One year DNA; our market view

Almost one year ago the DNA made its debut at the Vele di Pasqua. We wil have producec and delivered 55 more before the coming Vele di Pasqua. This time our new mast will make its debut.

We will start making masts because people who want to enther the class prefer to buy complete boats and availability is a problem nowadays. It also helps us to keep the price of the boats reasonable.

It is not our intention to dominante the market just to have a healthy business model.

As manufacturer we have a marketshare of about 40% know, our aim is not to grow beyond that but to grow further because the A-market itself becomes bigger. A bigger market is good for all of us. Past years and past winter not only have been good to us but also to the mastmakers and sailmakers. The sailors have more choice and will get better products as competition both speeds up innovation and improves quality.

The A-class is both a community and a commercial platform. It is not a manufacturers class. We love the A-class and have no intention to transform it into a DNA class.

Bimare showed us the way. Bimare makes almost all parts by themselves. If you are in a small market you need enough value added to have a healty business. We expect to see 2 or three big manufacturers and some smaller. The smaller one will focus on the platforms and buy more parts and the bigger firms will make more in house.

We will see some strong part manuafacturers and some smaller  too. Although Fiberfoam and Saarberg dominate we also see good masts of Bimare (in house producion primarily used on Bimare's boats) and Hall spars.

The A-class as a class has a huge potential. We started our business to make  competitive boats available to our friends and to new entrants. Once we have the new mast we can sell complete boats which is essential to attract new sailors. Sofar only a few new sailors entered the class and those were often facilitated by an A-class sailor they knew.

Coming year we want to promote the A-class to attract more F18, skiff, Moth, Finn, Laser and other sailors who want to have a high performance cat.

We just attracted two Mach 2 sailors, who loved their Mach 2 but swapped to the A-class due to its simplicity and the huge weather window you can use it in.The A-class is still relatively unknown to the bigger sailing public and has only a small installed base in Europe of approximately 1000 boats. We think we can expand that to a few thousand the coming 5 years. From a traditional A-class perspective absurd, but if you see the unmet needs of sailors in their fourties with money and no time you might see the potential too.

Happy sailing.