On 17 August Bering Yachts announced that Dmitry Vasiliev had bought into the company and joined as a partner. The yard describes him as a Maltese businessman. The trade press picked it up within a day and mostly reprinted the release.
What the announcement does not contain is a number. Not the size of the stake, not the price, not who sold it. BOAT International called it a "significant stake" in a headline, and that word is the only quantity anywhere in the coverage.
Who he is, as far as anyone has said
Vasiliev holds a doctorate in engineering and an executive MBA from the University of Antwerp Management School. The yard says he spent more than thirty years in senior roles at technology companies, and that he founded and chaired a builder of fast composite motor yachts.
That builder is not named. Neither are the technology companies. There is no date, no board seat, no described route to Malta beyond the label.
He has also not said anything. There is no quote from Vasiliev in the release or in any of the reprints, which is unusual enough that two outlets pointed it out. The only person speaking is the founder.
Alexei Mikhailov, Founder and CEO, Bering Yachts:“We are delighted to welcome Dmitry as a shareholder and partner. His combination of technical expertise, shipbuilding experience, and deep knowledge of business optimisation will play an important role in the next stage of our development.
”
Mikhailov appears throughout as founder and chief executive, present tense. Nothing in any source suggests he is stepping back or being diluted out.
What he is being brought in to do
The mandate in the release is operational rather than expansionary: production and business processes, reliability, build quality, support for the explorer side of the range.
There is one forward-looking line. Vasiliev is also to work on strategic collaborations within the Superyacht Division on projects of 50 metres and above, and the yard says the first major collaboration of that kind will be announced shortly. No partner, no timing.
Worth being precise about what is absent. No new production capacity is announced. No new series. No investment in the sites. The release talks about optimising what exists, and a reader looking for a growth story has to supply it themselves.
The yard behind the deal
Bering was founded in 2007. The first boat was a 50-footer built in Foshan, China, for the founder himself; seven boats came out of the Chinese period. Production moved to Turkey in 2017.
Today the main site is in the Antalya Free Zone, with more than 200 tradespeople and over 250 across all locations. A second site in Burgas, Bulgaria, took over aluminium catamaran and superstructure work in 2025 and gives the company a European Union footprint. The corporate headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The product is semi-custom steel explorers and trawler yachts from roughly 20 to 50 metres, plus all-aluminium catamarans. The range runs from the B60 up to the B165, with names buyers will recognise — B65 Golden Mile, B70 Levanna, B76 Lemanja, B92 Papillon — and catamarans at BC60, BC70 and BC80.
There is a split in how the yard sells it: yachts above 24 metres go as superyachts, and the boats below that line are sold as commercially classified explorers at noticeably lower money.
The Russian question, kept to what is documented
Bering is a yard Russian-speaking buyers know well, and the reason is the founder. Mikhailov is from Magadan, holds a doctorate in hydrogeology, and has been in private business since 1990. That biography is on the record, in a 2023 report by the German magazine Boote and in an interview on the company's own site.
The company today presents itself as US-headquartered with production in Turkey and Bulgaria. The words "Russia" and "Russian" do not appear on its About or Shipyards pages at all. The only trace is a separate sales phone number for the CIS.
No source connects the Vasiliev deal to any of this, and no sanctions issue appears anywhere in the coverage.
What this actually tells a buyer
Not much yet, and that is the honest answer.
A shareholder has arrived with an engineering background and a brief to tighten up how the yard builds boats. If the promised 50-metre-plus collaboration is real and lands soon, that is the story worth waiting for — a steel explorer specialist moving up a size class needs partners, and this is the first public signal of one.
Until the announcement comes, what exists is a release, one quote from the founder, an unnamed stake and a photograph.
Photo: Bering Yachts. Sources: Bering Yachts, Asia-Pacific Boating, Marine Industry News, BOAT International, Pressmare, Megayacht News.
