Erwin Bamps, Gulf Craft CEO, was interviewed last month by The Superyacht Report for a special feature on recently appointed CEOs and other top management positions and taking their insights on their thoughts on a recovering industry and also to get their stories on how to get to the top as well as their future plans.
Erwin Bamps, Gulf Craft's Chief Executive Officer
Erwin Bamps started "Before I joined Gulf Craft I was in the telecoms business with Hutchison, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate, as general manager responsible for telecoms projects. The decision making in such projects is rational and about long-term return on investment; it’s about infrastructure, rather than anything else. Then I fell into the boat business, which is not really about a need but rather about a craving – and it’s about a very emotional decision process in the eyes of the client.
The idea was to bring me in to help the company go global and build a sustainable, increasingly international business. Initially I thought the industry was very different, but then I realized it’s a construction business; it’s not a manufacturing business and we look at every boat we produce as being separate projects. That is very much in line with what I did in the telecoms business.
Gulf Craft is typically very pragmatic in a region that is always prone to some disturbance, whether it’s political or commercial. This means we have to be conservative as well as mindful of the long term, and that has allowed me to take calculated risks with the chairman’s and the board’s
approval. If you can do that at a time when people are worried about their existence then you can gain market share in critical times, and when the market picks up again you ride that wave. So whenever there was a crisis in the Gulf, whether it was the Gulf war or financial crisis, we have been
able to improve our market share.
READ the full article in Issue 158 of The Superyacht Report:
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