S15 E08: Anders Kurtén, CEO of Fraser Yachts

[Music] You're listening to the luxury item, the podcast on the business of luxury, and the people and companies that are shaping the future of the luxury industry. Here's your host, Scott Kerr. The luxury super yacht industry in 2025 shows strong growth driven by rising global wealth, technological innovation, and increasing interest in ocean-based leisure and privacy. Both sales volume and market value are up year over year, and the sector is evolving quickly with new trends and lingering risks. One of the biggest names in luxury super yacht brokerage is Fraser Yatz. Fraser Yatz has been in business for 78 years and is the world's largest and longest established full-service yacht brokerage. The company has grown into an international powerhouse with more than 230 specialists across 21 offices worldwide, working with over 13,000 active qualified clients and managing a portfolio exceeding $6 billion in yachts. My guest on the luxury item is Anders Kerten, CEO of Fraser Yatz. Anders joined Fraser Yatz as CEO in 2023, bringing with him over 25 years of management sales, marketing, and product development experience across both marine and luxury sectors. He was previously the CEO of Finnish shipyard Baltic Yatz, where he helped to execute the company's recent strategic turnaround. Welcome to the luxury item, Anders. Thanks, great to be here. Yeah, I'm so excited to have you. So, your fresh off the 2025 Monaco Yatz show that's recognized as the world's leading event and luxury yachting. It attracts the latest and greatest builds from around the world and attended by elite buyers, industry experts, and aficionados of all things super yacht. There are a number of key luxury super yacht events throughout the year where exhibitors display an impressive fleet of new and existing super yachts. So, for my listeners who may not be familiar, what is the significance of the Monaco Yatz show? The Monaco Yatz show without a shadow of a doubt is one of the key highlights in the sort of annual boat show calendar. If you will, it's one of the few occasions during the year when you can during a discrete time period of a couple of days see both the latest and greatest that the new build yards have recently launched as well as a prime selection of brokerage yachts currently on the market for sale on Charter. Coming out of this year, I know I think it was a week or so ago. What were some of the more notable trends that came out of the show? Look, I've been doing boat shows and yacht shows for the better part of three decades now and still get pretty excited about them and the closing spirit is usually the last day of the show. It all feels like unicorns and rainbows and champagne and marshmallows. Invariably, the actual commercial traction you see during the sort of pre-four weeks after the show concludes, but having said that this was definitely one of the better shows over the last four, five years. I think we felt a resurgence of interest and demand really across almost all size segments and all types of yachts. I think many of the trends that we've seen on the design side and the new builds they continue to be fairly strong. More open space, more social space, more large panoramic views, ideally at 360 degrees if that's not possible than at least 270 degrees. One sort of mini trend that we've witnessed already before this show is the resurgence of fast boats, which there was slightly less interest for in the preceding 18 months. But all in all, given some uncertainty in the sort of global landscape that surrounds us, we are looking ahead pretty positively at the next 12-month period. When you're saying fast, what do you mean, just speed? To really sort of view this in a balanced way for those listeners who aren't intimately familiar with the super ecosystem, I think it's important to understand that a sort of overall number of transactions annually on a global scale is pretty low now for brokerage in yachts over 30 meters. We're looking at some four or five hundred brokerage transactions on a sort of normalized annual basis and on the new build side. We're looking at even less than that, maybe sort of roughly around 200 would be a typical 12-month period. Now, when you have volumes that are as low as that, there's a lot of serendipity in the years. I usually like to say that the years are not brothers and sisters with each other. So sort of interpreting too much into sort of annual variation may sort of lead you easily, easily astray because there's, as I said, a lot of serendipity just driven by the fact that the volumes are so low, so I don't really read yet particularly much into it. It's just a sort of observation that we've made as we've followed the demand of sort of incoming queries, if you will. So what was Fraser's participation at Monaco Yacho? We had a pretty nice lineup. We had three yachts for sale in show, ranging from 45 meter, Abeking Resmssen called Bravado all the way up to a recent 78 meter, Amels called Energy. We had a few yachts for Charter and then we had a large handful of yachts at anchor sort of in vicinity of the show. And visitor numbers were pretty consistent with previous years as we've seen, but I think not only for Fraser, but for most interstucolyx that I had the chance to chat with during the show, we generally had the feeling that qualitatively the visitors this year were good. There were a lot of buyers around with serious intent to buy and that's really the fundamental reason why a brokerage house such as ourselves or a new buildyard exhibits their yachts at the show. It seems like the global super