The Bug in the Palace
On the night of April 3, 2024, a counter-surveillance team swept the elegant eighteenth-century palazzo on Milan's Via Manzoni that serves as the corporate headquarters of Ferretti S.p.A., one of the world's preeminent builders of luxury motor yachts. Hidden behind the desk of Xu Xinyu — an executive director at Ferretti who also sat on the board of its Chinese majority shareholder, Weichai Group — they found a listening device and signal amplifier. In the offices of the board secretary and the company's Chinese-Italian translator, additional devices were concealed inside power outlets. The discovery detonated two separate criminal investigations with the Milan prosecutor's office. But the bugs were only the most gothic symptom of a deeper tension that has defined Ferretti's modern existence: a €1.2 billion Italian luxury company — guardian of brands stretching back to 1842 — controlled by a Chinese diesel-engine conglomerate from Shandong Province, managed by an Italian CEO who operates with the autonomy of a founder, coveted by a Czech billionaire accumulating shares just below the mandatory takeover threshold, and recently joined in the capital structure by a Kuwaiti entrepreneur with interests spanning oil, retail, and Coca-Cola bottling. The espionage affair was never publicly disclosed to investors. Neither criminal case has produced charges. But the episode crystallized something essential about Ferretti: this is a company whose products embody the most rarefied form of European craftsmanship — mahogany speedboats once owned by Sophia Loren, 50-meter superyachts with bespoke quartzite bar tops — while its corporate governance resembles a geopolitical thriller set at the intersection of Italian industrial nationalism, Chinese capital expansion, and the peculiar sovereignty questions raised when a nation's luxury heritage falls under foreign ownership. Ferretti builds vessels for people who have transcended the constraints of ordinary life. The company itself has never managed to transcend the constraints of its own capital structure.
By the Numbers
The Ferretti Empire
€1.17BNet revenue from new yachts, FY 2024
€1.7BOrder backlog, year-end 2024
7Distinct yacht brands in portfolio
16.2%Adjusted EBITDA margin, FY 2024
€124.6MNet cash position, FY 2024
~3,800Employees across Italian and U.S. facilities
182 yearsHeritage of oldest brand (Riva, est. 1842)
37.5%Weichai Group ownership stake
Two Brothers and a Toy
The company that would become Ferretti Group began with an act of filial persuasion. In 1968, Norberto Ferretti — then a teenager working as a mechanic in his father Otello's car dealership in Bologna, a business specializing in Ferraris and high-end sports cars — convinced his father to purchase a nearby boating shop. Norberto had grown up cruising the Dalmatian coast and harbored an obsession with the sea that would never leave him. His older brother Alessandro, more commercially minded, joined the nautical venture. By 1971, the brothers had produced their first vessel: a ten-meter wooden motor-sailer that debuted to considerable acclaim at the Genoa International Boat Show.
Norberto was the product man — compulsive, hands-on, the sort of person who would later spend a hundred days per year aboard his own yachts and personally pilot racing boats to two Class One World Offshore Championships. Alessandro handled the commercial and financial architecture. The dynamic was archetypal: the builder and the businessman, passion and ledger, the person who obsesses over hull geometry and the person who obsesses over cash flow. For three decades it worked spectacularly. By the early 1980s, Ferretti had pivoted entirely to motor yachts, introducing innovations that became industry standards — stern helm positions, swinging salon windows, internal passages from salon to flybridge. The first Ferretti motor yacht debuted in 1982, and the company began producing sport-fishing vessels with both open and flybridge configurations.
I was still very young when my father gave into my protracted pleading and bought me the most important toy of my life: a small French-made boat, just 5.70 meters long. After forty years, I am convinced that a boat is the most wonderful toy a man of success could ever wish for.
The 1990s transformed the toy into an empire. Ferretti's participation in Offshore racing competitions — Norberto personally drove in the 1994 World Championship victory — generated technological breakthroughs in carbon-fiber hull construction and autoclave curing that fed directly back into the production line. But the real strategic leap was acquisitional. Beginning in the second half of the decade, backed by institutional investors who had taken capital positions, Norberto embarked on one of the most aggressive brand-consolidation campaigns in luxury manufacturing history.
