Ask most people in the industry whether catamarans are an important segment of the yachting industry and you will get a confident yes, usually followed by an anecdote about a marina that used to be all monohulls. Ask for a number and the conversation gets vaguer. That is because the number is hard to find, and the published ones disagree wildly.

This article builds the picture from the bottom up: audited company filings, national trade-body statistics, and extrapolation where a figure has to be modelled. Where something is published, we say so. Where we have estimated it, we show the working and flag it as an estimate.

The confident yes is correct, but catamarans are not out-selling monohulls. They are out-earning them, by a margin that has reshaped a national industry.

01 — The anchorFrance Leads the Numbers

There is no single global dataset for new-boat sales broken down by hull type. ICOMIA, the international trade body, publishes the closest thing to a worldwide statistical picture, but it does not split monohull from multihull. In the United States, the NMMA’s headline figure counts powerboats and personal watercraft only – sailboats are not in it at all.

France is the exception. The Fédération des Industries Nautiques publishes an annual breakdown that separates sail from motor, and monohull from multihull, in both units and revenue. France is also, by a wide margin, the largest producer of cruising multihulls in the world. That combination makes the French data the most useful source available on the segment.

With one caveat. FIN measures boats built in France. Groupe Beneteau builds in Poland, Catana Group builds in Tunisia and Portugal, and several significant multihull yards are in South Africa, Vietnam and China. So the French figure understates French-brand output and excludes a meaningful chunk of the world market. It is a pointer to the market, not an exact count in itself. For that we need to extrapolate.

That last figure is interesting. More than half of everything the French boatbuilding industry earns – sail and motor, dinghies to superyachts – now comes from boats with two hulls.

02 — The trendA decade that changed the industry

The structural shift is easier to see across ten years. In the mid-2010s, multihulls accounted for roughly a quarter of French boatbuilding turnover. By 2023–24 they had passed half.

Two things are happening at once here, and it is worth understanding them. Multihull revenue grew fivefold in absolute terms. But its share doubled, which means it did not simply ride a rising tide — it took ground from monohulls while doing it.

03 — The mechanismOne catamaran is worth nearly four monohulls

The reason the volume and value pictures diverge so sharply is simple arithmetic. Divide revenue by units for each segment and you get the average price of a French-built boat leaving the factory.

This ratio explains most of what follows. In theory, a yard that switches a production line from monohulls to catamarans roughly quadruples the revenue that line generates. Every strategic decision the major French builders have made over the past decade follows from those sums.

04 — The downturnWho is struggling, and how badly

2024–25 was the first soft year the segment has had since the pandemic boom. Multihulls did not escape the correction. But they absorbed it better.

The pattern is consistent and it is all about price points. The two segments that fell hardest – sailing monohulls at −30% and small motorboats at −18% – are the accessible, high-volume end of the market. The segment that barely moved, large motorboats at −3%, is the premium end. Multihulls sit closer to the premium end, and their rate of decline reflects that.

05 — The playersThree listed builders and one private giant

Four companies dominate cruising multihull production. Three are publicly listed, which means their numbers are audited and quotable. The fourth is private, and its structure tells us something about how this market works.

Groupe Beneteau — Lagoon and Excess

The largest boatbuilder in the group of four, and the owner of Lagoon, the highest-volume catamaran brand in the world with more than 7,000 hulls launched. Beneteau does not break out Lagoon separately, so any Lagoon-specific revenue figure in circulation is an estimate rather than a hard fact.

Within that, the detail that matters: sailing was 44% of boat sales in 2025 and fell 26.6% at constant currency, but the company was explicit that monohulls drove the weakness while multihulls held up. Beneteau’s multihull segment was down 31% in the first half and just 5% in the second, a recovery it credits to three catamarans launched at Cannes — the Lagoon 38, Excess 13 and Lagoon 82.

Fountaine Pajot – and the Dufour complication

The second-largest French multihull group, with more than 4,000 catamarans built since 1976. Its fiscal year ends 31 August. Revenue for FY2024/25 was €323.2m ($355m), down 8.2%, with net income of €29.9m and an EBITDA margin around 15%. The first half of FY2025/26 came in at €136.3m against more than €156m a year earlier, with net profit falling from €15.3m to €5.2m.

One caveat that is often missed: Fountaine Pajot’s group revenue includes Dufour Yachts, a monohull builder acquired in 2018. Treating the group figure as a pure multihull number overstates the segment.

Catana Group — the cleanest multihull guide available

Catana is as close to a pure play as this market offers. The Bali brand alone is roughly 95% of group turnover, which makes its revenue history the best single indicator of multihull demand through the cycle.

