Handshakes and hot buyers – the view from Cannes

opinion

by Rob Hodgetts

15 September 2025

Aerial view of the Cannes Yachting Festival.

A warm but weary smile creases his face as he stretches out his hand. Vasco Buonpensiere has just stepped off his yard’s 45m full custom yacht Tremenda after hosting his umpteenth tour of a sweltering September day in Cannes.

The heat and hectic schedule can take their toll, but Buonpensiere is in his element. The CEO of Italian shipyard Cantiere delle Marche is proud to display his yard’s wares, handed over for the Cannes Yachting Festival by its Latin American owner.

“Cannes is my personal favourite, together with Palm Beach,” Buonpensiere tells us in the welcome shade of the yard’s stand on the superyacht pontoon in Vieux Port.

“The atmosphere is nice and we have never left Cannes without at least one boat sold. It works well for us.”

That record apparently remains intact, with a handshake on another version of Tremenda on Tuesday, according to Buonpensiere. “It’s a good start,” he grins.

READ: ‘I don’t want us to be Stairway to Heaven’ – Buonpensiere

Cantiere delle Marche (CdM) has 14 projects in various stages of build, but like many others in the industry, Buonpensiere has seen a slackening in pace. “The first part of the year was slow,” he says. “We were expecting that, and we were already happy because we sold 12 yachts in 12 months the year before. But after the first three months, we were not used to that kind of slowness and we started to reanalyse what we were doing.”

A reorganisation of the company, including an “industrialisation department”, has created efficiencies in the yard which has “really changed a lot of things”, adds Buonpensiere.

The pace picked up to “full speed” again in May and the yard sold two other boats similar to Tremenda as well as delivering projects such as RJ155 for a repeat client which will be on show at Monaco. An expansion of CdM’s shipyard facilities is also planned.

‘If this is slow, I’m happy’

Across Cannes bay, in the brokerage section of the show at Port Canto, Jeremy Roche, Europe director, Denison Yachting, tells a similar story.

“Last year was challenging, certainly for us on the European side,” he says. “That doesn’t mean that individually, some people didn’t do very well, but it was a tough sort of recalibrating year.

“This year has been interesting because you’ve got this strange dynamic with the US dollar having fallen in value. That changes the asking prices dramatically.”

Roche explains how some European and South American clients have gone over to the US to buy yachts and brought them back to the Mediterranean. “It would massively help if we could see the dollar come back up to close to parity,” he adds.

He suggests there might be some bigger yards looking for a sale at the moment but concedes it’s “hard to get a global picture”. Overall, he feels “broadly positive”.

“If this is slow, then we’re very happy,” he says. “There’s still lots of demand.” His colleague Pierre Badin chips in: “For me, if the market stays like this for another three or four years, I’m very happy with that.”

READ: Brokers discuss off-market FOMO and a ‘changing’ landscape

Roche is another fan of Cannes. “You get buyers walking around on their own and they do come and buy boats,” he says. To prove his point, he gives the example of one walk-up client who did a deal for a new construction at the show having begun discussions with him the year before.

Further along the quay, at the desk for the striking 50m Rossinavi No Stress, Caroline Griffiths, a broker with Morley Yachts, agrees that Cannes attracts “very seriously interested clients”. “We’ve had a huge amount of interest and we’ve been doing multiple tours all day,” says Griffiths.

For Alexander Rodriguez of SeaNet, which champions co-ownership structures, the key to the show is the face-to-face time they can have with clients they have been cultivating for perhaps a year. “You have to talk to people and get them into meetings here so they trust the team behind it,” he says. His CEO Leon Klapwijk says it’s important to spread the narrative. “Shared ownership in the States is very common, they look at it as a smart deal,” he says. “In Europe it’s an ego thing. If you can put your ego aside, you can have a great deal buying a boat in the programme.”

Best testimonials

Sitting in the cockpit of one his Oyster Yachts, Stefan Zimmermann Zschocke, the company’s new CEO, radiates the bright-eyed energy of someone in only their second week in the job. The experienced industrial leader sees opportunity everywhere, not least at the top of Oyster’s range.

“Certainly we need to watch the market, but I don’t see a negative trend at the moment,” Zimmermann Zschocke tells us. He insists on-water boat shows such as Cannes are important for Oyster as a brand, but he senses a shift in how leads are evolving and suggests that might affect future strategy. “The marketing is really changing completely,” he adds.

READ: ‘Scaremongering’ over seized yachts damaging – Higgins

Back across the bay, past the wingfoilers and the yachts at anchor, the giant three-masted Black Pearl and various cruise ships, Buonpensiere wipes his brow as he reflects on CdM’s recent rise to prominence. The appearance last year of the explorer yacht Maverick, now cruising in the Arctic as part of owner Tom Schroder’s world odyssey, acted as an afterburner for the brand.

“Maverick has been great, great, great advertising for us,” adds Buonpensiere. “It has created a lot of happiness, and it deserves to.”

He adds: “Lately, our best testimonials are from surveyors and captains. A broker is a salesman, but when a captain speaks to another captain or a surveyor and says you should look at these boats, it makes us very proud.”

Tuesday’s prospective buyers were fresh leads who came with a broker, spent a couple of hours on board Tremenda and then turned the conversation to numbers.

“It’s a handshake, of course, not a contract,” says Buonpensiere. “It’s going to take weeks now. But it’s a good start.”

With that, he heads back out into the fray, a warm smile creasing his face.