Ferretti's brand-building spree, 1996–2008
1996Establishes Custom Line S.p.A. for fiberglass flybridge yachts, 28–40 meters
1998Acquires Pershing (high-performance open yachts) and Bertram (American sport-fishing)
1999Acquires CRN S.p.A. (custom steel/aluminum mega yachts, 30+ meters)
2000Acquires 100% of Riva S.p.A. — the 158-year-old icon of Italian luxury boating
2001Acquires Mochi Craft (lobster-boat designs) and lists on Milan Stock Exchange (MTA)
2004Acquires Itama (open cruisers with signature deep-V hulls)
2008Acquires Allied Marine for U.S. after-sales, brokerage, and distribution
Each acquisition filled a specific architectural gap: size segment, hull type, performance profile, geographic market, or customer psychographic. Pershing brought speed — the Pershing 45, which debuted in 1985 and was designed by the legendary Fulvio De Simoni, was the first yacht to successfully marry speedboat velocity with motor-yacht comfort, attracting buyers like Piero Ferrari and Formula One driver Michele Alboreto. CRN brought scale — steel-hulled superyachts above 40 meters for the ultra-high-net-worth segment. Riva brought heritage — a brand dating to 1842, when a carpenter named Pietro Riva began repairing fishing boats on the shores of Lake Iseo, and which by the mid-twentieth century had become, under the visionary stewardship of Carlo Riva, the producer of the Aquarama, known universally as "the Ferrari of boats," owned by royalty, movie stars, and business magnates, featured in James Bond films, and later collected by George Clooney. Bertram brought the American market. Itama brought a particular aesthetic lineage. Mochi Craft brought the New England lobster-boat tradition, reimagined in Italian style.
By the mid-2000s, the group employed some 2,800 people across more than twenty shipyards, primarily in Italy but also in the United States and Spain. Revenues exceeded €770 million. Ferretti Group was not merely the largest Italian yacht builder — it was, arguably, the most comprehensive portfolio of luxury nautical brands ever assembled under one roof. Norberto had built something that, in the language of luxury-goods strategy, constituted a maison structure: multiple brand identities, each with its own DNA and customer tribe, unified by shared manufacturing infrastructure, engineering capability, and a single relentless product sensibility.
The Leveraged Wreck
Then the money people arrived, and everything went wrong.
In October 2006, the British private equity firm Candover Partners acquired 60 percent of Ferretti Group in a leveraged buyout valued at approximately €1.7 billion. Norberto retained a significant equity stake and his chairmanship. The deal was structured with the confidence characteristic of the pre-crisis era — heavy debt, optimistic revenue projections, the assumption that the luxury yacht market would continue its upward trajectory indefinitely. The timing was catastrophic. The 2008 global financial crisis devastated the superyacht market with particular brutality; ultra-high-net-worth individuals who had been ordering €10 million vessels canceled or deferred. Demand collapsed. Ferretti's revenue plummeted. The debt burden — structured during an era of easy credit — became crushing.
By late 2008, the company was seeking to restructure approximately €1.3 billion in debt. The Financial Times reported on the group's efforts to renegotiate terms with its creditors. What followed was a multi-year period of financial distress that is now studied in Italian business schools as a case study in failed leveraged buyouts — a counterpoint to successful LBOs, illustrating the lethal combination of cyclicality, leverage, and a client base whose discretionary purchases are among the first to evaporate in a downturn.
Norberto departed. By 2012, the group was sold to the Shandong Heavy Industry Group-Weichai Group, one of the largest manufacturers of high-speed diesel engines in China and a leading company in the power-chain market, which acquired 75 percent of the share capital. The price was reported at a fraction of the 2006 valuation. It was a rescue — Chinese industrial capital saving Italian craftsmanship from the consequences of Anglo-Saxon financial engineering. Norberto later told an Italian journalist, with characteristic understatement, that he "coped with it all very well." He subsequently joined Wider Yachts as honorary president and collaborated with Solaris on new lobster-boat designs, unable to stop building boats even after losing the empire that bore his name.
The Galassi Reconstruction
Alberto Galassi took over as CEO in 2014 and has held the position ever since — a decade-long tenure that has effectively constituted a second founding. Galassi, a charismatic Italian whose conversational style runs at what one journalist described as "much higher RPMs than most people," brought a luxury-goods sensibility to a company that had been run, in its prior incarnation, more like an industrial conglomerate with premium products. He grasped something that Norberto's acquisitional instinct had intuited but never fully articulated as a corporate strategy: Ferretti was not in the boat-building business. It was in the lifestyle-and-identity business.
