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Richard Hadida was sailing off Antigua on his 90-foot yacht in February when his wife suggested they circumnavigate the globe with their baby son. He wanted to wait but he has “carpe diem” tattooed on one wrist and he remembered a close friend who was dying. “I thought, ‘Don’t kick any cans down any roads. Let’s do it.’”
A sailing yacht traversing oceans sounds like neither the most comfortable nor safest place for a toddler. But Hadida has reason to be confident as the owner and guiding spirit of Oyster Yachts, the UK maker of luxury “blue water” sailing boats. When they set sail next year, they will be in a platoon of wealthy explorers.
Hadida has paid for the privilege. He was co-founder of Evolution, the Swedish online casino group now valued at SKr135bn (£10.4bn), but has devoted much of his time to Oyster since buying it out of administration in 2018. That has been a struggle: Oyster made a pre-tax loss of £14.1mn last year and Hadida has injected a cumulative £65mn to keep it afloat.
He was warned. The friend who inspired him was Eddie Jordan, the former Formula 1 team owner who died in March, with whom he used to share his Oyster yacht. They were together in Cape Town when the chance to buy the company came up. “He tried to talk me out of it for three days. He said, ‘It’s going to be a headache.’”
Oyster was founded in Norfolk in 1973 by the entrepreneur Richard Matthews, who made £50mn when he sold it to Balmoral Capital in 2008. The yachts, which now retail for between £1.8mn and £8.3mn, are hand-built by 460 employees at five sites in Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and are known for combining luxurious decks and cabins with ocean-going sturdiness.
The company’s fortunes dived in the mid-2000s: it was sold on to Dutch investors for only £15mn in 2012, and in 2015 an Oyster yacht sank after its keel detached off the coast of Spain. The legal dispute, along with financial indiscipline led to its collapse. “They were making boats for zero profit,” Hadida says. “It was sheer, terrible business management.”
Hadida’s three-year turnaround plan sailed straight into the pandemic, during which appetite for ocean escapism grew, but builders were caught by supply chain inflation. Global demand has sagged, although luxury buyers are insulated from austerity. “No boat builder is having a fun time,” says Hadida, who lives in Monaco.
Oyster has found a novel way to build orders: it offers its 1,200 owners a mid-life challenge and a collective thrill by helping them to sail around the world together.
Its biennial World Rally is a 15-month, 27,000 nautical-mile circumnavigation by up to 30 Oyster yachts, leaving from Antigua and sailing to the Galápagos Islands, Fiji, Indonesia and Mauritius before ending back in the Caribbean “The world is wide, time is short, and you can sail wherever you want,” says Pau Serracanta, a Spanish investor and Oyster owner who completed the rally that ended in April.
Serracanta and his wife Helena de Felipe Sempere, a luxury hotel consultant, enjoyed surfing the waves off remote islands along the way. Even in the middle of oceans, they remained linked to the internet by the Starlink satellite system, enabling them to carry on with some work. “Thanks to Elon Musk, I am not retired, I will never retire, I live my life in another way.”
That is tempting for those who can afford the entry price of an Oyster yacht, and the rally fee of up to £135,000 for logistical and safety support. They also need to be good sailors, although many bring crews. The risks of sailing were underlined by last year’s sinking of Mike Lynch’s Italian-built superyacht Bayesian but being in a platoon helps.
Sailing in groups is common: the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers holds a crossing each year. But Oyster has turned luxury yacht ownership into a rarefied social experience. “Adventures, stories, experiences you have together with friends are more and more important,” says Torsten Müller-Otvös, former Rolls-Royce chief executive, who is now advising the company.
Oyster still needs to make money. The boats are very expensive but the margins on building them are inadequate. Hadida says he plans to launch larger models that will cost even more. Oyster’s sailors can’t have all the fun.
Cartography by Steven Bernard