yacht brokerage market had a strong first two quarters of this year with rising year-rear sales volumes. Q3 shows continued strength and brokerage sales yet also experiencing a noted slowdown in the new build segment. What's been reigniting the super yacht market? I mean, is it purely the private equity gains and crypto wealth broadening the customer base or is it something else? Well, I think you know people are people no matter which income or wealth bracket they happen to find themselves and I think you sort of the level of uncertainty if it continues for a certain period of time it gets sort of normalized. So whatever is now if it continues for months or even years you sort of discount that as the normal status quo. So I think one factor for sure is and we saw this in extreme is you know during the pandemic the realization that you know we don't know what tomorrow brings. This is not a dress rehearsal so if we have dreams and and wants and things that we have been thinking about there's really no guarantee that tomorrow will be significantly better than today so why wait. I would say that if I you know this is all pretty philosophical and based upon assumptions but but since these are essentially assets that nobody really needs they're based on you know fulfilling a personal dream which often is related to a deep love of the sea and the wish for the future. For personal freedom these are the types of things that you need to feel sort of pretty good before you pull the trigger and make the decision and I think you get used to a certain level of uncertainty and then you don't wait anymore. On the new build side it was showing that there was some softness there what do you think that is. I go back to sort of the previous reasonings around serendipity and normal seasonal very so for now I wouldn't read too much into it but I will say this if we observe the sort of past three four five year cycle that. New build prices have have risen quite quite significantly over the last three four years and this actually you go all the way down to you know smaller both the same goes for them and always when you have. Significant shifts in in pricing especially if they are upward which usually they are you get this sort of you know period of discovery when. People potentially looking at in this case embarking upon a new build new build journey it takes a while to get used to the new price level and sort of adjust your expectations to it right and then the second thing is that that many of the of the notable yards they have quite a reasonable order stock now. So you know the next delivery might be in 2028 or 2029 or for the real big projects it might even be in 2030 or 2031 so that that kind of takes takes the urgency out of the equation if you're not getting it for next season then. You might sort of you know consider the specification or the design or whatever it is that you want to do for slightly longer. And I was reading this year is slated to see the delivery of some of the largest super yachts in history with at least 10 super yachts exceeding 100 meters or about 328 feet in length this trend reflects the growing appetite for larger yachts. These are not just feats of engineering, but exclusive symbols of prestige and innovation. What's the brokerage market trend for larger vessels? It's solid. And here we actually come into something really interesting. If we look at the sort of sales statistics over the last 15 years, and we look at the sort of bigger yachts as we approach the 70 or 80 meter mark, first of all, that's only a handful of transactions every year. So it's subject to even more vagaries and serendipity than the smaller yachts in terms of annual fluctuation. But that end of the market has been remarkably stable for years and years, specifically because we're talking about only a handful of transactions. And I think you could probably safely say that it's on the brokerage side, it's somewhat inventory constricted and really understand the sort of handful of transactions that are recorded in, you know, for argument sake, let's say in 2023, you need to really understand what was the actual supply, what were the yachts on the market, how were they priced, and so on and so forth. The super yacht market features many major brokerages, plus an increasing number of new boutique firms and specialist agencies all vying for listings, clients, and charter business. The inventory for top quality late model super yachts, especially larger ones, is limited fueling competition even more. On top of that, you have Savvy or Global Clientel. How does Frazier stand out in this crowded field? Ever since we were founded in 1947 in San Diego by the late David Frazier, we've really sort of relied on our core values of honesty, integrity, and trust. And especially if you look at the brokerage side, this is a very sort of personal relationship driven business. So I guess in this field, we probably would be, would be less characterized by maybe grand sweeping gestures, if you will, and then more about just very proficiently, and maybe perhaps even quietly going about the day to day business. Now, I happen to believe that we have many of the best sales brokers in the industry. And if you allow me, I'm actually going to share a story with you that illustrates a little bit how this philosophy might actually transpire in the real world. We have a senior broker who, and this is the story is over 10 years old. So it's already prescribed. But anyways, goes a little bit to describing the ethos. Senior broker was approached by an old client who wanted to buy a new yaw and sales procre in question, knew