We never rest because we are selling more than just a boat. We're selling freedom. We're selling relaxation and peace and nature. The boat is the instrument.
Under Galassi's leadership, the group was systematically restructured. Non-core brands were rationalized — Bertram, Apreamare, and Mochi Craft were eventually divested or discontinued, sharpening the portfolio. The remaining brands were repositioned with clearer segmentation. R&D investment intensified. The direct sales presence in the United States — particularly in the Northeast and Florida — was rebuilt. And Galassi executed one more acquisition that, in hindsight, may be the most strategically significant of the post-Norberto era.
In January 2019, at the Boot Düsseldorf boat show, Ferretti Group announced the acquisition of the Wally brand through an exclusive license agreement. Wally was the brainchild of Luca Bassani, a wealthy Milanese yachtsman who had founded the company in 1994 and personally designed every vessel it produced — nearly fifty sailing superyachts and more than 120 powerboats and motor yachts, all characterized by dramatically angular designs that broke every convention of the Euro-style rounded aesthetic. The 118 WallyPower, a 60-knot gas-turbine marvel featured on Top Gear, had become perhaps the most recognized yacht silhouette of the twenty-first century. Ferretti committed over €84 million in investment over the 2019–2022 period for brand development and new model construction, with Wally's largest yachts to be built at the Ferretti Group Super Yacht Yard in Ancona. Bassani remained as exclusive designer. In July 2025, Ferretti acquired full ownership of Wally, purchasing the remaining shares of the controlling entity.
The Wally acquisition served multiple purposes simultaneously: it pushed Ferretti into the avant-garde design territory that none of its existing brands occupied; it brought a sailing-yacht capability to a portfolio entirely defined by motor yachts; it added a Monaco-based brand identity with a younger, more design-forward customer demographic; and it gave Ferretti a credible entry into cutting-edge technologies — wave-piercing hulls, axe bows, hybrid propulsion — that Bassani had pioneered. In a single deal, Galassi had addressed the portfolio's most conspicuous gaps.
The Double Listing and the Golden Power
The financial architecture was rebuilt in parallel. In March 2022, Ferretti listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange — a gesture toward Weichai's Chinese origins and the growing Asia-Pacific luxury market. A year later, in June 2023, the company added a listing on the Milan Stock Exchange (Euronext Milan), returning Ferretti to the Italian market it had departed during the debt crisis. The dual listing was unusual but strategically coherent: Hong Kong provided access to Asian capital and signaled Weichai's continued commitment; Milan anchored the company's identity as an Italian luxury house and gave European institutional investors a liquid entry point.
But the dual listing also introduced the Italian government's "golden power" provisions into Ferretti's governance calculus — legislation designed to protect companies deemed strategically important from foreign interference. A very small percentage of Ferretti's production serves the defense sector (fast naval patrol vessels), which placed the company within the golden-power framework. This would prove consequential.
In early 2024, Ferretti's board considered a share buyback program that would have allowed the repurchase of up to 10 percent of outstanding shares. The Chinese directors on the board were reportedly initially hesitant. On March 2024, Galassi formally notified the Italian oversight committee — the move that triggered golden-power scrutiny. According to Bloomberg, the notification came earlier than the Chinese directors had expected, and they reportedly worried that Galassi might be leveraging the golden-share mechanism to "sideline them by seeking allies in the Italian government." The buyback was withdrawn by month's end. And then, in early April, Xu Xinyu noticed the SUV and the two strange men lingering outside the palazzo.
An Italian Problem with Chinese Characteristics
The shareholder dynamics at Ferretti are not merely corporate-governance minutiae. They are a live case study in the contradictions of globalized luxury manufacturing.
Weichai Group, which currently holds approximately 37.5 percent of Ferretti, is a state-adjacent Chinese industrial conglomerate whose core business — diesel engines, heavy trucks, power-generation equipment — could not be further from hand-stitched yacht interiors and Crema Marfil marble countertops. Its investment in Ferretti was opportunistic: a distressed asset available at an attractive price during Europe's financial crisis, offering diversification into high-margin luxury goods and a platform for expanding Chinese influence in European industrial markets. Weichai has been, by most accounts, a patient and non-interventionist shareholder — until it wasn't.
