Japec Jakopin: Green machine keeps boat builder afloat

Japec Jakopin was at a boat show in Monaco in September 2008 when his clients began glancing feverishly at their BlackBerry e-mail devices as news spread of Lehman Brothers' collapse.

"Nobody said, 'I'm not buying the boat'. But they said 'we need a month until this settles a little bit'. Later they said they needed a year to be able to decide. And of course the situation is still not settled."

Along with the rest of the industry, Seaway, a Slovenian boat development company founded in 1989 by Mr Jakopin and his brother Jernej, saw demand for its premium sailing yachts decline last year as customers deferred big-ticket purchases.

But Seaway's 280 employees, who include 35 engineers, had a trick up their sleeves. In 2009 the company unveiled the Greenline 33 - the world's first production diesel-electric hybrid motor boat, drawing swooning reviews and winning several boat-of-the-year awards.

Replete with a solar-panelled roof, the Greenline consumes less fuel than an ordinary diesel motorboat owing to the option of running on electric power.

Its low-drag hull also requires less energy to move through the water.

Although it is not the fastest of boats, the Greenline has already sold 120 units, making it the world's best-selling motor yacht of 10 metres or more.

After falling last year from €33.2m to €29.9m, Seaway's revenues are forecast to rebound this year to €36m ($50m) as a result of the Greenline's success.

"We were always a bit embarrassed designing power boats where the demand is for inefficiency and for bigger power," Mr Jakopin explains. "So we said let's take a blank sheet of paper and try to think what boats will have to be like in the future."

In addition to environmental and sustainability criteria, Seaway focused on the expectations of the cash-rich European baby-boom generation that is now nearing retirement.

"Our clients want to have fun on the water - not read a complex manual of 200 pages. This boat is simple - if you can drive a car, you can drive this."

Mr Jakopin says he is especially proud of the large number of first-time boat buyers in Greenline's order book, who he claims were drawn by its relatively low cost (about €100,000), comfort and reliability.

"We have to attract new people into boating as we are losing existing boaters as they are dying out or have stopped sailing.

"The potential of the Greenline is huge. If we can sell 120 boats of an unknown brand with no introduction in its first year, that means the potential is thousands worldwide."

Mass production of the Greenline is a big strategic step for Seaway and its sister company J&J Design, which traditionally focused on designing boats for the big manufacturers. But it would not be the first time that the Jakopin brothers have taken a bold step into the unknown.

Japec started professional life as a cardiologist, while Jernej was originally an architect before the pair decided to see if they could turn their boating hobby into a career.

In 1983 they founded J&J Design, a boutique design studio that has since designed more than 250 power and sailing boats.

"We are something that shouldn't exist. Normally the big [boat builders] do their development in-house. [But] we are an independent development company," he says. "It's more difficult to have so much freedom-related creativity in-house."

Jakopin designs have since been used to manufacture a total of 60,000 boats by well-known boatyards including Beneteau, Jeanneau and Bavaria. But with Seaway the Jakopin brothers are increasingly taking on the boatyards at their own game.

"We went into niches where the big boat builders didn't want to be. Nobody wanted to build carbon boats," says Mr Jakopin of Seaway's award-winning Shipman carbon-epoxy yachts, which it began developing in 2002.

Seaway's headquarters in Begunje, about 50km north of the capital, Ljubljana, are situated at the foot of snow-capped mountains, far from the coastline (the area has a wealth of skilled craftsmen).

Following a devastating fire in 2007 that destroyed a boatbuilding workshop, the company began constructing an additional €25m boatbuilding facility in Monfalcone on Italy's Adriatic coast, which opened last year.

The five-hectare site has access to a 300m stretch of coastline, more than enough room for the company's Shipman yachts, which measure up to 46m in length.

Having developed an interest in renewable energy through the Greenline project, Mr Jakopin is not letting this new-found knowledge go to waste.

In addition to producing boats, Seaway manufactures giant 62m rotor blades for wind farm turbines (the carbon-epoxy technology is the same that went into the Shipman yacht). The company is also investing in fuel-cell technology.

Revealing the didactic instincts of a former physiology university lecturer, Mr Jakopin dashes repeatedly to whiteboard to sketch designs, equations and tables to explain these concepts.

In spite of the success, Mr Jakopin says he has no plans to sell up.

"We had an opportunity [to sell] in the past but we understood that would overturn the basic reason why we switched from our normal profession to our hobby," he says.

"Freedom is our main asset," he adds.

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