With the ongoing price hikes in fuels, it makes sense to switch over to solar-electric technology and Silent-Yachts is opening up this technology to other builders.
Michael, following a busy couple of years promoting, selling and building your new line-up of models, can you provide an overview of your current production?
The site has about 22,000sqm of covered facilities in four big sheds and about the same area outside the sheds. It has a double set of moulds for the Silent 60 and a single set for the Silent 80. The number of workers is hard to determine because the Italian system uses a lot of sub-contractors, so it’s difficult to know how many people are working on our furniture, for example. I’d estimate there are maybe 200 people in Italy working on or for our boats.
Several visits followed and in October we signed a contract to start the production of some of our boats, so we brought over moulds and even some finished hulls just to speed up production. They’re producing the Silent 60 and Silent 80, and are incredibly fast. They’ve also started on the production of two Silent VisionF 82s, which is the hybrid version of their VisionF 80.
So, while it seems like a big announcement, it’s just a logical development based on our orders and our relationships with our clients. We’ve been offering these services for a while, so it’s more a formalisation of our existing offerings. Furthermore, Silent-Yachts models are different to most other boats on the market, so other companies wouldn’t be able to handle a lot of these aspects.
Right now, my electric car is being charged by the solar panels on the roof of our office building. Over a year, the building’s solar-electric system powers all the offices and systems in the building. Sometimes we produce enough to give to the grid, and sometimes we must take from the grid when there are days of gloomy weather.