the client and their family quite well and was actually adamant in advising the client that this really isn't the right yaw for you given what I know about, you know, the use case, how you use it, where you usually want to go. And said clients went off and bought the yacht. Anyways, in this case, not with us. And then there was three years of complete radio silence. Three years later, same broker gets a call from this client who at that point just approached him and said, "Look, could you help me sell this yacht?" Because it wasn't really right for me and my family. And let's get the yacht that I should have gotten three years ago. So that ethos of always really going out of our way to do what we firmly believe is best for the client. I think this story is a great illustration of how we go about that, even if it might be sort of in the long and the short run, perhaps even detrimental to sort of short term business, but for sure in the long run solidifies what was already a pretty solid client relationship. What share of your business is from super yacht sales versus charter? The biggest piece of the business is sales brokerage, which depending on the year could be 35 40% of the overall business and the second largest piece of the business is the charter business, which isn't quite as big as sales brokerage, but actually this past season was a really good season for us July was the best ever recorded month in all of our written accounting history. Several years ago, post pandemic Frazier reported a 10-year drop in the average age of its customers due to an increase in young cryptocurrency investors and tech executives entering the market. Keep pandemic Frazier's clients averaged 55 to 65 years old, but now they've dropped to between 45 and 55 with its youngest client stage, just 25. Is that young wealthy customer trend still holding? Yeah, it is. And look, in fairness, I think there's actually another causality at work here, sort of behind this younger client profile, because before the pandemic for decades, both the voting and yachting industry generally had sort of a percentage of newcomers as in first time chargers or first time buyers, which was somewhere around the 10% mark. During the pandemic that shifted dramatically and we had almost one third first time buyers and chargers. And while there's been some attrition after the pandemic were still at a way higher ratio of first time buyers and chargers. And I think that's the real root cause driving also a younger clientele to be attracted to the lifestyle, which is great news for the industry by and large, because it shows that there's a healthy appetite for the wonderful experiences that super yachting can provide you. And I think one of the sort of the biggest changes in expectations is that, you know, I represent the old guard, not only because I'm old, but because the fact that I sort of approached voting and yachting in the traditional way, which is my grandfather had a summer cottage in the Finnish archipelago here also had a mahogany sailing boat and I was carried upon that boat before I could walk and it was 10 meters long boat where there was ample standing room inside the cabin as long as you were standing on your knees. And I have no recollections from our childhood summer sailing trip with the family, which could go on for weeks that it would have been cramped or constricted. So I sort of accept and almost even expect when I step on board a boat that, you know, if there are camping conveniences and comfort, that's already pretty good. But the new generation who approaches it sort of at a later stage of life completely and new their expectations are way, way higher and they really expect to be able to carry their own shore lifestyle seamlessly on board, whether they're chartering or owning an asset and a lot of this drives recent developments and especially for this end of the clientele, it's less about the yacht. I mean, you know, my generation and people who have approached voting and yachting were both and yacht nerds, so we are really intensely into the product itself. But for this other end of the spectrum, it's less about the yacht and it's more about what can it take you with whom and what kind of experiences can you share with the family and friends while you're on that yacht. So once again, there's sort of a broader picture to me in the background that's driving these trends. And how are the preferences different from the older clientele in terms of, you know, are they also looking at things that are, you know, technologically advanced and environmentally conscious super yachts? Those factors coming to play? Oh, for sure. In my previous life when I was running a yacht called Baltic yachts, a sort of high-end builder of custom sailing advanced carbon composite super yachts, we started sort of toying with the idea of trying to make sustainability a unique selling proposition. And this was about 2019 when it was, you know, a great icebreaker at a cocktail party and everybody would nod politely and smile because they knew that it was the right thing to do. But then really rapidly during the pandemic, we somehow turned a page and our thesis at the time was that people had more time to spend on their computer and perhaps also more time to spend with loved ones and even our clientele, you know, they want to be able to look at their grandkids in the eyes and defend the consumption choices that they make within the parameters of their own belker. So for sure that sort of turbo boost at the sustainability aspect and unfortunately simultaneous, the technological options that we now have at our