Ocean Alexander

A Taiwanese Yard Built on One Man's Bad Loan

Ocean Alexander began in 1977 when Alex Chueh, who had lent money to a friend's boatyard in Kaohsiung and never saw it repaid, took over the yard itself and turned it into a yacht builder. He partnered with American naval architect Ed Monk Jr, and the yard's first design, the 50-foot Mark I, set the double-chine, semi-displacement look the brand still trades on today.

The company grew fast: production space doubled within its first decade, and the yard later earned ISO-9002 certification for its production, installation and servicing process, an unusual credential for a yacht builder of that era to chase. Alex Chueh's son, John Chueh, known within the company as Johnny, now runs Ocean Alexander, and the yard's own account says its earliest boats resell today for triple what they cost new.

Built for America, Assembled on Two Continents

About seven in ten Ocean Alexanders built in 2018 went to American buyers, and the yard has organized itself around that market for decades. It opened a US factory on Merritt Island, Florida, to build its 70e model, and ran a second production yard in mainland China until closing it in 2013 to concentrate manufacturing back in Taiwan.

Construction technique moved with the market. Ocean Alexander says it was among the first boatbuilders anywhere to adopt vacuum-infused fiberglass lamination, and it later replaced its traditional gelcoat exterior finish with an aircraft-grade polyurethane skin. That switch shows up independently too: BoatTEST's sea trial of the yard's own 100-foot model describes the same polyurethane finish and credits it with eliminating gelcoat oxidation on that hull.

A Christensen Partnership That Ended in Taiwan

In 2009 Ocean Alexander partnered with the American superyacht builder Christensen Shipyards to build its Evan K Marshall-designed 120 Megayacht at Christensen's Vancouver, Washington facility, shipping a mold across the Pacific to get started. The first hull, Dream Weaver, launched in 2012, but Christensen's own financial and management troubles halted work on the next two hulls mid-build.

Ocean Alexander filed a commercial lien naming the two unfinished hulls as collateral in 2015, then shipped both back to Taiwan to finish them itself, adding a beach club neither Christensen-built hull had originally planned for. It is a rare public look at how a yard protects a program when a construction partner fails, and it left Ocean Alexander, not Christensen, in control of the 120's finished reputation.

From the 100 and 120 to the Revolution Series

The 100 and 120 pushed Ocean Alexander into the megayacht bracket during the 2010s, and Showboats International named the yard one of the world's top five superyacht builders on the strength of it. By 2021, industry tracking rated Ocean Alexander the fourth-largest yacht builder anywhere by feet of yacht produced, a scale the small Kaohsiung yard of the 1970s never approached.

The current range has moved on stylistically. The Revolution Series opened with the 90R at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, the 35R won an NBC Sports Best of Show award at the same event, and a 45-foot Divergence center console and a Puro series co-designed with Italian designer Giorgio Cassetta both extend the brand well below megayacht scale. The 100, covered in full on this page as the yard's production-run entry into the three-digit-foot bracket, has since gone out of production as the newer Revolution Series took over that size class.