Italian Dominion and Reinventing of Pocket Super Yachts

Italian yacht builders has always feed the 24 to thirty meter pocket super yacht market.  From a certain point of view the Italians started and expanded the segment, and made it become over the years the important not too big and nor small category, which many yacht builders crave today.  Semi-custom-production yachts like the Baglietto 26m build from the seventies to the mid eighties, and the Benetti 26 and 25 models of the mid seventies were pioneers in making this size, what it has become today.  

Today Italian Yacht Builder's continue to re-invent the segment, on the design and on the legislative front.  The smart legislative move was having yachts in this size which stay under the 24 meters of Load-Line-Length in the twenty-tens.  This makes building these yachts easy to legalize, operate, and register.  Ferretti, Sanlorenzo, and Azimut were pioneers in this, expanding the size of the yachts beyond 27 meters, and today arriving up to thirty meters of length over all but still staying under the 24 meter LLL legal frame work.  

But the Italians have also been clever in putting new design segments in the 24 to thirty meter size, which then into the years also went over the thirty meters size.  

Beyond the standard flybridge motor yacht sport yachts were the first to be pushed over 24 meters in the nineties; Overmarine Mangusta, Baglietto, and Arno Leopard were a pioneers in expanding the size of the Super Sport Yacht.  In the twenty-tens Sanlorenzo pioneered the innovative SX line, which still today beside the recently arrived bit different Azimut Seadeck and Sunseeker Ocean have little competition.  Azimut also pioneered the new style hybrid explorer volume focused yachts, with the Magellano.  Again today this line has a competition from the likes of Ferretti InFynito, Horizon, Ocean Alexander, and Princess X-line. 

Now Sanlorenzo and Italy does it again, as it debuted the new SHE.  A retro pocket super yacht, inspired to the gentleman yachts of the sixties, bringing the past into the future not only from the same builder but bringing inspirations of Baglietto, and Picchiotti of that decade gone by. Just launched in Cannes 2026, SHE Sanlorenzo has sold seven units.       

What all this shows is that the Italians keep on pushing the design of the segment, introducing new elements to excite yacht buyers and future owners to sign the dotted lines.  While doing what works is important; Azimut, Ferretti, and Sanlorenzo still dominate the classic flybridge yacht in this size, introducing new segments is an important part to push new growth.  Models like SX for Sanlorenzo; the SX 88 has sold over eighty units in ten years of production, and helped Sanlorenzo to become one of the top three super yacht producers in the World.  For real comparison, that is as much units as the standard SL86, in more or less the same production times.

So fair to the Bell Paese, Italians its true dominate this segment by like seventy per-cent, but it's also a fact, they do not rest on their laurels, and always look ahead to excite clients and the market; with innovative elements of comfort, design, speed, and technology.