Sunseeker Yachts

And what is our big boat today?

Today we are on a Sunseeker Predator 55.

It's a brand-new model.

Uh, it is on sale currently with Sunseeker Southampton just up there.

Price for this starts at about 1.675 million, but this particular one with the lovely gray hull, the stabilizer fitted, all the kit, is about 2.03 million.

Yeah.

It does, don't get me wrong.

But I d- I do think that the... we're possibly getting to a level where it's, it's going too far.

Um, and so when we think about events that might happen in restaurants or in hotels or even in somebody's private villa, you generally have access to all the appliances, like a fridge, a cooker, an oven.

Now, when we, say for example, we often use a, particularly yacht in Dubai, a 40-meter Sunseeker to do-

Mm

... seated dining experiences, and that's because they allow us to remove all the furniture inside, and we can then place back inside a full table scape and set up.

Yeah, and the boat?

The boat is a very lovely Sunseeker Predator 55.

It's a 2026 model.

It's on sale through Sunseeker Southampton, just up on the key there.

Starting price for this, about 1.675 million.

This one, with all the kit on it, including a Seakeeper stabilizer, comes to about 2.03 million.

There's obviously Beneteau, there's Jeanneau-

Mm-hmm

A friend of mine, Kit O'Neill, had a birthday and invited people he knew.

He's got a Sunseeker ninety-five, so it's a cool place to have a party.

Emily and I met there.

We dated after that." "That's a yacht, is it?" says Poppy.

"When was the last time you saw her?" "Emily left our flat at about eight last night, Friday.

She was going to Kit's boat to see his mum.

She stays on the Sunseeker at weekends sometimes." "Emily and Kit's mum are close, are they?" "Yeah," he says.

"And she never came home?" Robin shakes his head.

Yeah, so we recently had a successful case in the US that ended up prosecuting a luxury yacht manufacturer.

And this was off the back of the UK case, which essentially fined this luxury yacht manufacturer, Sunseeker International, for using Burmese teak or Myanmar teak in their yachts.

Let's go back to 2018.

EIA actually submitted some information about Sunseeker to the UK authorities about the potential illegal use of Burmese teak in their yachts.

And this ended up resulting in a prosecution of Sunseeker in 2024.

They were fined around £350,000 for breaching the UK essentially it's impossible to bring in any timber from Myanmar currently.

It's impossible to comply with the regulations as it stands.

Sunseeker were prosecuted in the UK, but then the US realized that Sunseeker had sailed these two yachts worth $4 million combined out to the US to be sold there.

That's hard.

And it was a period of time that was really formative because... not having any money and really being sort of hand to mouth in terms of what you could do to try to get into the market but the first thing we did and often business stories are about people and connections and very very early on we we knew we could build a really nice looking wooden boat and we did do, and we wrote to three people in the industry, in our British industry, to say, look, we're two young guys in our 20s, we've built this boat, and we're coming to Earls Court Boat Show in London with a wooden boat, really nice to meet you, could you come and have a look? So Robert Braithwaite from Sunseeker, David King from Princess and at that time Gerard Wainwright from Sealine.

And I wrote a handwritten letter to each of them and all three of them showed up at the boat show.

to come and look at what we'd created.

everything.

And then just talking about pivotal moments and this, like any business, being about people, it was then a question of trying to meet the right people in the industry to let them know what we were doing and the product that we had.

So for me particularly, that meant getting on a plane and going to Genoa Boat Show because the Italian builders were still really the strength, although Princess and Sunseeker were significant.

Ferretti and Azimut back then were the two big companies that we needed to make contact in Italy.