Hundreds of jobs have been secured following the announcement that a buyer has been found for Bavaria Yachts

17 September 2018

Bavaria Yachts has been bought by a private equity fund advised by the German investment company CMP Capital Management-Partners.

The move secures 800 jobs in Germany and France.

The yacht builders went into self-administration in April, allowing the firm’s management to remain operational while new investors were sought. This also meant Bavaria could continue to build and deliver 220 yachts during that period.

The private equity fund will also acquire all shares in the French subsidiary Bavaria Catamarans SAS.

‘All 550 employees of BAVARIA YACHTS in Giebelstadt and all 250 employees of BAVARIA CATAMARANS in Rochefort will transfer to the purchaser,’ said Bavaria in a statement.

The purchase will be completed after merger control clearance by the German Federal Cartel Office, which is expected in a couple of weeks. The parties have agreed not to disclose the purchase price.

CMP Capital Management-Partners is a German investment company that has specialised in the acquisition of companies in distress in Germany, Austria and Switzerland since its foundation in 2000.

With the investment in a company, CMP employees assume operative management responsibilities on site. In the case of Bavaria, Dr. Ralph Kudla, restructuring expert and partner at CMP, will join the executive board.

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Commenting, the managing director ofCMP Capital Management-Partners, Kai Brandes, said: ‘We are convinced of Bavaria’s global market potential and will sustainably develop the company. The restructuring measures will focus on regaining market share and improving production costs.’

Restructuring expert Dr. Tobias Brinkmann, managing director of Bavaria Yachtbau since insolvency proceedings began in April 2018, said Bavaria was an ‘outstanding company with a strong brand, compelling products and a highly dedicated team.’

‘We are pleased to have found a well-known and experienced buyer in CMP who will lead Bavaria into the future. The entire management would like to thank our employees, yacht dealers, customers and suppliers,’ he stated.

‘ They have all supported Bavaria Yachtbau during the insolvency proceedings. The fact that Bavaria has been able to successfully build and deliver 220 yachts during the last five months shows how committed and reliable our staff is,’ added Dr Brinkmann

22 May 2018

Bavaria Yachts has announced it is in the process of securing new investment and hopes to make an announcement in July.

The German yacht builder is continuing to take orders and deliver new boats.

‘Production has been stabilised and deliveries are continuing: more than 30 yachts have left the shipyard over the past two weeks and have been handed over to customers,’ said Bavaria in a statement.

‘All 600 employees are on duty, and agreements were reached with all major suppliers for further delivery against short payment terms,’ it added.

Bavaria went into self-administration last month. This allowed the firm’s management to remain operational while new investors are sought.

It only affected operations at Bavaria’s German operations. Nautitech – Bavaria’s catamaran arm – was unaffected.

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The German shipyard said management and administrators have started an ‘investor process’ to rebuild Bavaria Yachts for the future.

‘The objective is to be able to present an investor in July 2018,’ said Bavaria.

The firm, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, was sold by its founder, Winfried Herrmann to the private equity group, Bain Capital in June 2007 for around €1.1 billion.

The American investment firms, Oaktree Capital and Anchorage Capital Group then became creditors post financial crisis in 2008.

As part of restructuring, Oaktree and Anchorage waived a substantial majority of their loans and became majority shareholders, investing ‘significant resource’.

‘Unfortunately, Bavaria Yachtbau was unable to recover operational profitability,’ said a spokesman for Oaktree and Anchorage.

As a result, Bavaria went into self-administration, and restructuring expert, Dr Tobias Brinkmann was appointed to find new investors.

‘We are continuing the operation and want to go into the coming order season with a new investor,’ stressed Dr Brinkmann.

‘The first expressions of interest have already been received, and we are also actively approaching potential investors,’ he added.

24 April 2018

Bavaria Yachts has confirmed that is has now gone into self-administration.

The German shipyard said boat production and deliveries will continue until June 2018. Wages and salaries for Bavaria’s 600 workers are also secure until then.

The self-administration, which allows the firm’s management to remain operational while an investor for the company is sought, only affects operations at Bavaria’s German operations.

