David King, the founder of Princess Yachts, has passed away after a period of illness. He was 83
David was one of the European production motoryacht industry’s most successful first-generation pioneers. He stood shoulder to shoulder with contemporaries such as Robert Braithwaite (Sunseeker), Sam Newington (Fairline), Paolo Vitelli (Azimut-Benetti) and Norberto Ferretti (Ferretti Group), all five of whom created substantial boatbuilding operations that exported all over the world and that, to varying degrees, spurred each other on to greatness.
Born in Dundee in 1942, David studied engineering at the Royal Naval College (Dartmouth) and subsequently spent his early years in the Royal Navy. It was that experience that set him on course after leaving the service with two friends to set up Marine Projects, the forerunner of what we know today as Princess Yachts.
Initially the intention was to establish a charter boat business in Plymouth, but very quickly the trio decided they would have a go at building a boat themselves. Long before they finished that first boat, the original ‘Project 31’, they ended up selling it and two more. The boats were sold for £3,400 each, but subsequently it was realised that they were costing £3,460. The story became one of David’s favourites, a salutary reminder that every successful business begins with lessons learned and that the willingness to keep improving matters far more than getting everything right first time.
Slowly but surely that fledgling business went from strength to strength building ever bigger Princess models as David appreciated early on that building smaller models really didn’t pay. And eventually towards the end of his tenure Princess topped out at 40m (130ft).
In the early 1980s Marine Projects was sold to South African wine magnate Graham Beck, although David remained in charge of not only Marine Projects, but was also an influential board member of Beck’s acquisition vehicle, Renwick PLC, which for a number of years also owned the old Fairline Boats.
During the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s the company was not only building its own Princess range of motorcruisers and motoryachts, but also contract building. For instance, for many years it also produced the Moody range of sailing cruisers. However, by the mid-to-late 1990s a booming global economy and skyrocketing demand for the Princess portfolio meant that contract building activities had become a distraction and were taking up capacity that could be more profitably used to build more Princesses. In 2001 the company became Princess Yachts to better support the brand and by this time the business had become one of the biggest employers in Plymouth.
Eventually Princess Yachts was sold in 2008 to L Capital, a fund belonging to France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, the owner of one of the world’s largest luxury brand portfolios. David was instrumental in securing that investment from that LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) sister fund.
Since then, Princess Yachts has continued to grow and most recently changed hands in spring 2023. Its present majority shareholder is American investment fund KPS, which now presides over a business that employs getting on for 3,000 people, has a turnover in excess of £300 million and that builds around 150 boats a year from a portfolio that presently spans 14.6m (48ft) up to 36.5m (120ft). Those numbers are David King’s material legacy to the company’s Plymouth workforce and the Princess family of dealers around the world.
For those that knew David personally, he was unassuming, modest and fundamentally kind. Throughout his working life David King built good boats because he cared. He owned and ran his own Princesses, so knew what worked and what didn’t. And he remained on Princess’s model development team long after he retired as chairman a decade or so ago.
“For many people, it is difficult to think of Princess without thinking of David,” says present Princess Yachts CEO, Will Green. “That says everything about the contribution he made over more than six decades, but it only tells part of the story… David never tried to take any personal credit for what Princess has become. Rather he was always the first to recognise the contribution of others and that humility earned him enormous respect throughout our industry.”
