By Mike Davin, online editor, Boating Industry magazine — This week, the National Marine Manufacturers Association released its 2009 Recreational Boating Statistical Abstract. Read more >>
Tags: boat sales, Economy
As boat builders and their suppliers hire more employees in an effort to ramp up production, they are contributing to a trend that is helping to lower the nation’s economic stress, according to an Associated Press article published today. Read more >>
For more than two weeks, the average price of regular gas in the U.S. has been dropping, according to USAToday.com. As of yesterday, the average price of a gallon of regular gas was $2.76, the newspaper reported in an article today, and some analysts are predicting it could drop further, perhaps even as low as this time last year, which was about 30 cents per gallon cheaper. Read more >>
Tags: Boating, Economy, gas prices, Memorial Day
A few weeks ago, a former boating industry executive contacted me, asking about the state of marine business in the U.S. He is a friend who left the United States a few years ago to take a position within a different division of his company based in another country. Since his e-mail, I’ve been thinking about how to answer him. Read more >>
By Mike Davin, online editor, Boating Industry magazine — We highlighted an interesting article from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in our e-newsletter the other day. The article reported on the difficult decision facing Florida’s Manatee Technical Institute, which is weighing whether to cut its boat-building curriculum. Read more >>
While dealer net profits through July are off 60 percent, the rate of decline appears to be slowing. Through June, net profits, year over year, were off almost 86 percent. Read more >>
Tags: Economy, Marine Dealers
I was driving in the car yesterday when a story came on National Public Radio about Columbia, Ky.-based houseboat builder Majestic Yachts. It’s no surprise in this economy that it was a sad story, at least at first. The article began by profiling Faye Womack, a former employee. She was part of a 27-person boat production team until orders stopped coming in last summer and CEO Jim Hadley was forced to lay off every single employee. He and the two other owners spent the winter trying to find odd jobs to pay the factory’s bills, according to NPR. Read more >>
By Terry Grapentine, Principal at Grapentine Company LLC — In a recent Sunday New York Times’ column (“The Inflection Is Near?” March 8), Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist Thomas L. Friedman suggests that the U.S. economy has finally reached an inflection point in its ability to sustain growth. We have reached a point where we can no longer support the growth that our economy has experienced over the past 50 years at the expense of increased environmental waste, insufficient financial market oversight, and indiscriminate credit lending. “We simply can’t do it anymore,” Friedman says. Read more >>
Tags: Economy, Guest Blog, Marine Dealers
By Peter Granata, President, Granata Design and the Marine Design Resource Alliance — There’s a new bandwagon pulling into town, and if you’re too busy ducking bullets you may not notice it. If you hang around the boating industry long enough, you’re bound to experience a cyclical downturn. This most recent version has to be the worst since 1980, and many agree that this one is the worst, period. Nonetheless, the point is that it is cyclical. The industry will come back, although it’s probably going to look different than it was. Read more >>
After the alarm went off this morning, my husband and I were talking about how fast the summer is going this year. This is an annual conversation, and as usual, I’m reluctant to acknowledge that it’s almost over. The difference this year is that I’m much more satisfied with our summer. Last September, we decided we would devote this summer to family time with our son, Nathan, now four years old. What we couldn’t have anticipated then was that our family’s cabin in the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York would be available for so much of the summer. Because the cabin is shared by my mother, her three siblings and their children, we typically make it up there for one week of vacation and two or three other weekends. This year, as of the end of Labor Day weekend, we will have spent 24 days up there. Read more >>
