Fountaine Pajot already has a premier place in the increasingly popular sail and power catamaran market here, while sturdy, well-designed Dufour monohull yachts are top sellers in France, and have sailed in Asia-Pacific waters since the 1980s. The two yards, located around La Rochelle and its nearby regions, merged under FP control in 2018 to achieve better build and marketing synergies.
Mathieu Fountaine, Deputy CEO of Fountaine Pajot-Dufour Group, at left with Greg Boller and Mark Elkington, CEO of The Yacht Sales Co, Romain Motteau, Deputy CEO of FP-Dufour, Patrick Gillot of TYSC and Steven Guedeu, Group Sales Director of FP-Dufour
Their innovative Odysséa project launched last year, for example, strives to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Most models in their current ranges – 37-53ft Dufours and 41-80ft sail and motor Fountaine Pajot catamarans – are also available in Smart Electric mode. Campaigns to keep oceans clean are strongly supported by the group.
Buying 60 per cent equity in The Yacht Sales Co (TYSC), with its 15 offices in Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific and Southeast Asia, marks a new sales and service phase which will equally apply to other dealers in places like Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Hong Kong and South Korea. It is the second such acquisition lately. Italy’s Sanlorenzo motoryachts earlier announced its take-over of Simpson Marine, another large Asia-Pacific dealer.
The TYSC staff at one of many recent Asia-Pacific boat shows
A ready-made integrated sales network makes sense and provides obvious advantages. Signs are, however, that the two dealerships will in future operate in different ways, in terms of focus, although both stem from long personal relationships, Mike Simpson with Sanlorenzo’s Massimo Perotti, and TYSC CEO Mark Elkington with Fountaine Pajot founder Jean-Francois Fountaine, and now with FP executives like Romain Motteau, marketing specialist Hélène De Fontainieu and Hong Kong-based Kevin Corfa.
Elkington was a prominent player in Queensland’s Whitsunday Islands when it became a boating, sales and yacht charter centre, in tandem with upmarket resorts, and he engaged the craze for catamarans and trimarans in Australia and New Zealand by launching Multihull Solutions, covering all aspects of these in-demand craft.
The flagship of Fountaine Pajot’s sailing cats, the Thira 80
The Thira 80 is billed as “your own private island, wherever you want it”, and offers a wide range of activities and options across her decks
The French meanwhile established themselves as the world’s foremost sailors of multihull vessels, from high-speed offshore racers often crewed by single-handers or sailed short-handed, to smaller family boats benignly cruising the Med and Bay of Biscay.
After Jean-Francois Fountaine, Yves Pajot, Daniel Givon and Rémi Tristan got together to form Fountaine Pajot in the 1970s, Elkington became a latter-day partner in development of these boats, acting as a hands-on adviser in the nineties and naughties during trips to the yards, which he represented, and to boat shows at La Rochelle and at the Cannes Festival de la Plaisance.
FP President Claire Fountaine says: “Little by little, our boats have combined performance with more space, more comfort and more innovation. We’ve become cruising boat specialists, always bearing in mind that you shouldn’t expect anything from the sea, but you should expect everything from the boat.”
The FP Power Cat 80 was recently released and features hundreds of fine-tuning touches, among them an amidships lounge seen here built into the sturdy hull
Elkington goes further and says that today’s catamarans are literally double the volume of cats produced a couple of decades ago. Combine that with hundreds, even thousands of innovations and equipment updates that are constantly taking place, and today’s FP Group vessels are indeed state-of-the-art.
Fountaine Pajot and Dufour both use high-tech composite injection and infusion moulding in the hulls, bulkheads, decks and flybridge, an advanced technology that allows lightness while still imparting robustness and keeping up quality. Experienced joiners then design and assemble the wooden parts that make these boats so unique.
The Fountaine Pajot Power 67 model includes a foredeck spa, and most FPs and Dufours are available in Smart Electric mode which strives to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2030
Multihull Solutions morphed into The Yacht Sales Co a few years ago, in a nod to the fact that over 25 years, expertise had evolved to sell not only multihulls but also sail and motor monohulls. It built up a strategic portfolio, that for some time included those from shipyards such as Absolute, Maritimo, Tesoro and Gulf Craft as well as additional multihull brands like Iliad Catamarans, Neel and Leen trimarans, and Cora Catamarans.
Activities spread from Australia and New Zealand to New Caledonia, Fiji and French Polynesia, Panama and the Med, and in Southeast Asia to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Iliad cats are built at two yards in China.