disposal are way, way, way ahead from where we were 10 or 15 years ago. The second thing that really aids with the sort of transition of being able to live your life on board a super yacht is is is is starling. Not only for the sort of, you know, leisure part of things going are the days when desperate youth crews scoured some remote island in Macarabi and looking for a DVD with the favorite kids movies of the charter party on board. Because you have that all available through streaming, right? But the other aspect of that is also that you can actually conduct a board meeting on board your super yacht with a video conference these days. So a fundamental shift in what's actually possible. on board compared to the situation only 10 years ago. You joined a CEO of Frazier Yots in 2023. Your career didn't start out on the high seas, but spans from building websites in Finland during the early.com days and then transitioning to building wooden boats and then turning around Baltic Yots as you were just talking about this the shipyard in Finland. What lured you to Frazier Yots? Well, look, I love the product. I really enjoy being involved in the sort of hand-son process of actually rafting these shipyards, but running a yard is a little bit like running a paper mill. It's quite slow paced and the good news is really that there are no major changes and you won't always keep the business so that you have roughly a 16 to 18 month order stock because that means that you can plan production ahead and the material flows are uninterrupted. Engineering has time to keep up with stuff that is actually going into production. On the other hand, the order stock isn't so long that it prohibits sales, right? Because if you have a four-year order stock, then obviously the sales department can take a really long vacation. Now, especially in Baltic case operating in an niche within an niche, which is sort of high-end performance sailing shipyards, the actual number of contracts that it would make sense to bid on on an annual basis is somewhere between 10 and 15 in a good year on which you can execute on maybe two or three because that's the average number of launches that I yard like that can do. So the clock frequency is is pretty low once you actually get a hang of it. What lured me to the service side really is the sort of significantly higher turn of transactions. Now, in a normal year, a freighter will do some 50 brokerage transactions and go through some 6,800 to 7,000 days of charter so that's a completely different environment just from a pace of the business perspective. And when you joined in 23, Frazier was enjoying exceptional business performance. What were your strategic priorities when you took over the helm? Well, I think really in some ways unifying the culture as the company had been without a CEO for the better part of a year at that point. And then probably the second thing would be to sort of lay the foundation for future growth. When you're on the service side, such as we are, it's great if you have a strong brand that acts as an umbrella for your service offering. It's wonderful that you have a long history that gives you values and something to sort of lean back on. But at the end of the day, if you look at your most valuable assets, it's really all about the people. So what we've done over the past two years is we've further developed our in-boss, rainy broker system. And we now have seven junior brokers who are attached to a to a older mentor who are the future of this entire industry and also of our eminent company. Frazier Yachts also operates a specialized business intelligence team that provides clients with real-time access to market data, pricing trends, and technical insights for informed decision making in the super yacht sector. Could you provide an example of how Frazier used these market insights and analytics to influence how Yachts are positioned and sold? I'll start with a blanket statement. We use the intelligence provided by our in-house intelligence department every day on the sales side for accurate and nuanced real-time market insights on the charter management side specifically for suggesting locations, pricing, giving accurate forecasts on given what we know here's what we think will be the performance of the yacht over the following seasons and in charge around on the yacht management side or accurate operational cost forecast because this full suite of services that we provide really the sort of ultimate reason why we do that is to try and make yacht ownership as predictable and thus pleasurable as humanly possible because at the end of the day data without interpretation is not particularly valuable. It's the interpretations that make it intelligence, right? And since we cover almost 360 degrees of the services that you as a yacht owner need, whether it's selling or buying, whether it's chartering, whether it's yacht management, which is essentially everything related to the yacht safety and regulatory compliance, brewing that you might need that the crew doesn't take care of themselves. We have quite a sort of wide range of data input points. One particular example that I'm not going to describe in any particular detail because discretion is a really big part of what we do about it. We actually won a listing by providing the most pessimistic expected sales lead time for the project at hand. And whereas many positive that this can be sold in three months, we actually said that in our view based upon the data that we have of similar projects during recent years and currently in build, we're looking at 18 months for the sales cycle and that