CVC Capital Partners is selling D-Marin, the leading premium marina operator in the EMEA region, to InfraVia Capital Partners. CVC announced the deal on 6 July. Trade press puts the price above €1 billion — about $1.14 billion — though neither party disclosed an official figure.
For CVC this is an exit. The fund — CVC Capital Partners VII — bought into D-Marin in 2020, back when the operator was a smaller, fragmented business. Over six years it installed a new management team and pushed the footprint out from four core countries to nine. "We transformed the business from a hidden gem into the clear market leader," said CVC's István Szőke. D-Marin now runs 28 marinas.
What changes hands
The network is the story. D-Marin operates 28 premium marinas across nine countries, with more than 14,300 berths — over 1,000 of them built for superyachts. Twelve boatyards service around 2,500 yachts a year, and the group counts more than 50,000 customers annually. The core sits in Turkey, Croatia, Greece and the UAE; under CVC it added Spain, Italy, France, Malta and Albania.
That inventory is what InfraVia is buying, and the buyer's identity is the interesting part.
Why an infrastructure fund wants berths
InfraVia is an infrastructure investor — the kind of firm that usually owns toll roads, airports and fibre networks. Marinas now sit in the same bucket. "This transaction is a strong fit with InfraVia's infrastructure investment thesis," said founder and CEO Vincent Levita, who called D-Marin "a leading premium marina platform across the Mediterranean."
The logic is straightforward once you treat a marina as an asset class. Berth contracts and yard services throw off recurring, inflation-linked revenue on long time horizons — annuity-like cash flows, the exact profile infrastructure money hunts for. And the supply side is locked. Mediterranean waterfront is essentially fixed, permitting a new marina is slow and politically fraught, and the superyacht fleet keeps growing. Scarce, hard-to-replicate berths let owners hold prices in a way few businesses can match.
That combination — recurring income plus a supply ceiling — is why a marina platform can now command a billion-euro valuation from a fund that thinks in decades.
What it signals
A private-equity owner handing a marina platform to an infrastructure fund at this valuation puts marinas in a new category: mainstream infrastructure assets, alongside toll roads and fibre. The Mediterranean marina map is consolidating too. At 28 marinas and 14,300 berths, D-Marin is one of the largest single premium networks in the region, and ownership is passing from one major fund to another — prime berthing concentrated under financial owners.
For CVC the arc is textbook private equity: buy a fragmented gem, install management, roll up the footprint, sell the scaled platform. Private equity usually runs that playbook on a software vendor or a healthcare chain. This time it ran on marinas.
For anyone who keeps a boat in Turkey, Croatia, Greece or the UAE, infra-fund ownership usually means two things at once — continued investment and standardized service across the network, and professionalized, generally rising, berth pricing. D-Marin CEO Oliver Dörschuck framed the handover in customer terms: "InfraVia has consistently demonstrated clear alignment with D-Marin's customer-first philosophy," he said, adding that the CVC partnership "has been instrumental in shaping D-Marin into the business it is today."
Goldman Sachs and Clifford Chance advised CVC; Morgan Stanley and White & Case advised InfraVia. Neither side has given a timeline for closing.