“For us it is business as usual,” said Elkington, who is headquartered on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, before boarding a plane to New York recently. “Fountaine Pajot has made an investment, and they want to see returns from all facets of the business.”
Targets include Fountaine Pajot and Dufour doubling their already substantial sales in Asia-Pacific in five years, he told Yacht Style, so clearly there is much work lying ahead.
The interiors of the FP Power 67 offer custom choices for every owner to create their preferred combinations of fabrics and hues
The outer decks of the FP Power 67 are generously endowed
The sales strategy of Multihull Solutions and now TYSC dealers is that they must find the best boat for each individual client, across all models and types of craft and budgets, regardless of whether boats are newly built or pre-owned. This may be open to some interpretation, but it appears to have struck a chord, and has led to a relatively high level of repeat business.
Fountaine Pajot Group says in a separate statement, reported last issue, that it is the world’s leading manufacturer of cruising yachts and catamarans. It recorded sales of €350 million for the financial year 2023-24, representing a 26.9 per cent growth on the previous year.
The Fountaine Pajot Power 80 recently unveiled and the FP Thira 80 sailing cat are the present flagships of the FP lines. Eight sailing models are the new FP 41 and 44 (the latter replacing the Elba 45), the Tanna 47, Aura 51, Samana 59, Algeria 67 and the Thira 80. Power cats start with the Code 07 and continue with the MY4.S, which is also new, MY5, MY6, Power 67 and Power 80.
The original Fountaine Pajot MY4.S
The Fountaine Pajot MY44 embodies all the advantages of multihull design and draft with plenty of space for relaxation
These vessels are suitable for anything from entry level – a first experience in what multihulls are all about – to serious around-the-world cruising in a high degree of comfort, space and safety that didn’t exist only a decade or two ago.
They are the culmination and embodiment of what earlier owners have recommended, carefully recorded in minute detail, so that latest FPs always carry an accumulated wealth of innovations and refined ideas in the completed boat.
This has led to a string of awards, as peers review what has been added to or adapted in each model, and Fountaine Pajots and Dufours are again short-listed for the next round of international trophies.
Space limitations preclude individual profiles, which can be found on the FP website, but as a sample the Thira 80 sailing cat is billed simply as “your own private island, wherever you want it”. Among its features, “two side deck lounges with retractable balconies evoke the glamour of a cruise ship, the only difference being that this flagship can sail.
“When you are on board, you are no longer a mere spectator watching the scenery flash before your eyes. You become part of the landscape, moving in harmony with the natural world, immersed in the experience.
“The yacht’s sophistication is apparent at every turn. Owners have the freedom to select furniture and palettes to suit their personal style, with upholstery options from the distinguished Pierre Frey range. Solar panels over the side lounge are transparent to provide shelter without restricting natural light”.
Most recently, FP has collaborated with Couach Catamarans to present the sleek new Veya brand of powercats – which debuted at the 2025 Miami International Boat Show in February, and is now represented by The Yacht Sales Co.
Dufour monohull sailing yachts are the leading brand in France, and in Asia became integral parts of the early Raja Muda Regatta going on to the King’s Cup in Thailand
The Dufour Yachts range starts at 37ft and extends through 41, 44, 470 and 48 to the largest 530 model. The yard was launched more than 60 years ago. Older readers will recall that the King’s Cup in Phuket, Thailand, began in 1987, and the island-hopping Raja Muda Regatta in next door Malaysia three years later in 1990.
To link these two fledgling events, Asian Boating ran a 100nm race from Langkawi to Phi Phi, where keelboat races of the King’s Cup then began. Malaysian and Singaporean yachts were welcome, as were international flag vessels, while Hong Kong sailors flew into Langkawi and hired a fleet of Dufour yachts that had been imported by a charter company based there.
They didn’t have spinnaker poles, but Dufour, after negotiations with Asian Boating, kindly agreed to provide them. The Hong Kong yachties brought their own spinnakers, sheets and guys, and so a new class of keelboats began to contest both the Asian Boating Langkawi-Phi Phi Race and the King’s Cup proper.
This included official border crossings, which was another logistics problem, and some Thai islands were then disconcertingly occupied by pirates, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, a keen supporter of sailing from junior Optimists up, tried out the Dufours too, and amused himself advising his less experienced ministers how to stop a sailboat, not quite the same as applying brakes in a car.
Dufour was thus somewhat central to the early development of these two Southeast Asian regattas, and much-updated models have been racing and cruising in Asia-Pacific waters since.
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