honesty backed up by real data actually won a listing. I want to talk about the US tariffs on European made goods and its impact on your business. Many of the world's recreational boats and yachts are mating Europe and most of the biggest buyers are in the US. While most Americans who can buy a $10 million or $100 million yacht can likely afford another 15 percent tax, the cost equation for many buyers changes with tariffs. Are you starting to see any fallout from that? Not really. And I think once again to sort of understand this ecosystem, when we're looking at the sort of bigger yachts which almost invariably are brewed by professional brew, I sort of have to make a caveat that it really doesn't matter whether the ultimate beneficial owner has a Swedish passport or a German passport or a US passport or for that matter, a Finnish passport. Generally they rarely flag their vessels under the flag of their home country. And this really to me is not so much lacking patriotism as it is and we can use Finland as an example because it's sort of non-value loaded in this instance, right? The Finnish flag code is not intimately familiar with the sort of intricacies of super yachts. It's more geared towards merchant marine and commercial applications and that's why the big super yachts tend to sort of verge more towards lag stays that actually understand super yachts and running them. Italy consistently holds the largest market share of global super yacht order book and construction supported by a strong network of skilled artisans and a long-standing reputation for quality and luxury yacht manufacturing. I would imagine they stay on top of the latest trends, rethinking spaces that adopt to different users and more customization for things like entertainment, leisure or work. What are some of the design trends that shipyards and designers are shaping the world of yacht design right now? We actually for another presentation that I recently did with it a little poll amongst some of our senior sales and charter brokers specifically asked to, you know, the top 10 most requested features on sort of a modern super yacht and the list is roughly as follows and it's not in any particular order of priority. We really out of the qualitative answers to the themes that we're recurring in most of the answers. One is that of the design of the stern of the bow. The beach club, which is essentially sort of having the stern be fairly low with a fairly uniform wide expansive space that even on a big yacht where once you're on the upper decks you're pretty far away from the water. You can enjoy proximity to the ocean and have a chance for not only playing around with the tenders and toys. In the case of tenders and toys it seems like more is more every year. That's definitely a design feature that is very much still on Vogue. The overall trend of taking your own shore lifestyle on board is really exemplified on yachts by more focus on full gyms and well-appointed well-being areas whether it's spas or sonas or amams or massage corners. Outdoor cinemas are really popular. Starlink we mentioned already. You've improved propulsion and energy whether that is diesel electric hybrid or more exotic propulsion methods. That's for sure talking point in many new build projects on board pools and jackos is also features that can help retain quality crew, whether it's size of crew cabins or livability of crew quarters in engender and related to crew. multi-talented crew is something that really comes up. So we've actually had live job postings that are roughly like, you know, Deckhand wanted, must speak three world languages preferable, if able to play an instrument while singing. And also if they can do a yoga or Pilates class or perform a massage, that would be great. And by the way, they need to be able to make the mean martini. [laughter] So looking at all those trends, like if you would take a, you know, just an overview of those ones that you just read, what does that tell you about today's owner? I go back to the point of higher expectations and sort of little friction between the transition from their onshore lifestyles to their on-board lifestyle. That would be the overall umbrella that I would sort of group these sort of, you know, just symptoms if you will, all under. You know, leading fashion and design houses, such as Louis Vuitton or Mazz, Armandicassa, Fendi Casa, Ralph Lauren, have extended their expertise to yacht interiors, offering bespoke furniture, accessories and textiles. Earlier this year, the Italian Sea Group launched 72 meter admiral Armandie Superiatt, the first of two superiattes entirely designed by the late George Yarmani. Are you seeing more luxury brands joining forces with yacht manufacturers for a new generation of wealthy consumers seeking exclusivity and lifestyle integration? I think for sure we are. And to me, this is actually a trickle-down effect, because even if we go decades back and look at custom building, which is usually sort of, you know, the bigger end of the tonnage, where you start from basically a blank piece of paper and then based upon the use case and requirement and wishes and wants of the client, start designing the yacht to be built. There it's been quite typical that it's owner of privilege to choose whichever interior designer they feel comfortable with. And then in some cases also the exterior designer, if sort of an industrial designer is desired in this case, in addition to the naval architecture. And I think sort of for the semi-custom end of the market, the halo effect that a well-recognized household name, either from a high end luxury or