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Beneteau Discuss Building A Network in China
For French sail and motoryacht manufacturer Beneteau, operating in China has been something they’ve been effectively doing for over a decade.
It makes them well placed to offer a perspective on the Chinese market, which they have been tapping into with great success thanks to their established team of distributors in the region.
We caught up with Thibaut de Montvalon, Managing Director of Beneteau, at the 2015 China Rendez-Vous to hear his thoughts.
“The fact that we’ve been here a long time means a lot; the fact that we’ve been established in China means a lot also,” he said. “I’m not sure that it means so much for a buyer. I’ve been here seven years, my company’s been here 11 years. but it helps us at least have a better understanding and a good visibility of the trends. So we’ve educated ourselves as well and grown more mature and I think it gives us an insight on which direction we should take.
“As far as the client is concerned, the range we offer is obviously a very strong point. So you can walk into this booth and I told you we just closed a deal on a 9-metre boat and we could be hopefully this afternoon talking about a 70-feet motoryacht, or a 40-foot sailing yacht, so having this wide choice is also a very strong element for our clients.
“And then very importantly, we have a very strong distribution network, because as you probably know Beneteau doesn’t sell boats direct – we run through a network of distributors. This is all around the world. We are manufacturers and we have distributors who distribute our product and we are the only brand who have gone for a wide range of distributors in China. So we have ten distributors and all of them have been with us five years, if not six, years.
“The people running this show are our distributors here in Sanya. They’ve been with us more than six years and this is very strong because I believe that being here early means that we selected the right people quite some time ago and we had the opportunity to train them. So we have very good salespeople to handle the clients.”
You can watch the full video interview with Thibaut de Montvalon. above this article.