In October 2025, Bloomberg reported that Weichai had sent an internal document to its parent company accusing Galassi of centralizing control and marginalizing Weichai-affiliated directors, who were "effectively cut off from the company's main operating environment and only carry out sporadic, superficial tasks in the Milan office." The document alleged that Galassi had "in effect achieved full control over Ferretti" following a management reshuffle. Ferretti declined to comment publicly. The dispute was publicly compared to the Pirelli situation, where China's state-owned Sinochem Group was ordered in 2023 to reduce its governance role under Italy's golden-power rules.
Meanwhile, KKCG Maritime — the investment vehicle of Czech billionaire Karel Komárek — had been steadily accumulating Ferretti shares. By January 2026, KKCG launched a voluntary partial offer worth up to €182 million to increase its stake to approximately 29.9 percent, just below the 30 percent threshold that would trigger a mandatory full takeover bid. The offer, at €3.50 per share, came with a slate of board nominees that, according to Reuters, "would not seek to replace the company's current top management." Komárek's stated intention was to "play a more active role in contributing to Ferretti's development and growth" — diplomatic language for wresting governance influence from Weichai without triggering a full takeover.
Then a Kuwaiti arrived. Bader Nasser Al-Kharafi — chairman of Boursa Kuwait, vice president and Group CEO of Zain Group, distributor of Volvo and Polestar in Kuwait, shareholder of Coca-Cola Kuwait — acquired 3 percent of Ferretti through BNK Holding just months before the shareholders' meeting that would renew the board. The investment was described as part of a strategy to build a global portfolio focused on "prestigious assets and companies considered high-quality, well-managed, and with significant growth potential."
Three shareholders, three continents, three entirely different theories of value. Weichai: industrial-conglomerate diversification and Chinese prestige. Komárek: European luxury-goods consolidation by an active minority investor. Al-Kharafi: Gulf-wealth portfolio construction around iconic brands. And in the middle, Galassi — an Italian CEO defending the operational autonomy of an Italian company listed in Hong Kong and Milan, majority-owned by China, minority-targeted by Prague and Kuwait, building boats for people whose net worth begins at nine figures.
The Brand Cathedral
Strip away the governance drama, and what sits underneath is an industrial asset of genuinely unusual quality. Ferretti Group's seven-brand portfolio — Ferretti Yachts, Riva, Pershing, Custom Line, CRN, Wally, and Itama — constitutes something approaching a complete taxonomy of luxury motor yachting. Each brand occupies a distinct position defined by size, performance, heritage, and customer identity.
Ferretti Yachts is the backbone: flybridge motor yachts from 14 to 30 meters, the group's highest-volume brand, the original company DNA. Over 3,500 units have been delivered in its history. Its two lines — the classic Flybridge series and the newer INFYNITO range, featuring an "all-season terrace" and solar-roof options — target the core of the luxury cruising market.
Riva is the soul. No other yacht brand on earth carries the cultural weight of Riva. The Aquarama — produced from 1962 to 1996 in mahogany, featured in Bond films, owned by Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, and George Clooney (who purchased the very boat from Ocean's Eleven and married on it) — may be the single most iconic pleasure vessel ever built. Modern Rivas range from the 27-foot Iseo runabout to the 50-meter flagship, and the brand's emotional resonance functions as a halo over the entire group.
Pershing is the adrenaline. Named for the Pershing missile — a branding choice that tells you everything — the brand produces high-performance yachts from 14 to 35 meters, where the design brief starts with speed and ends with luxury. The Pershing 115, the current flagship, hits 38 knots on twin MTU diesels and 52 knots with an additional aviation gas turbine. Formula One driver George Russell is a recent owner.
Custom Line is the canvas. Established in 1996 as the semi-custom arm, it builds composite yachts from 28 to 50 meters across two families: the displacement Navetta line (long-range cruising, generous interiors) and the planing line (speed, sleek profiles). Custom Line is where Ferretti earns its "made-to-measure" revenue — yachts built to individual specification with bespoke interiors executed by the in-house Custom Line Atelier.