fashion or design provides, but to me is just this same approach trickling down from the customer end of the market. Last year was announced that Frazier Yacht adopted a tool Yeti or aka the Yacht Environmental Transparency Index that assesses the super-yacht environmental impact of various members of your fleet. It's the first brokerage company to partner with the Water Revolution Foundation on this initiative. Could you talk about how you're using Yeti to make meaningful steps towards sustainability? Absolutely, but before that, I'm going to share with you a late breaking news that was actually announced during the Monaco Yacht Show, we've also managed to get the Large Yacht Brokers Association as a body of the largest brokerage houses to sign on with the Water Revolution Foundation. Wow. So this is spreading as it should. Our initial pledge was to try to encourage all our 130 Yacht Management fleet to do the Yeti Index. And what we see there's many permutations and many benefits of this. Now, for the audience, think about this as the stickers that you see on household appliances, at least here in Europe, when you're walking to a white good store to buy a new microwave oven or dishwasher or whatever. All the appliances are equipped with stickers. You have the dark green sticker for very energy efficient, and then you have the red orange yellow stickers for slightly less energy efficient appliances. This is really a little bit simplified, but this is the same for superiors. You can take a given size segment or topology of superiors, and you can rank them according to level of sustainability, if you will. And I firmly think that first, this will benefit the charter managed yacht, because we're seeing a little bit of traction amongst the younger harder clients. I'll tell you that they want to do a two-week charter in the Western Medinarily August next year. And we are actually getting requests. So you sent me back to these five yachts. How do they rank not only from the tenders and toys and amenities and design, but also how do they rank from a sustainability perspective? And this is a great tool to be able to visualize that. The second thing as one of the sort of endemic features of superiors as an asset class is that they don't really have a best before date. You know, we have 50-year-old yachts in the fleet. The fleet consists of some 7,000 yachts, and the earliest members of that fleet are actually built in the early 1900s. So I usually say that a well-built yacht really has no expiration date as long as it's properly maintained. But in order to keep it running with regular intervals, you need to do smaller or bigger refits. And if you're considering a refit where you might have to swap out the main engines, anyways, Yeti is a great tool for you to be able to look at different options, what you could do during the refits and assess the sort of, you know, bang for the buck or return on investment for your dollars or euros. Also from a sustainability perspective, whether it's the propulsion technology or replacing the the HVAC, the air conditioning system on board or something as mundane as switching over to lead lighting and the list goes on and on and on. You can actually use Yeti as a tool to quantify the impact of this, you know, particular subpart of the refit project on the sustainability or environmental sort of footprint of the yachting question. Luxury yachting is evolving and today's buyers are more discerning, data driven and cost conscious, delivering exceptionally yachts seems like table stakes in your market. So what will define the strongest players in the next 10 years? Trust. This is a business that is extremely reliant on trust. So we're going to continue to act in the client, very best interest and we firmly believe that that's going to serve us well for the next 10 years as it has done for almost 80 years, not. And it seems like trust is playing the biggest role it's ever had these days, especially in the in the luxury space. Oh, 100%. So Anders, my final question is the luxury item question, which I ask all my guests. So if you was stranded on a deserted island and you can only have one single luxury item with you, what would that luxury item be? It can't be any form of air or water transportation. So you can't use any of the yachts, the Frazier yachts in your fleet to take you off that island or anything that requires mobile service so you can't call anybody in your network or your colleagues, bring a super yacht over to you to take you off that island. It's just you on this lonely island all by yourself. What would the one single luxury item you would like to have with you? I hope you won't disqualify my choice just because conceivably it might actually float, but my choice would be a Steinway grand piano because I would expect to have plenty of time on a desert island and I could actually start getting my chops back and maybe earn my passage back home on a luxury cruise ship by working in the piano bar during my trip home. Anders, Curtin, CEO of Frazier yachts. Thank you so much for joining me on the luxury item. Thank you Scott. It was a true pleasure. That's it for this episode of the luxury item podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this useful and entertaining, I would be really grateful if you can share it with a friend or colleague. I would love it if you subscribe so you never miss an episode. And while you're there, be sure to rate and review us on Apple podcasts. It really helps other listeners find us. The luxury item podcast is a production of Silver Tone Consulting. I'm your host Scott Kerr. Until next time.