Why the market for superyachts is booming

Even oligarchs, tech barons and other super-rich folk might have been expected to reconsider spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a superyacht amid gathering global turmoil. In 2020, as covid-19 spread, “I spent my days doing worst-case scenarios and drawing up the budgets to go with them,” says Giovanna Vitelli, chairwoman of Azimut Benetti, the world’s biggest maker of such craft. Then Western sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine lost her a tenth of her customers.