Would you like to spend your next vacation in a comfortable apartment on the beach? And enjoy boat trips through, say, the Rías Baixas? Above all, do you feel like doing both at the same time? No problem. If you have 150,000 euros, Minimum Boats makes it easy for you. And in a different way than conventional.
This Galician startup, born barely three years ago, has decided to combine both concepts —the boat and the vacation apartment— to give shape to Mínimo 8, a “boat-house” In all rules. And despite the fact that its proposal has only been available for two years, it has already captured the interest of markets as attractive as the German or the American. The company is in fact working on an order for 120 units that will leave for the US with the hope of doubling the order in 2024.
His key: combining the appeal of apartments for tourists and pleasure boats with a formula that is quite different from the yachts or sailboats that can usually be seen sailing along the coasts. “We could basically define it as a ‘floating apartment'”, stand out from Mínimo Boats.
adding concepts
Seen from the outside, Mínimo 8 is more reminiscent of a motorhome than a boat, although with some other crucial difference, of course: it is designed to move through the water and be moored at docks. Its creators have designed it with a maximum beam of 2.98 metres, a draft of 0.5 and 7.99 m of slendermeasures for which -they point to Faro de Vigo- issues such as registration fees or exports have been taken into account, which would be complicated if it exceeded 8 m.
The Galician startup presents it as “an innovative concept of sports boat”, configured to accommodate a maximum of six people and the capacity to navigate both inland waters and estuaries, bays and sheltered waters.
to take care of the acoustic and thermal insulation on board Mínimo Boats has opted for fiberglass panels with XPS cores and double glazing with an argon gas chamber. Inside it incorporates several cabins, bathroom, living room, pantry and kitchen. Two outboard motors and a catamaran hull, built with polyethylene, complete the design of a ship that —recalls the company, based in Porriño— is designed to act both as accommodation and as a boat.
Its first unit was manufactured just a couple of years ago for clients from Baiona, a coastal town located very close to the startup’s facilities, but since then, Mínimo Boats has managed to arouse interest beyond the borders of Galicia or even the market. national. A market study actually showed them an interesting potential demand in California and Florida.
As he explained to Faro de Vigo, he managed to capture the interest of a client in the North American market for which he is preparing an order for 120 units and in which he has already managed to make a mark with the delivery of 17 boats at the end of 2021. today the US actually represents close to the 85% of your marketa figure that could fall short in 2024, when he hopes to double the order.
“We also have Spain with great growth potential and we are developing Central Europe,” the company abounds, pointing to a business niche, that of floating holiday homes, which other companies have already explored with different strategies. A good example is Caracat, a hybrid between a catamaran, caravan and houseboat promoted by a German firm.
There are also larger-scale options that are no longer planned as places of rest, but rather authentic floating cities, with all kinds of services and businesses on board, such as the gigantic MV Narrative, Pangeos or, curling the loop a little more and going to the options more enormous, the Freedom Ship, a huge multi-story ship with a capacity for around 100,000 people.
Regarding prices, the Galician newspaper reports that a fully equipped Minimo 8 costs around $150,000. The company is already working on a larger model, 15 meters in length, which could be ready by mid-2024, when it expects its billing target to be around 15 or 20 million euros. Not bad if one takes into account that 1.6 million entered last year.
Images: Minimal Boats
Via: Faro de Vigo
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