CRN is the apex. Based in Ancona, CRN constructs fully custom steel-and-aluminum superyachts above 50 meters — the segment where individual vessels can cost €30 million or more and take years to deliver. This is Ferretti's entry into the megayacht world, competing with Lürssen, Benetti, and Feadship.
Wally is the insurgent. Bassani's designs — angular, carbon-fiber, performance-obsessed, aesthetically radical — attract a customer who sees conventional yacht design as insufficiently bold. The Wallytender series, the WallyPower line, and the WallyWhy exploration vessels constitute a brand identity built around the proposition that form must serve function and that "the only rule is that there are no rules."
Itama is the purist. Open cruisers with signature deep-V hulls and a devotion to the "open" style — no cabin superstructure, no flybridge, just deck and sea. The smallest brand by volume, but it completes the portfolio's coverage of the open-yacht segment.
This architecture is Ferretti's most durable moat. A new entrant cannot replicate Riva's 182 years of heritage, CRN's superyacht construction expertise, Pershing's four decades of performance credibility, or the industrial infrastructure — the Super Yacht Yard in Ancona, the shipyards in Forlì, Cattolica, La Spezia, Mondolfo, and Fano — that allows all seven brands to share engineering, procurement, and production resources while maintaining distinct identities. The moat is not any single brand. It is the portfolio itself, and the manufacturing platform beneath it.
The Superyacht Pivot
The most consequential strategic shift under Galassi has been the deliberate reweighting of the business toward larger, higher-margin vessels. The numbers tell the story with unusual clarity.
In Ferretti's first-half 2025 results, superyachts (vessels above 43 meters, built at CRN) represented 47.6 percent of the total order backlog — up from 34.9 percent in 2024 and a figure that has roughly doubled in less than four years. Made-to-measure yachts (30–43 meters, primarily Custom Line) contributed 40.8 percent of first-half revenue, overtaking composite yachts (sub-30-meter series production) at 37.8 percent. The group reported 47 units over 30 meters currently in production or recently launched as of the September 2025 Monaco Yacht Show.
This is not merely a product-mix shift. It is a fundamental transformation of the business model — from a volume manufacturer of mid-range luxury yachts to a semi-bespoke builder of large vessels for the ultra-high-net-worth segment. The implications cascade through every operational dimension: longer production cycles, higher per-unit revenue, greater customer intimacy, deeper customization capability, lower sensitivity to economic cycles (UHNW buyers are less price-elastic than the "aspirational luxury" customer buying a €2 million 50-footer), and structurally higher margins.
Spending behaviours that defy market trends, contrasting with the aspirational luxury segment. The global yachting industry remains resilient amid geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty, highlighting its stability and strength.
The pivot is visible in the geographic revenue mix as well. In H1 2025, the Middle East and Africa surged to 35.4 percent of revenue — nearly doubling year-over-year — while Europe declined to 40.4 percent. The Americas fell to 22.6 percent, partly reflecting tariff uncertainty that made April 2025 "not easy," in Galassi's words, before demand rebounded strongly from May onward. The Gulf states, flush with sovereign and private wealth, have become the growth engine — a market where 42-meter Navettas and CRN superyachts find ready buyers.
The composite segment — the sub-30-meter fiberglass yachts that constituted Ferretti's historical bread-and-butter — is under pressure. Revenue from composite yachts fell 16.4 percent year-over-year in the first nine months of 2025. The company acknowledged the challenge, stating it would "remain price competitive in yachts below 24 meters," language that signals margin compression in the entry-level range. First-time buyers, more sensitive to financing costs and macroeconomic sentiment, have pulled back. The aspirational customer who once stretched to buy a Ferretti 500 is either waiting or defecting to less expensive brands. Ferretti is not fighting that battle. It is moving upmarket, where the clients are richer, the orders are stickier, and the margins are fatter.
The Membership Club
Galassi's most revealing metaphor for the business is not industrial but social: "The Ferretti Group is really a membership club."
The comment, made during an interview at the Monaco Yacht Show, captures an insight that separates Ferretti from its competitors. The company does not merely sell vessels. It sells belonging — to a community of owners who attend invitation-only Elton John concerts at Venice's Teatro La Fenice, Robbie Williams performances at the Yacht Club de Monaco, VIP previews of new models, and seasonal gatherings that function as floating salons for the global ultra-wealthy. Owners "bring their boats from all over," Galassi noted with satisfaction. "No matter where they were cruising last summer. They made sure."