Nautitech – Bavaria’s catamaran arm – remains unaffected and trading, delivery and after sales service at its base in Rochefort, France continues as normal.

‘In the current situation, we want to supply our customers with the usual high quality, stressed Bavaria’s chief operating officer, Erik Appel.

Dr. Ing. Tobias Brinkmann, specialist lawyer for insolvency law and partner in the law firm Brinkmann & Partner, joins the management team. Bavaria’s previous CEO, Lutz Henkel, left the management board last week.

Bavaria said its ‘top priority is now the search for an investor’

‘We have years of experience building high-quality yachts and are industry leaders in many areas,’ said Appel.

Bavaria said that against the background of a good market positioning, the aim was to ‘put the operation on a sound financial basis’.

Bavaria was founded in 1978 and is considered one of the market leaders in European yacht building. In January, it announced the new flagship C65 as well as the C45 models at Boot Düsseldorf.

Payment of wages and salaries for the months of April to June 2018 will be secured by bankruptcy pre-financing.

In a statement, Nautitech Catamarans, said: ‘To this day, the catamaran business remains in Rochefort France. It is an independent French company with its own employees, suppliers and bank accounts. Seen as the “jewel in the crown” of the Bavaria group, the well managed and profitable catamaran business is already attracting interest from potential buyers.

‘Whilst we understand that both the catamaran division and the struggling German operation will probably soon be under new ownership, or indeed ownerships, the operation of the catamaran business is completely unaffected by the situation in Germany. Therefore trading, delivery and after sales service continue as before.’

20 April 2018

The German yacht building giant Bavaria is expected to issue a statement later today, explaining that it is entering administration.

It is thought that the administration will apply to the Bavaria monohulls, but not to Bavaria catamarans. The company, which announced the new flagship C65 as well as the C45 models at Boot Düsseldorf earlier this year, is expected to continue construction and delivery of all current orders and will not be closing its factory.</s>Despite no official communique from the company itself, reports from Germany on Friday (20 April) indicate that Bavaria Yachts has gone into administration.

The company employs over 500 people in Giebelstadt, Bavaria making power and sail yachts up to 57ft long. A separately owned multihull brand, Nautitech, is based in La Rochelle, France and is expected to continue business as usual, according to several reports.

A statement is expected early in the week.</s>Police chief inspector Timo Schüller (pictured above) stands next to Germany's A3 motorway at border to the Austria. One after another trucks drive past him. The noise is deafening. Schüller, wearing a blue sports jacket, has to raise his voice to be heard. "Many refugees from the Middle East cross into Germany here," he explains. The motorway is part of the so-called Balkan migration route.

Read more: Outcry in Bavaria over extending police powers

Schüller looks over to a dark brown, derelict former border post still located between both motorway lanes. The building used to be part of the Suben checkpoint, which was located just south of the Inn River, which divides Germany and Austria. The checkpoint was closed when Austria joined the EU's Schengen agreement, which prohibits border controls within the bloc. That was in 1995. Back then, Bavarian border police served at Suben. By 1998, the control post became superfluous and was closed. "Now, we're patrolling a 30-kilometer-wide [19 mile] strip along the border, and we're doing a good job," Schüller says.

Officially, nobody is challenging this assessment. But some political leaders in Bavaria imply that border checks should in fact be improved. Bavaria's state government has a vision of what the future of border policing could look like: Newly appointed State Premier Markus Söder of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), announced plans to establish a Bavarian border guard, promising that, "We will get to work!" And Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann stressed that "our new border guard will help reduce illegal migration, fight inhumane people smugglers and cross-border crime." A 1,000-strong border guard is planned.

Timo Schüller learned of these plans "from the media." And he doesn't want to provide a political interpretation. So he flatly states: "In Germany, the national police force is responsible for protecting borders." Which, he says, is exactly what it says in the law pertaining to the national police force. And it's what can be observed every day. Uniformed and plainclothes national police officers patrol the area, with the right to stop and search any car they deem suspicious.The Bavarian state police participate in these random spot checks. The law stipulates that they must hand over asylum-seekers, migrants in the country illegally and people smugglers to the national police.

