Ferretti May Put Apreamare Up For Sale

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
May 14th 2009 at 9:02PM

Italian yachtmaker Ferretti may lighten its load by selling off some of the less expensive brands it owns. Of course less by Ferretti standards is still quite expensive. Bloomberg reveals that one of the brands Ferretti may unload is Apreamare, a unit which makes gorgeously classic fishing boats. The boats are modest compared to Ferretti's standard megayachts and sell for as little as 500,000 euros.

The logic for selling brands with a lower price point is that the ultra-rich are less likely to cancel their yachts. Apreamare is valued at around 60 million euros and Apreamare Chairman Cataldo Aprea is said to be behind an investor group looking to by back his family brand. The group is one of several looking at buying the 160- year-old Apreamare brand. Apreamare may be sold in a package deal with the Itama brand.

Ferretti flirted with bankruptcy earlier this year but a group of 100 creditors led by Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc converted their debt to equity to avert bankruptcy for Ferretti and restructured 1.2 billion euros of debt. Ferretti is expected to begin paying interest on that debt next month and a few sales could make that burden a little easier to take.

Tags: apreamare, ferretti, yachts