This is the luxury-goods playbook applied to marine manufacturing — the same strategy deployed by Hermès, Ferrari, and Patek Philippe, where the product is the entry ticket to a world of experiences, relationships, and status signifiers that compound over time. An owner who buys a Riva 76 Bahamas is not purchasing fiberglass and horsepower. They are purchasing membership in the Riva tribe — a lineage that connects them to Carlo Riva's Aquarama, to Brigitte Bardot on Lake Como, to George Clooney's wedding. The emotional equity of that lineage is not replicable at any price.
The digital dimension, which Galassi initially dismissed — "I did not believe that this business could benefit from digital growth" — has become a meaningful lead-generation channel. Ferretti Group's social media presence exceeds 123,000 followers on Instagram alone, and the company regularly converts digital engagement into sales inquiries. For a product category where the average transaction runs into millions of euros, the cost of customer acquisition through digital channels is trivially low relative to the lifetime value of a client.
Cash Is Like Oxygen
Ferretti's financial trajectory since the Weichai rescue has been consistently upward. Net revenue from new yachts rose from €692.2 million in 2020 to €1,173.3 million in 2024 — growth of nearly 70 percent in four years. The order backlog reached €1.7 billion at year-end 2024, an 11.6 percent increase over 2023 and a 25.5 percent increase over the first nine months of 2024. Adjusted EBITDA hit €190 million in FY 2024, a 12.3 percent year-over-year increase, translating to a 16.2 percent margin. The company ended 2024 with a net cash position of €124.6 million — a stark reversal from the €1.3 billion debt restructuring of 2008–2012.
Believe it or not, companies live or die by cash. Cash is like fuel. Cash is like oxygen. Cash is what tells you whether you can proceed with investments or not. This company is ready to do acquisitions. This company is ready to continue the growth of its products.
The cash position is strategically significant. Ferretti emerged from its debt crisis with an institutional memory of near-death by leverage. The company now operates with a fortress balance sheet — net cash, not net debt — that provides optionality for acquisitions, R&D investment, and share buybacks (governance permitting). In a capital-intensive manufacturing business with long production cycles, this balance-sheet discipline is both a competitive advantage and a cultural artifact of having nearly been destroyed by its absence.
For the first nine months of 2025, net revenue reached €887 million, adjusted EBITDA stood at €141.7 million (16 percent margin), and the backlog climbed 12.9 percent year-over-year to €1.5 billion. The company maintained its full-year 2025 guidance: net revenue of €1.2–1.24 billion, adjusted EBITDA of €201–207 million. Net profit, however, dipped to €61 million from €62.2 million — a reflection of the margin compression in the composite segment partially offsetting gains in superyachts and made-to-measure.
The Shipyard as Stage
Ferretti's manufacturing footprint spans six primary facilities across Italy, each calibrated to specific brand and size requirements. The headquarters and main shipyard in Forlì cover 51,000 square meters with 23,000 square meters of covered hangars, employing a workforce that includes over 100 designers. Cattolica houses a second yard with 12,000 square meters. The Super Yacht Yard in Ancona — over 80,000 square meters — is the nerve center for Custom Line, CRN, and Wally's largest vessels. La Spezia handles specific Custom Line and CRN builds. Mondolfo serves Pershing. Fano contributes additional capacity.
The vertical integration is notable. Ferretti operates in-house capabilities across fiberglass production, yacht painting and refitting (through subsidiaries like the formerly owned Pinmar), furnishing and interior fit-out (through acquired companies like Diesse Arredamenti and Zago), and has even developed its own brand of gyroscopic stabilizers, ARG. This degree of integration — unusual in an industry where many builders outsource extensively — gives Ferretti quality control over the customer-facing details that define luxury (interior joinery, paint finish, hardware specification) while capturing margin that would otherwise flow to suppliers.
The engineering department, established in 1989 and sometimes called the Engineering
Division, functions as a shared resource across brands. This is the structural advantage of the portfolio model: a carbon-fiber innovation developed for a Pershing racing application can be adapted for a Ferretti Yachts flagship; a hybrid propulsion system prototyped for Wally can be deployed across the Custom Line Navetta range; a gyroscopic stabilization system engineered for one brand can be standardized across all seven. The intellectual property generated by the engineering division is compounding — each year's R&D expenditure benefits not one brand but seven, amortizing innovation costs across a diversified revenue base.
