Italian Sea Group's Losses Hit $115m as Formal Sale Sets Real Dates

The Numbers Behind the Crisis

The Italian Sea Group's FY2025 revenue came in at $345 million, down 25 percent from $460 million in FY2024. EBITDA swung from a positive $80 million in 2024, a 17 percent margin, to a negative $115 million in 2025. The Maritime Executive and Megayacht News both attribute the bulk of the collapse to a cost overrun estimated at roughly $70 million, on top of the revenue drop itself. These are the first full-year figures the group has disclosed since its insolvency became public in May.

The root cause, per the company's own account, is not ordinary trading conditions but what founder Giovanni Costantino has described as coordinated misconduct by senior managers. 'They effectively created a parallel company, devoting almost more time to it than to the real one,' he told Pressmare, describing systematically falsified documentation uncovered after the crisis surfaced on 4 February 2026. KPMG Advisory was engaged for an independent forensic review shortly after.

The Sale Process Just Became Formal

Until now, the bids reported for the group, a Sanlorenzo-backed consortium, financier Giulio Gallazzi's SRI Global, and Finvacchi, were expressions of interest submitted informally under the court-supervised Article 44 process. On 11 August 2026, per Megayacht News, the company formally opened bidding under two explicit tracks: an asset deal, selling individual yards, brands or stakes separately, or a share deal, a capital increase to recapitalize the group as a whole and keep it intact.

Both tracks now carry real deadlines for the first time: non-binding offers are due 15 September 2026, binding and irrevocable offers by 15 October 2026, with signing targeted for 26 October 2026. Meti Corporate Finance and KPMG Advisory are running the process. That is a materially tighter and more concrete timeline than the sixty-day administrators' window reported when the court process opened in July, which only pointed to early September as a first checkpoint rather than a hard date for offers.

Costantino Steps Aside, but Not Away

Giovanni Costantino, the group's founder and roughly 53 percent controlling shareholder after seventeen years running it, stepped down as chair and chief executive in late July 2026. He remains in place on a prorogatio basis, continuing his duties until a shareholders' meeting expected around 10 September 2026 formally appoints a successor. His son, Gianmaria Costantino, also resigned from the board in the same period. Costantino says he has personally injected EUR 25 million into the company during the crisis and commissioned the KPMG review himself: 'It was a necessary act of responsibility... since February 4 I have worked non-stop for almost six months alongside a team of consultants,' he told Pressmare.

That same 21 July interview carries a line that now reads in tension with what followed three weeks later: asked directly whether the company was for sale, Costantino said, 'No. I have absolutely no intention of selling the company.' The formal two-track bidding process, which explicitly includes a full asset sale as one of its two options, opened on 11 August. Whether that reflects a genuine change of position once the board and creditors took over the process, or simply a founder speaking before the decision was fully out of his hands, is not resolved in any of the public record so far.

The Same Bidders, a More Structured Contest

The roster of interested parties has not changed: the Sanlorenzo-backed consortium, structured through a vehicle called Polo Nautico Carrara, is still offering security worth up to 10 percent of the eventual price alongside two or three unnamed international shipyards holding the rest. Sanlorenzo's executive chairman, Massimo Perotti, has framed the bid as industrial rather than financial: 'We believe that the role of a leading company is measured not only by its ability to create economic value, but also by its responsibility to safeguard jobs.' SRI Global, controlled by Giulio Gallazzi, and Finvacchi remain in contention for the whole group, while Azimut-Benetti and Ferretti Group continue to review the dossier for select assets rather than the company as a whole.

What changed on 11 August is not who is bidding but how: informal interest now has to convert into a non-binding offer against a fixed 15 September deadline, under one of two explicitly defined structures, or it lapses. That is a real narrowing of the field to whoever is prepared to commit in writing on a clock, rather than simply signalling interest to the press.

What This Means If You Own or Are Building One

Roughly 650 people and, at the height of the crisis, seventeen yachts under construction across Admiral, Tecnomar, Perini Navi and Picchiotti sit inside whichever outcome the process delivers. An asset deal could separate a brand's name from the yard that actually builds it; a share deal keeps the group, and by extension its existing contracts, under one continuous owner. Buyers with a hull in build should ask their yard or broker directly for written confirmation of delivery timing now that firm dates exist for the wider process, rather than waiting for a headline announcement.

Not yet published: which of the two structures wins, any valuation attached to either track, and what a winning bid means for the roughly 650 jobs across the group's Italian sites. The 15 September non-binding deadline is the first real date on which outside observers, and existing owners, will learn anything concrete, a month earlier than the 26 October signing target that follows it. Anyone with a contract at one of the six brands, Admiral, Tecnomar, Perini Navi, Picchiotti, NCA Refit or Celi 1920, is effectively reading the same three dates as the bidders themselves: 15 September, 15 October, 26 October. Until the first of those passes, no outcome is more likely than any other, whatever any single bidder's public framing suggests.