Cantieri di Pisa's Gennasio Becomes Sole Director as New Builds Return

What changed at Cantieri di Pisa, and why now?

Enrico Gennasio, who has owned Cantieri di Pisa outright since 2021, has formally taken the role of Sole Director, moving from a hands-off industrial owner to the shipyard's direct strategic authority.

The change was confirmed in trade press on 14 September 2026, with Barche Magazine and Megayacht News both reporting the same restructuring the same day. Until now Gennasio held the company through Holding Meg, the vehicle he also uses to control half of Alfagomma Group, while day-to-day leadership sat with CEO Marco Massabo. The Sole Director title does not remove Massabo, who keeps operational command of production and the expansion plan, but it does put ultimate sign-off on strategy in the hands of the man who owns the business, rather than a layer of holding-company governance between them.

Gennasio framed the move as the next stage of a recovery rather than a rescue. He said the ownership had worked to restore Cantieri di Pisa to being a productive company, preserving its expertise and laying the groundwork for solid and sustainable growth, and that the new structure would support the shipyard's growth, the consolidation of its refit business, and the brand's return to the new-build market. That last phrase is the one worth reading twice: a yard that spent its recovery years mostly on refit work is now being run, on paper, by the person with the capital to greenlight new construction. Neither report names a trigger event for the timing, and there is no suggestion of financial distress behind it: the more plausible reading is that the custom 40 metre now in build, the first full new hull the yard has laid down since 2021, was the point at which Gennasio decided the growth phase needed his own signature rather than a holding company's.

Why does an industrial hydraulics group own a Tuscan yacht yard?

Gennasio is not a yachting financier: he runs Alfagomma Group, a Lombardy-based manufacturer of hydraulic and industrial fluid-transfer systems employing close to 5,000 people, and bought Cantieri di Pisa in 2021 after a period of closure as a personal, boat-enthusiast project rather than an Alfagomma acquisition.

Cantieri di Pisa was founded in 1945 at Limite sull'Arno in Tuscany, building civil and military vessels before it became known for the Akhir line, drawn from 1970 with naval architect Pierluigi Spadolini. The yard closed for a period before Gennasio, a boat owner since his teens, bought it in 2021 and set about restoring production. Over the following years the ownership brought skilled labour back on line, kept the workforce through the rebuild rather than replacing it, and expanded the 50,000 square metre Pisa facility, which now runs a 600 metre quay, a 300 tonne travel lift and a 20 tonne crane. The yard marks its 80th anniversary in 2025.

The Alfagomma connection matters for one practical reason: it is the source of the vertical-integration philosophy Gennasio has pushed into yacht building, particularly in-house composite and carbon manufacturing rather than buying in hulls from third-party suppliers. He has been blunt about the alternative. Discussing industry support standards, he said a buyer of a 15 to 20 million dollar yacht should not face abandoned support from the people who built it, a line aimed squarely at yards that sell a hull and disappear once the warranty period ends. It is also a line that fits the rest of his career: Alfagomma's own business is built on long-lifecycle industrial components, where a customer expects parts and service decades after the original sale, and the same expectation is what he is now applying to a business that sells yachts instead of hose assemblies.

What is Cantieri di Pisa building right now?

Since 2024 the yard has rebuilt its range around three heritage-inspired lines, Polaris, Saturno and a renewed Akhir, alongside a carbon-fibre 80 Veloce flagship and its first fully custom 40 metre hull, due for delivery in summer 2027.

Polaris is the explorer line, with wave-piercing displacement hulls at 38, 48 and 60 metres. Saturno takes a more traditional profile with a generous stern and reworked deck connectivity, currently shown at 56 metres. Akhir, the yard's oldest and most recognisable name, has been renewed with a 44 metre model built entirely in carbon composite. All of it sits under Chief Designer Antonio Luxardo, the Optima Design co-founder brought in during 2024 to keep the portfolio visually consistent, and all of it is built to a stated ceiling of 58 metres at the Pisa yard itself, with a 2025 partnership with Genoa's T. Mariotti covering custom projects that run larger.

The custom 40 metre now under construction is the detail that gives Gennasio's new-build language substance rather than marketing: it is the yard's first fully bespoke hull since the rebuild began, scheduled for a summer 2027 handover, and a public test of whether an owner will commission a one-off from a yard whose recent revenue has leaned on refit work for the existing fleet. Nine projects were shown across the 2024 Cannes Yachting Festival and Monaco Yacht Show, and the company has said it is scouting three further facilities to keep pace with demand, while explicitly rejecting volume production in favour of a limited annual hull count with real customisation. A 2025 roadshow programme aimed at the United States, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific is the other half of that bet: a yard capped at 58 metres on its home slipway needs buyers who will travel to Pisa, or commission through the T. Mariotti arrangement, rather than a domestic Italian market alone.

What does this mean if you own, or are buying, a Cantieri di Pisa yacht?

For the 740-plus boats the yard has built since 1945, the governance change is a signal about who now answers for parts, warranty and refit support, not a change to any individual yacht.

Cantieri di Pisa has built its post-2021 identity partly on servicing its own back catalogue, and Gennasio has said as much explicitly: the after-sales failure he criticises in the wider industry, where a manufacturer stops answering once a yacht is out of warranty, is the gap he says his ownership exists to close. Putting his own name on the Sole Director title makes that promise slightly more binding, because the accountability for a refit quote or a parts delay on an older Akhir now sits, on paper, one signature away from the man funding the company rather than several layers of holding structure removed.

For a prospective buyer weighing a custom commission against an established yard with a longer order book, the honest read is mixed. The capital behind Cantieri di Pisa is real and industrial rather than speculative, which matters after a decade in which several smaller yards have failed mid-build. But the track record for new full-custom construction is thin: one 40 metre hull, not yet delivered, is the entire proof so far that the yard can execute a bespoke new build on the timeline and budget it promises, and neither Gennasio nor Massabo has published order-book or revenue figures to size the business independently.