It uses to be that USA parts were freighted over to the Far East, installed into a hull buildt there, and then the finished boat was freighted back to be sold in the USA at a good price.

With freight up so much, will this effect new boat sales?

With freight up so much, will this effect used boat sales?

Will this effect how new boats are built?

That is the question.

Grand Banks has talked up shipping yacht sub-assembles inside containers and doing final assembly in either Oregon-Washington state for ahwhile.

Their name came up slighly/lightly when the SesSwirl plant in Bend, Oregon was vacated.

Containers should be more weather proof and damage proof than deck cargo as well as fit better/cheaper as cargo on a freighter.

...North Star Yachts has laid off 60 workers in this Columbia River town north of Portland, Ore. The company is moving production to China for lower labor costs... this might be AP release

Sounds like an oops!

I suppose this might shake down to what happens to be the most labor intensive part of yacht building. Whether that is the making the hull, the superstructure, the joinery inside, or the mechanicals? But I have no answer. Don't know which uses the most labor or what the cost split is between Far East and US/Canada. According to posts on YF the PacNW guys (plus PJ and Trinity) who make the largest yachts are still keeping busy. Under 100' is the bad news.

Kelly

It depends on their currency versas the US, plus the molded work in the boat- higher front end cost to the boat builder to make the molds, but the lower the "per boat" cost with molded parts. easier to keep up, too.

Lots of factors to consider here:

-engineering time to design assemblies that "fit" inside a sea container. Just how many of what parts can you pack in there???

-shipping cost of sea containers back and forth. Last time I had involvement that was $4-5000 per trip to that side of the world, compared to $25000 per trip for open deck shipping. This was before the fuel price increases of the past year (note that this was on a piece of drilling equipement, one of products we shipped had a 40 ft long boom so that $25,000 cost would go up exponentially for say, a longer hull/deck piece)

-what parts are viable to ship (I can't see the hull of a yacht fitting in pieces into a sea container) so do you have interior bits manufactured here or there and shipped?

For certain though, the cost of shipping has changed the viability of globalization.