Yacht builder in trouble?

You've got to believe in KARMA.
I can think of at least one person with a smile on his face.

Hi,

Whilst I feel for the workers and their families no one can say that this scenario hasn't been a longtime coming.

See this link...

New Yacht Design or Copy

It is also unfortunate that Broward Marine in Ft L is not looking so good as well. I know they had just laid off the most part of there build team...

Broward's re-organizing their company structure. They are going to continue to build boats (they have 2 under contract), but it will be a combination of select Broward employees working in conjunction with sub-contractors that are specialized in their respective fields. This is a business model used successfully in Europe and after much deliberation, Broward's management team felt this was the best way to be competitive in today's environment and take Broward into the future.

I'm curious to see how this works out for them. Ironically, I was having lunch with a couple of sagely (i.e old ) industry veterans and this topic came up.

The question I have is, where are we going to find enough highly skilled workers to maintain the high standards of craftsmanship required on mega-yachts? Competition to attract these workers seems fierce between the new-build and refit facilities. Couple this with rising onboard wages created by the crew shortage and it becomes a sellers market (the engineer on my boat was once a yard mechanic).

I would imagine the housing downturn will create a vast labor-pool. Home equity has funded remodeling and furnishings over the past few years. With the demand for furniture tapering off, there may be a good number of skilled wood workers that could cross-platform to yacht building. As an example of tapping into this resource... Christensen is building a new yard in Tennessee for their larger yacht line.

Also, with the number of lay-offs in production boat building right now, there should be a number of workers with lamination, assembly and integration experience. We also have a large number of college grads with engineering degrees and no place to learn while they earn.

Just some thoughts...

I asked the poeple that I had met that had just recently been laid off from Broward what there opiniuons were of what was going wrong and taking place with in the company. They felt that Broward had a good work force of skilled labors but they were lacking in the engineering side of things. They felt they were not given clear instructions of what needed to be done and a lot of times have improper instructions handed off that were wrong that caused projects to have to be redone differently or majorly modified afterwards which cost lots of time and money..

Not to mention that they were getting awfully pricey for just....a Broward.