Read more: Germany: Is Bavaria set for an anti-Merkel conservative swing?

The Schengen agreement did not put an end to border surveillance. EU citizens were given the feeling that state borders had ceased being important. In the meantime, the mood has changed. Schüller gets into his police car. He wants to show us where border controls have become an important topic again.

Border checks are a sensitive issue in Lower Bavaria, in Germany's southeast. In September 2015, locals felt like they were caught up amid a state of emergency when hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East were allowed to cross the border. Residents vividly remember those days. Everyone helped out in those difficult times. The national police, the state police, Germany's army and thousands of volunteers. It was a major effort and huge numbers of asylum-seekers were helped. But many locals were left feeling that neither the government nor state authorities really had had the situation under control. It undermined their trust in the state.

Gerhard Waschler represents Passau East in the Bavarian state parliament. The CSU politician saw first-hand what can happen when Bavarians are worried their border isn't secure: The far-right AfD party won many votes in the region during last year's general election.

"A vast majority supports the idea of a Bavarian border guard," Waschler is pleased to report. He says surveys indicate Bavarians are most concerned about security issues. "And creating a border guard definitely increases security."

Waschler's fellow party member Walter Taubeneder from Passau West, who also holds a seat in the Bavarian parliament, hopes the "innumerable border crossings" with Austria and the Czech Republic will soon be under tighter control. He is eager to see the plans for the new border guard. In a recent address, Bavarian State Premier Markus Söder promised "more than just spot checks," including the use of drone technology. Waschler and Taubeneder are happy the border guard's headquarters is set to open in Passau in July. That will certainly help in the upcoming election for state parliament.

Read more: A deeper look at Germany's new Interior and Heimat Ministry

"Bavaria's state government has indeed touched a nerve with that," said Christian Flisek, a prominent domestic policy specialist in the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). He aims to win a seat in Bavaria's state parliament in October. Flisek does not reject deploying extra police along the border with Austria, but he is somewhat wary of the idea. "That would be telling the people: Merkel failed, the federal government failed, now we are taking the situation into our own hands — but that is actually a bogus claim," he said. Flisek believes that bringing in a new organization, with new uniforms and badges, would not change the fact that they ultimately would have the same powers as the border police already operating in Bavaria. "It's a symbolic policy, just like the fixed border controls that have been reintroduced in Bavaria," he said.

In 2015, Germany's federal police built a new checkpoint at a parking lot 10 kilometers from the border with Austria. Bavarian state authorities pushed for it as a way to catch people smugglers, migrants in the country illegally and other criminals. It helped people in Bavaria to feel that their safety concerns were being taken seriously. Three such checkpoints on the autobahn to Bavaria have made the security presence there much more visible. However, they also make it clear that authorities are not as closely patrolling the many other routes across the border. Adding new border police would not necessarily do anything to change that situation, as they would not be allowed to carry out future controls.

On the A3 itself, the border controls tend to hold up traffic fairly often. Symbolic policies, then, do have a price.

"The traffic jams particularly anger the commuters," said Georg Perl, who heads the inspection authority. The exhausting work here requires a lot of manpower. He and his team usually look at every car passing through — a traffic-control system slows vehicles down to a walking speed. Suspicious vehicles are waved to the side and examined by a special team inside a tent structure originally designed for farm animals. At the moment, the tent is empty. "When the traffic really slows down, we take a break from controls so it can get going again," said Perl.

Does that not then mean that anyone who really wants to slip through the cracks, can? Perl grins. "Today again we had a trunk with illegal puppies, no older than eight weeks," he said. Smugglers know that the authorities are here. The ones carrying people can travel through one of the numerous other border junctures in the region. Nevertheless, Perl said he and his team still find plenty.

"We get lots of hits with people who are wanted, or traffic offenses, but fewer cases involving people with migrant backgrounds," he said. Those cases are transferred to the border police. Perl calls them "incidental."
German manufacturer Bavaria Yachtbau is expected to collapse into administration.