When the going gets tough, yachting enthusiasts buy bigger boats. At least, that’s what North Sails’ Geoff Meek tells the FM.
Already the largest sailmaker in South Africa, North Sails’s business has grown faster in the past 18 months than in the previous three decades, says Meek. He’s an old hand, having grown up in a sailing family — it’s in the blood. He’s spent the past 40 years making sails.
North Sails’s range is wide, catering for everything from small dinghies such as Optimists and Dabchicks to catamarans and high-end luxury cruisers. The company serves the leisure and racing markets alike, and prides itself on its innovation. It’s part of an international group that produces most of the sails in the world. Of those made in Cape Town, 80% are exported, mainly to Europe and the West Indies.
Fabric is imported, laser-cut to exact specifications and made up in the company’s Paarden Island factory. It’s highly skilled work, and almost all the 50-odd workers have served the company for years.
One of its notable recent achievements was providing the sails for South African Kirsten Neuschäfer’s record-making Golden Globe Race victory.
The event is a “retro” race in which entrants single-handedly circumnavigate the globe nonstop, using methods and technology available up until the 1960s, such as celestial navigation. Modern electronic equipment — including cellphones, autopilot and satellite communications — is not allowed.
After 235 days alone on fibreglass-hulled Minnehaha, Neuschäfer sailed to victory on April 27 — the first woman to win the race. And she did so with North Sails, Cape Town, as one of her sponsors.
“The [sail] package is designed with different sails to work in different conditions and different angles and different wind speeds,” says Meek.
It is aimed at making sailing safer and easier.
The Western Cape boat-building sector is worth about R3bn. More broadly, maritime firms in the province employ more than 3,200 individuals
— What it means:
More and more, the boatbuilding sector is gaining prominence in South Africa. In recent years, the government and various agencies involved in marine manufacturing have identified the “blue” (ocean) economy as a sector with huge potential for growth and job creation.
The Western Cape, which accounts for 70% of South Africa’s boatbuilding activity, is leading the way to grow the industry. To that end, the authorities are working with big- and small-boat builders, sail- and mast-makers, rope manufacturers and other companies in the value chain.
The approach is clearly bearing fruit: the boatbuilding and sail-making sector in the province has grown about 20% in the wake of Covid despite the moribund economy. And while demand has now tapered off slightly, prospects remain good, says Vanessa Davidson, manager of the South African Boat Builders Export Council (Sabbex).
According to Davidson the uptick in demand for recreational vessels over the past few years is not confined to South Africa — it’s a worldwide phenomenon that she believes has been driven by a natural human response to Covid.
“Sometimes the purchase of a luxury vessel is a dream deferred,” she tells the FM. “[Now] people have thought: ‘We can’t put it off because maybe we won’t be around to realise our dream.’
“Also, technological developments ensuring internet connectivity on a boat ... mean you can be anywhere in the world on your boat and still be meeting your work demands.”
Boatbuilding is “without a doubt” a very important manufacturing sector in the Western Cape and has grown significantly, according to Wesgro, the official investment promotion agency for Cape Town and the Western Cape. The agency says companies have full order books for the next two to three years, the vast majority of vessels is destined for the export market, which has “grown significantly over the past decade”.
As of this year, the Western Cape boatbuilding sector is worth about R3bn. And, more broadly, maritime firms in the province employ more than 3,200 individuals.
According to Wesgro, South Africa’s top export markets for recreational boats are the US (R1.4bn), Italy (R840m), the British Virgin Islands (R472m), France (R319m) and Türkiye (R126m). Trade with neighbouring countries has also increased significantly, “and there has been a noticeable rise in trade with Sub-Saharan Africa overall”.
While most Western Cape boatbuilding companies are in Cape Town, there are also boat yards in St Helena Bay, Saldanha Bay, Swellendam, George and Knysna. The Saldanha Bay industrial development zone, about 150km north of Cape Town, is the country’s first sector-specialised economic zone for marine repair and fabrication firms.
Davidson is a special project manager for Freeport Saldanha, which is planning improvements to the harbour. She’s also co-founder of BlueCape, a nonprofit that aims “to support businesses and investors in the ocean economy, to remove barriers to entry and to support skills development and transformation for job creation”.
Sometimes the purchase of a luxury vessel is a dream deferred. [Now] people have thought, ‘We can’t put it off because maybe we won’t be around to realise our dream’
— Vanessa Davidson
According to BlueCape, catamarans top the list of local manufacture when it comes to units produced. In fact, the country is ranked second only to France when it comes to manufacturing the two-hulled yacht.
Most of these vessels are built by Robertson & Caine, which produces more than 220 boats a year in the luxury catamaran sector and employs 1,700 people.
That’s been enough to draw international interest. The company was recently sold to Vox Ventures, a subsidiary of international investment firm PPF Group.
Announcing the sale, Dashan Daya of Capitalworks, the private equity shareholder in Robertson & Caine, said it represented the single-largest foreign direct investment in the boatbuilding sector in South Africa and is “a significant endorsement of the [sector’s] world-class skills, intellectual property and manufacturing capacity”.
The transaction “facilitates further significant investment and comprehensive training programmes and bursaries to enhance the skills and capabilities of Robertson & Caine’s employees”.
When asked by the FM, Capitalworks declined to divulge the value of the sale.
The yacht-building sector, of course, has spin-offs in terms of tourism and hospitality, and provides niche areas for numerous small and medium businesses in its value chain — many of them family-owned.
One such business is Jo Fensham Yacht Upholstery, established 40 years ago. It is Cape Town’s leading supplier of soft furnishings for the luxury yacht market.
The firm was founded when Fensham struck a deal to make yacht cushions at home on her small Elna SU sewing machine for a start-up building Holiday 23 yachts. Owned by John Robertson, that start-up is today Robertson & Caine — and it remains the upholstery firm’s largest client.
Like Robertson & Caine, Jo Fensham Yacht Upholstery has evolved over the years. In 2011, Fensham’s daughter Tariq returned to Cape Town with her husband Craig and toddler after practising as a heritage architect in the UK. Struggling to find work in the city, she started helping her mother a few days a week, “and before I knew it I was running the whole thing”, she says.
At that point, the company had six employees working from premises covering just 100m2; today its 30 staff work in an HQ seven times the size.
Tariq tells the FM the company survived the “worst weeks” of her life during Covid, when it had to plunge into overdraft to pay salaries. It is finally recovering, recruiting international clients and retooling. The focus now is on innovation as it looks to become a leader in the sector.
She’s already following in her mother’s footsteps, after last month being named a “rising star” in the service excellence category by industry association Sabbex/Boating South Africa.
She has high praise for the example her mother set — hard work, service and “quality at all cost” — as well as for the staff who have embraced that. “Quality is the big thing in this industry, because high-end products have to be top quality. It sounds all rosy and fantastic and everything glamorous, but it’s [very] hard work.”
For the moment, with the industry looking strong, that’s paying off.
“As long as the boatbuilders are doing well, all of us subcontractors and component suppliers can benefit,” says Tariq. “We just water ski behind the big boys and hang on to the rope for dear life.”
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