Princess Yachts founder David King dies, three owners after his sale

A rented shed, a boat sold at a loss

David King was born in Dundee in 1942 and trained as an engineer at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, before serving in the Royal Navy. In 1965 he left the service and, with two friends, Brian Phillips and Cliff Viney, rented a boatbuilding shed in Plymouth and founded Marine Projects (Plymouth) Ltd. Their first model, the 31-foot "Project 31," sold for GBP 3,400 against a build cost of GBP 3,460, a loss on every hull, and a lesson King said later taught him never to build small or cheap again. The yard delivered around 150 boats under the Marine Projects name before the Princess brand took over the model line and, eventually, the company's own.

Princess Yachts International PLC became the company's formal legal name in 2001, by which point King had already spent three and a half decades pushing the yard toward bigger, more complex boats: the Princess 45 was, at its 1982 launch, the largest production powerboat built in Britain. He kept the business vertically integrated, running most trades in-house rather than subcontracting, and built an apprenticeship pipeline the yard still credits with its production depth today. In 2004, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, King sent Princess staff and boat molds to Sri Lanka to help rebuild fishing boats for communities that had lost their fleets, a detail both obituaries chose to lead with, ahead of any sales figure.

Three owners in 45 years

Marine Projects, and then Princess, has changed controlling owner three times since King built it. South African wine magnate Graham Beck bought the company in 1981; King stayed on, sitting on the parent board while running Princess day to day. In June 2008, Beck sold a 75 percent stake to L Capital 2 FCPR, an investment vehicle co-sponsored by Bernard Arnault's Groupe Arnault and LVMH. Trade press coverage of that sale put the deal near GBP 200m at the time, though neither side confirmed a figure and Princess has never published one. L Capital's yacht holding later folded into L Catterton, the luxury-focused private equity firm LVMH co-owns with Catterton, which held the stake until 2023.

In February 2023, US industrial buyout firm KPS Capital Partners acquired a 75 percent controlling stake through a new holding entity, Mayflower Bidco Limited, filed at UK Companies House. As with the 2008 sale, the price was not disclosed, not by KPS, not by Princess, and not by any of the trade outlets that covered the transaction at the time. King remained close to the business well past his own retirement as chairman, staying on the model-development team for roughly a decade and continuing to personally own and run Princess yachts of his own.

What KPS ownership looks like from the outside

Princess today employs around 3,000 people (the company's Wikipedia profile cites 3,200, a figure it notes is down after recent redundancies) across five shipyards in Plymouth covering more than 1.1 million square feet. Annual turnover is reported above GBP 300m, on production of roughly 150 boats a year spanning six model lines, X, Y, F, V, S and R, from 14.6m to 36.5m (48ft to 120ft). About 90 percent of that output leaves the country, sold into more than 100 export markets, a share King had already pushed past 60 percent by the early 1990s. None of that scale is in dispute; what is genuinely unclear from outside the company is how KPS's ownership changes capital allocation, model cadence or warranty backing versus the LVMH-linked ownership it replaced.

Princess CEO Will Green's tribute to King was unambiguous about the man: "For many people, it is difficult to think of Princess without thinking of David... David never tried to take any personal credit for what Princess has become. Rather he was always the first to recognise the contribution of others and that humility earned him enormous respect throughout our industry." It said nothing, though, about what continuity under a third financial owner in two generations actually means for buyers. No named Princess executive has spoken publicly about product roadmap, investment plans or warranty continuity since the KPS deal closed in 2023, and neither Megayacht News nor Motor Boat & Yachting's coverage of King's death includes a comment from KPS itself.

The provenance question, for a buyer or an owner

A yard's ownership history matters to a Princess buyer in the same way a marque's ownership matters to a classic-car buyer: it is a proxy for whether the parts, the warranty and the resale market will still make sense in ten years. The case for confidence is real. Princess kept its founder's engineering discipline and vertical integration through two changes of financial sponsor, it still trains its own tradespeople, and KPS is an experienced industrial buyout firm with a record of funding manufacturing scale-ups rather than stripping them. A boat ordered today is backed by a business turning over more than GBP 300m a year, not a founder-run yard dependent on one owner's personal balance sheet.

The case for caution is just as real and just as documented. Two of Princess's last three ownership changes, the 2008 LVMH-linked sale and the 2023 KPS deal, closed without either buyer or seller disclosing a price, so there is no public financial trail showing how much debt the yard is carrying or what returns its current owner needs from it. No named person inside Princess has put a figure or a timeline on what KPS wants from the business, and the company's own public profile notes headcount has already fallen from a recent peak even as turnover is reported growing, two facts that, read together, are worth asking a Princess dealer to explain before signing, rather than after.

The 60th year lands mid-transition

Princess marked 60 years since that rented Plymouth shed with an anniversary programme running through 2025 and into 2026, including dealer events as far as Hong Kong, where Princess's regional distributor Sunazure Nextwave ran a 60th-anniversary stand at the Sai Kung boat show in December 2025: six decades of hull numbers laid out behind a stage built for a cocktail hour, not a spec sheet. It is a reminder that King's death lands on a brand mid-anniversary and mid-ownership-transition at once, still building in the city where it started.

For an owner or a buyer, the anniversary marketing and the ownership questions are two separate things worth keeping separate. Sixty years of hulls in the water is a genuinely strong provenance signal; three unpriced ownership changes since 1981 is a genuinely open one. Neither should be allowed to stand in for the other when a survey or a new-build contract is actually on the table, and a dealer who cannot answer a direct question about either has not earned the sale.