shows, have become very thin.
Such big names as Christofl, Dior, Ferragamo, Louis Vuitton and many others disappeared from the stands of the show. And the point is not that they left the luxury market, but, forced to think about saving, they preferred to participate in more targeted exhibitions (nevertheless, yacht shows are primarily shipbuilding).
Target participants literally pounced on the yacht show, and many considered it to be almost the last hope for receiving orders and selling mega-yachts stubbornly stuck in shipyards (the rich also cry during the crisis). Such increased enthusiasm is explained by the fact that in the first half of 2009, yacht sales fell by 40% – and this despite the fact that prices were reduced by 25%. The shipbuilding market has not yet collapsed just because many orders for luxury yachts were made even before the financial and economic crisis – building a yacht is not five minutes, and the shipyards are still afloat, using previously concluded contracts. But there are practically no new contracts.
So manufacturers of super-yachts just flocked to Monaco, and the current yacht show was more like an industry exhibition, even more of an exhibition-sale, having substantially lost in the part that was supposed to be a show.
About 30 thousand visitors expected the yacht show, but 10 thousand were not counted – this is mainly explained by the entrance price of the show too high for the times of crisis – 60 euros per day. True, the charity auction of the first day was quite successful, he collected more than half a million euros from the sale of watches. This money, as well as half the amount earned for entrance tickets, was transferred to the Monegasque Foundation Against Myopathy.
Monaco Yacht Show
Do not wait in Monaco and the Russian oligarchs. But even Roman Trotsenko, the head of the most famous Russian shipbuilding company Timmerman Yachts, did not appear, ignoring such a momentous event in the yacht world for the first time in ten years. But if the Russian business reacted to the show with coolness, this can not be said about the inhabitants of Rublevka and others like them – it seemed that they all moved to Monaco for the duration of the yacht show.
The favorites of the exhibition were Princess Mariana by Fraser Yachts (78m, four floors, a helipad, a golf course, a 13-seat cinema, a 12-meter underwater dock pool, two bars, a dance floor, 6 cabins) and a motor yacht Sylver Angel from Benetti / Camper & Nicholson (64.5m cabin, trimmed with black marble and crystal from Lalique, trim onyx and silver cabins, silver mink bedspreads).
In total, 100 mega-yachts from 25 to 90 m in length took part in the exhibition, 42 of them were the novelties that came off the slipways in the current 2009 year. Also, 78 motor yachts and 22 sailboats participated in the yacht show. The total value of the presented yachts amounted to 2 billion euros. Sofia Vargan