Robertson & Caine – the unlisted one

South Africa’s Robertson & Caine builds Leopard catamarans, plus the Moorings and Sunsail branded boats. It produces roughly 200 to 215 units a year – about three catamarans a week – employs around 2,600 people, and has delivered more than 3,000 boats. It is the world’s largest builder of power catamarans.

It is also privately held, and here is the part that distorts most market sizing exercises: a large share of its output does not pass through a retail transaction. It goes into affiliated charter fleets under a distribution relationship with The Moorings and Sunsail that has run for nearly three decades. Apply retail prices to those units and you will overstate the market.

06 — The mapWhere multihulls sell

Catana’s geographic revenue split is revealing here, because it shows something the industry rarely states directly.

Turkey, Greece, Croatia and Martinique are not places where large numbers of people buy catamarans to keep at home. They are charter bases. Together they represent 38.7% of Catana’s revenue – the best evidence available of how much multihull demand is driven by the charter industry rather than by private owners.

This is the fact that separates multihulls from monohulls more than any design consideration. Charter economics reward interior volume, cabin count and stability at anchor. Those are the attributes a catamaran delivers and a monohull does not.

07 — The sizeHow big is the global market, really?

Building up from French published data, South African production volumes and estimated output from the smaller yards in Poland, Vietnam, China, Tunisia and Italy, we arrive at:

Peak was likely 2023–24, at somewhere around $1.43–1.65bn (€1.3–1.5bn) and 1,900 to 2,200 units, with the market having contracted 15 to 20% since. Those are modelled figures and should be quoted as estimates, not published data.

Now compare that against what the market research industry publishes. Grand View Research sized the catamaran market at $1.35bn for 2021. Precision Business Insights put it at $4.8bn for 2025. Those can’t both be measuring the same thing, and our bottom-up figure lands close to one and roughly three and a half times below the other.

08 — PerspectiveA rounding error

One final comparison. In 2025 the United States alone sold 215,237 new powerboats and personal watercraft, down 8.8% on the year. Global cruising multihull production is somewhere around 1,500 units.

Measured in units, multihulls are a rounding error in world boatbuilding – a fraction of one percent, in a market overwhelmingly composed of small trailerable powerboats. Over 90% of US unit activity is personal watercraft, aluminium fishing boats and similar. Measured in revenue, multihulls are more than half of what an entire national industry earns.

09 — What to watchWhat happens next

• Power catamarans are a growth story nobody has sized properly. Beneteau credits its motor catamaran ranges for supporting the Prestige brand; Catana is launching the YOT powercat line; Robertson & Caine is already the world’s largest power cat builder. Power multihulls sit at the intersection of the two most resilient segments in the market – multihulls and motorboats over 9 metres, the latter down just 3%.
• The entry-level sailing monohull may be undergoing a structural correction. A 28% volume fall and a 30% revenue fall in one year is a big correction. French commentators are openly asking whether this is cyclical or structural.
• Boats are getting bigger. Fountaine Pajot is pushing toward the Thira 80 and FPY 110; Lagoon has launched the 82; Catana is preparing the Bali 7.0. Rising average unit value has been partially offsetting falling volume across the whole industry.
• Charter fleet renewal is a swing factor. Fleet operators deferred orders through the downturn, choosing to keep boats in service longer. When that cycle turns, it turns fast – and Catana’s geographic sales show how important that segment is.
  
• Production is shifting away from France. Tunisia, Portugal, Poland, Turkey, China, Vietnam and South Africa are all growing. So is the UK, Italy and the Netherlands. The French data that makes this analysis possible will become less representative each year.

10 — MethodHow these numbers were built

Every figure in this article falls into one of three categories, and we have tried to make clear which is which throughout.

Published figures come directly from the Fédération des Industries Nautiques (AGM, 31 March 2026), the NMMA’s full-year 2025 data summary, and the audited results and revenue releases of Groupe Beneteau, Fountaine Pajot and Catana Group.

Derived figures — average unit values, the 51% share of total French output, Beneteau’s implied sail and motor revenue — are arithmetic applied to published numbers. The derivation is shown in each case.

Estimated figures — global market size, global unit volume, peak-year figures, Catana’s FY2024/25 revenue pending filed accounts — are modelled with stated assumptions. They are our estimates and should be attributed as such, with the range rather than a single point.

Currency conversions use a flat reference rate of €1 = $1.10 throughout, chosen for year-to-year comparability rather than accuracy at any given moment. Actual rates varied materially across the period, particularly during 2025.