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Billy Smith Discusses Trinity’s Shifting Dynamics
As one of the biggest yacht builders in the United States, Trinity Yachts are sufficiently well established to deal with the peaks and troughs of the market.
With the market for 40-5-metre boats still struggling to catch up with the wider market resurgence, Trinity are busy focussing on other areas of the business. We sat down with Billy Smith of Trinity Yachts to find out more.
“Trinity Yachts is doing fine,” he said. “The corporate company is now known as Gulf Coast Shipyard group. We had an equity investor come in last year, so we’re doing fine financially, we have 1,000 employees.
“Unfortunately the yacht sector of our business has fallen down to only about 10 per cent. We have a 59-metre under construction that delivers next year. We have done quite a few refits on existing Trinitys, which was kind of interesting, we’ve never done it before, but we had the capacity, we had the workers available, so a lot of people who are buying Trinitys are bringing them back to the factory and having them redone. So that’s been an interesting development for us.”
He continued: “We’re going back to our roots which are military and commercial. Next year we’ll be delivering a 92-metre by 19-metre off-shore supply vessel and this is the first vessel in US history which will actually burn LNG as its fuel. It’s not a cargo vessel, it will burn LNG as its fuel, so the carbon footprint will be virtually nil.
“It’s not quite ready for private yachts yet but this is all technology that is going to be transferred into the yachts. These vessels are dynamic positioning, they’re firefighting, they’re diesel electric, they’re LNG, they’re ABS passport green which means that they’re built with the idea that they’re gonna be recycled, so everything that goes into the boat is green and when it goes to recycle it there are no issues."
You can watch the full video interview with Billy Smith above this article.