Sunseeker

A Poole yard that built a British performance idiom

Sunseeker traces back to 1968, when Robert Braithwaite founded a small boatbuilding business in Poole, Dorset, first trading as Poole Powerboats. The Sunseeker name arrived in the mid-1970s and the firm has stayed on the Dorset coast ever since. Today it builds in Poole across several production sites and employs around 2,600 people, producing roughly 150 boats a year in a range that runs from about 38 to 161 feet. Keeping design and hand finishing under one roof gives the brand a consistency that carries from its smallest sportscruiser through to its largest superyacht.

The performance reputation was earned early. By the late 1970s the racing designer Don Shead had joined the effort, and the deep-vee Offshore 28 gave the yard a name for fast, seakindly hulls. Shead went on to shape the Hawk and Superhawk sportsboats through the 1980s and 1990s, and that racing bloodline still informs how Sunseeker thinks about speed and ride. The company moved into the superyacht arena in the mid-1990s with the Predator 80, then pushed past 100 feet with the Sunseeker 105 in 2001.

Screen presence and a global owner base

Few builders have matched Sunseeker for cultural reach. The yard's boats have appeared in several James Bond films, and the Superhawk 34 featured in The World Is Not Enough, which fixed the brand in the public imagination well beyond the marina. That visibility helped Sunseeker build an international dealer and service network that now stretches across the Mediterranean, the Americas, the Middle East and Asia. For many buyers the name has become shorthand for a particular kind of British sporting glamour on the water.

Ownership has changed hands more than once without unseating the Dorset base. In 2013 the Chinese group Dalian Wanda bought a controlling stake, funding a decade of investment in larger models and yard capacity. In late 2024 the American firm Lionheart Capital and Italy's Orienta Capital Partners acquired the business, a move announced during the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. Through each transition the boats have continued to be drawn and built in Poole, which is the point most owners care about.

One design language, many silhouettes

Sunseeker's current line splits into families that share a visual grammar. The Predator and Superhawk names sit in the Performance group, the Manhattan badge covers the accessible flybridge cruisers, and the Ocean series marks the newer volume-led superyachts introduced from 2021. Exterior design and naval architecture are handled in-house, most recently under chief design officer Ewen Foster, which is why a 55-foot sportscruiser and a 134-foot flagship still read as members of the same fleet. The signature cues are a raked windscreen and deep hull glazing set over a low, forward-leaning stance.

The company's recent direction has been about usable volume as much as top speed. The 90 Ocean, launched in 2021, pushed an upright stem and a wider beam to win roughly a fifth more interior space than a comparable earlier hull, and it collected a run of design awards. The 134 Superyacht, revealed at the 2025 Cannes Yachting Festival, extends that thinking to just over 40 metres with a tri-deck layout built at Osprey Quay in Poole. The through-line is a British builder trying to hold on to its sporting character while it grows into the superyacht market.