Between the fifth and the eighth of August, a Florida dealer filed for Chapter 11, a French catamaran yard went into court-supervised restructuring, and a Breton builder of electric outboards watched its site burn down. Lined up, the three read as one story about an industry falling over. Taken apart, only one has much to do with the boat market.
Nautitech: the shareholder left, the production line stayed
On 7 August the Commercial Court of La Rochelle opened a redressement judiciaire over Nautitech Catamarans — the French court-supervised restructuring procedure, broadly the equivalent of Chapter 11 in the United States. Cessation of payments was dated 15 July, the observation period runs six months, and the trade press learned of the case only on 13 August.
The trigger was not weak sales. The shareholder of Nautitech, the Berlin fund CMP Capital Management Partners, stopped funding the company, and the procedure is the frame for finding a buyer while the yard keeps running. French trade press put it flatly: a restructuring opened in order to change shareholder. No bidder has been named.
The yard is a going concern. Registered in Rochefort, it reported revenue of €20,956,800 for the 2024 financial year, the last published, with headcount in the 100 to 199 band. Output runs at about 25 catamarans a year against roughly 50 in 2023, a deliberate move upmarket. Ten boats have sold this year, four delivered and six in build, across the 41 Type S, 44 Open and 48 Open.
Production, deliveries and aftersales support all continue, the order book gives visibility into the summer of 2027, and the 41 Type S is still booked for Southampton, Saint-Tropez and La Rochelle in September. Under French law current contracts run on through the observation period while pre-filing debts freeze. That is the sharp end for suppliers, whose receivables are now on hold. Warranty obligations and customer deposits have not been addressed publicly.
Temo: a fire on a Saturday morning
On Saturday 8 August, at around 9.20 in the morning, fire took hold on rue Daniel Gilard in Vannes, Brittany, in a building shared by a wellness centre and the electric-propulsion company Temo. French sources put about 60 firefighters on site; Marine Industry News reported 50. Nobody was hurt, since the premises were empty, and the Morbihan prefecture found no technological risk to residents.
Offices, workshop, showroom and warehouse were destroyed along with equipment and stock; shipments, repairs and R&D stopped. The cause is not established. Lithium batteries were stored on the premises, but no official source connects them to the ignition.
Temo was founded in 2018 by Alexandre Seux and Justine Perussel, employs 23 people and raised a €6 million Series A from At One Ventures, the Bpifrance-managed Ecotechnologies 2 fund and angels. Its TEMO·450 outboard launched in 2020 and has sold over 5,000 units in 15 countries; the larger TEMO·1000 followed in 2023. The plan now: new premises, replacement equipment and stock, a restarted supply chain, a staged return to operations. Nothing has been said about insurance or the size of the loss.
None of this is a market signal. A company at the strongest point of its short life lost its building on a Saturday morning.
FB Marine Group: the one that really is the market
On 5 August Fastboats.com Sales Company, LLC, trading as FB Marine Group, filed for Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida, on the Subchapter V track: the streamlined small-business version, where the debtor keeps control and files a plan faster. Judge Scott M. Grossman has the case, Carol Lynn Fox is trustee, and claims are due by 14 October.
The petition lists assets above $1.7 million against liabilities of about $2.6 million, but the revenue line carries the story: $18.4 million in 2024, $15 million in 2025, $10.5 million in 2026 to the filing date. More than 40 percent gone in two years.
The company has three South Florida locations — Fort Lauderdale, Miami Beach, West Palm Beach. It sells new and used boats, runs charter, finance, brokerage and service, carries Contender and IKon, and holds outboard dealerships for Mercury Marine, Yamaha and Suzuki. Headcount is not disclosed.
The creditor list is where the diagnosis sits. The largest unsecured claims are $400,000 owed to Brock Vernon, $262,000 to Rudy Trevisan and $250,000 to Yaddiel Marin — all disputed litigation claims — then a $115,000 final judgment and a contested judgment above $77,000. No bank debt sits at the top. Litigation finished this one off, on top of a top line that was already falling.
The filing skips what owners will ask first: what happens to customer boats in storage or in for service, and to deposits already paid. The petition is silent and management filed no statement of cause. Subchapter V keeps the debtor in possession and the automatic stay halts collections, but the status of specific customer obligations is undisclosed.
The 2026 sequence
The rest of the year gives the August cluster company.
| Date | Company | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 17 May | West Marine | Chapter 11, District of Delaware |
| 6 July | Kadey-Krogen Yachts | Chapter 7 liquidation, Delaware; revenue $14.96M in 2024, $10.11M in 2025, $403,962 in 2026 |
| 5 August | FB Marine Group | Chapter 11, Subchapter V, Southern District of Florida |
| 7 August | Nautitech | Redressement judiciaire, Commercial Court of La Rochelle |
| 8 August | Temo | Fire destroys the Vannes site |
| around 10 August | MarineMax | Agreed acquisition by Blackstone for $1.5 billion |
| August | The Italian Sea Group | Opens the search for a new investor |
The last two rows are a different category. Blackstone paying $1.5 billion for the largest American dealer network is capital arriving, and a listed Italian builder seeking an investor is a change of ownership, not a failure. The market is contracting and changing hands at the same time.
What the numbers actually support
The American numbers come from NMMA, and they count hulls. Retail sales of new powerboats fell 8.8 percent in 2025, to 215,237 units from 236,070, with personal watercraft down 10.8 percent and pontoons 12.5 percent. Used boats make up about 80 percent of everything sold in a year, and NMMA expects 2026 in line with 2025. "The mixed and uncertain economic environment that persisted throughout 2025 brought material impacts to the recreational boating market," NMMA chief executive Frank Hugelmeyer said in January.
France reads the same way. The FIN counted 7,063 units of national production in the 2024–2025 season, down 16 percent by volume and 17 percent by value. Sail took the worst of it at 27 percent down, motor boats fell 8 percent, and boats over nine metres held value almost flat. The bottom of the range is what fell away.
The European industry bodies, awkwardly, do not confirm a downturn at all. ICOMIA's spring 2026 update has the European market growing, at around $17.9 billion this year. Both readings are accurate, because they count different things. Units of new boats are falling; industry revenue, which folds in service, marinas and refit, is rising. Prove a crisis with the money figures and you are reading the wrong column.
Three events in four days, three mechanisms. Nautitech is an ownership problem: the yard has an order book into the summer of 2027, and its shareholder chose to stop paying for it. Temo is an accident, carrying no market signal at all. FB Marine is the market one: revenue down from $18.4 million to $10.5 million in under three years, with lawsuits rather than banks atop the creditor list.
What to watch next
For Nautitech, the six-month observation period is the clock, and the order book gives a buyer something real to acquire; suppliers have the least room to manoeuvre. For Temo, it is how fast 23 people can restart from nothing. For FB Marine, owners and deposit holders will learn where they stand through the Subchapter V process, ahead of the 14 October deadline, rather than any announcement.
Unit sales of new boats are down on both sides of the Atlantic, the bottom of the range is taking the damage, and the companies that fail are failing for their own particular reasons — a departing investor, a fire, a courtroom. Meanwhile private equity pays more than a billion dollars for a dealer network. Same market, both of them.
Photo: Nautitech Catamarans / nautitechcatamarans.com.