What the Sea Reveals
Custom Line launched five new yachts in October and November 2025 alone — three Navettas and two Saettas — bringing the total number of composite-hulled vessels launched at the Ancona Super Yacht Yard to 21 for the year. The fifteenth Custom Line Navetta 42, launched on October 9, was built for a family in the EMEA region for whom it was their first made-to-measure yacht. The project involved the Custom Line Atelier interpreting the owners' "style requirements" through a collaborative design process that yielded bespoke customization in every area — a fully mirrored forward wall in the main-deck salon, an aqua-green quartzite bar counter on the upper deck, a card table for convivial evenings, larger walk-in closets in the owner suite, custom rugs, and freestanding furniture selected piece by piece. Sandy color palettes enlivened by pink, green, and orange accents. Fine woods and Crema Marfil marble. A yacht that could not be mistaken for any other.
This is the made-to-measure model in action — and it is the model Ferretti is betting its future on. Not commodity production of standard fiberglass yachts, but individualized manufacturing where each vessel is a canvas for the owner's identity. The process is slower, more labor-intensive, and requires a deeper client relationship — but it produces higher margins, stronger brand loyalty, and an order backlog that is inherently stickier because cancellation means losing months of customization work.
The group reported steady growth in net revenues from new yachts from 2021 to 2024, with an increase of almost 40 percent, driven primarily by this strategic shift toward made-to-measure and superyacht segments. Superyachts have doubled their share of total orders in less than four years. When Galassi says "the world is not falling apart," he is not making a macroeconomic forecast. He is observing that the people who buy 42-meter Navettas and 50-meter CRN superyachts — the billionaires, the sovereign-adjacent families, the tech founders, the Gulf dynasty heirs — are not the people whose purchasing behavior correlates with consumer confidence indices or manufacturing PMIs. They buy yachts because they want privacy, freedom, and the tactile experience of Italian craftsmanship shaped to their exact specifications. The composite-yacht customer, the aspirational buyer stretching into their first Ferretti 500, might hesitate when interest rates rise or markets wobble. The superyacht customer does not hesitate. The superyacht customer tells the Atelier to source the specific quartzite from a specific quarry.
At the Monaco Yacht Show in September 2025, Ferretti debuted the Riva 112' Dolcevita Super — a flybridge yacht whose design responded to owner demand for larger outdoor spaces — alongside five other vessels. Galassi spoke of the coming Riva 42 metri Caravelle, a model invoking the legendary boat Carlo Riva introduced in the 1960s. "Carlo Riva, the genius of yachting and beauty, always used to..." Galassi began, before trailing off, as if the sentence didn't need finishing. In the Ferretti universe, some legacies speak for themselves.
The company's stock traded at approximately €3.77 on the Milan exchange in early 2026, implying a market capitalization of roughly €1.2 billion — a valuation that reflects both the genuine strength of the operating business and the governance discount applied by investors uncertain about the outcome of the Weichai-Komárek-Al-Kharafi shareholder battle. The KKCG offer of €3.50 per share was, notably, below the prevailing market price but above the December 2025 level before Weichai increased its holding, a premium structure designed to attract shareholders disillusioned with the governance situation.
Somewhere in Ancona, the seventh hull of the Custom Line Navetta 140' — the flagship of the planing line — was being readied for a client in the Americas. The launch ceremony would be attended by the yacht's captain. The interiors featured generously sized, convivial furniture: large ten-seater sofas, outdoor seating on every deck, a second dining table on the upper deck for children and grandchildren. A floating family home, 42 meters long, built to order in a country whose industrial policy increasingly treats such vessels as strategic national assets — valuable enough to bug, to fight over, to invoke golden powers to protect.
The listening devices in the Milan palazzo have never been attributed. The two criminal cases remain open. The shareholders' meeting that will determine the composition of Ferretti's next board of directors is approaching. And in the Super Yacht Yard in Ancona, the keel of the next Custom Line 50 — the brand's first all-aluminum build, announced as a step into even larger territory — is taking shape under the hands of Italian craftsmen who will never know, or care, who owns the holding company. They are building boats.
