South Korea: A new market for the yachting and top luxury Industries
It has been a year now that the Rodriquez Consulting team has kept a close eye on Korea and together with partner Yacht Designer Andrea Borzelli has drawn some thoughts on the dynamics and future developements of what looks to be a new market for the top luxury segment and specifically for Yachts.
It’s very important to undeline that the number one exported good as a percentage of Korea GDP still comes from the ship building industry. Indeed, Korea is world famous to be home of Hunday in Pusan Daewoo and several other significant commercial ship builders. As a matter of fact Hunday still is the largest shipyard worldwide in terms of facilities and number of employees.
What about luxury yachts? Well, after dealing with a number of players and former government officials, we have to say that we see a solid potential. Since the South Korean government grathed quite a lot of autonomy to local/regional governments the demand for design and development of new yachts to export increased significantly and even more interesting, design and development of new marinas became short and medium term goals.
Although the legislation is still quite closed to luxury yachts, HNWI are growing rapidly in Asia in general and in South Korea specifically Asia as a whole has already outnumbered Europe by quantity of V-HNWI (millionaires) and South Korea is very likely to gain more and more importance in terms of share. Korea is now 11th country among the world fastest economic growth countires and the Korean economy is expected to become among the 10 top economies in terms of GDP by 2050, placing it in 8th position.
“South Korea is definitely the place to be with the impressive project to construct new marinas and boating facilities in Gyeonggi Province within the next few years. As the local yachting industry is still relatively young, it is a perfect moment to take a strong position at the very beginning. ,” says Nicolas Lapp, Sunreef’s vice-president.
For more information, Market Research or other services on the Korean Market please click here and register your interest or e-mail us with Korean Market in the subject line.
