Industry intel with Camper & Nicholsons’ Giovanni Alessi Anghini and Paolo Casani

Laura Nicholls - SuperYacht Times
16th October 2019

With a 200-year heritage behind them and having recently acquired technology company NowBoat, Camper & Nicholsons are making big moves to uplift their image as a traditional brokerage house. As the NowBoat technology team is now fully integrated in-house, Camper & Nicholsons has spent the summer making fast progress advancing their new website and intelligence platform. The acquisition of NowBoat has allowed Camper & Nicholsons to secure a new team of five in-house developers who are supported by their existing IT department of 10 - a decision which was already in discussion some time ago.

Two years ago, we decided that the best way to manage the future was to bring our infrastructure in-house and not to buy or rely on other third-party suppliers as our competitors do,” explains Paolo Casani, Camper & Nicholsons Chief Executive Officer. “This is a big step,” adds Giovanni Alessi Anghin, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer. “There is no one else, as far as I know, that is seriously investing in technology, but Camper & Nicholsons have brought new knowledge in-house to create a digital environment for a digital generation.”

So far, the move has been a success for the group: since the launch of the new website at the beginning of June 2019, they have received triple the number of enquiries for both sales and charter. “We thought the new platform would give us some good figures, but we hadn’t predicted it would be quite this much!” says Casani. “We think that because of this new tool we have been able to reach a new generation of potential clients who focus more on charter.” In further discussion, Casani shares more trends that have been identified so far during 2019: “After the crisis, new construction was growing by three to five per cent and remains slightly increased. What is declining is the brokerage sector, and this can depend on so many factors such as the economy and major global politics. We see an interesting increase in charters which we need to understand and observe as it represents a change in clients’ attitudes.”

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