In Memoriam: Paolo Vitelli

Paolo Vitelli, the founder of Azimut Yachts, has died following a fall at his home on New Years Eve. He was 77.

Acknowledged as a giant in the global yachting industry, Paolo Vitelli was one of a generation of European entrepreneurs who capitalized on advances in naval architecture, fiberglass construction and marine-engine technology to establish the primacy of the motoryacht in leisure boating. Along with his compatriot and rival Norberto Ferretti, and the English triumvirate of King, Newington and Braithwaite, he shaped the modern boating world in Europe and beyond.

Born in Turin, Vitelli excelled at school and got an early taste of professional life in the Italian division of the German Oetker Group, where his father had worked. It was an experience which he later said taught him the value of keeping a professional grip on company accounting systems. As a teenager, he spent several summers sailing along the Italian and French coast in his International 420 dinghy and camping overnight on the beach. But his entrepreneurial ambitions soon got the better of his youthful adventurousness.

Vitelli founded Azimut in 1969 as a boat-rental business while he was still in college studying economics and commerce, and by the early 1970s the company was importing boats from England, Scandinavia, France and Holland. One of the brands was Powles, and recognizing the talents of the British yard’s naval architect, Bernard Olesinski, Vitelli commissioned him to design the first Azimut, a 43, in 1974. Of elegant and modern design, it was built of fiberglass at a time when most Italian boatbuilders were still crafting their products in wood.

In addition to championing new technologies, Vitelli’s approach to business focused on team-building. In several interviews with me over the years, he emphasized the importance of putting good managers in place, while ruefully acknowledging the difficulty he sometimes had in delegating. One of his most illustrious alumni, Massimo Perotti, regarded him as a mentor. In 2008, shortly after leaving Azimut to take control of Sanlorenzo, Massimo told me: “I owe him everything.”

Vitelli was an avowed professional and could affect a schoolmasterly air, at least when talking formally to journalists. He ran a tight ship from his large Avigliana office, with its huge boardroom table, Janes Fighting Ships and Nautical Quarterly copies on the shelves, along with certificates, awards and half-hull models on the walls alongside portraits not only of his grandfather but also, slightly incongruously, of the King of Norway. He served as Norway’s honorary consul from 1971 to 2018, and also as a member of the Italian parliament from 2013 to 2015.

Riding high during the boom times of the 1980s, Azimut launched a 105-foot model in 1982, which at the time was the largest fiberglass motoryacht ever built. The boat attracted a raft of high-profile customers and it would be years before any of the company’s competitors could match it. However, his fateful decision to buy the famous but ailing Benetti shipyard in Viareggio nearly proved a step too far. By his own admission, the acquisition could have cost him the entire company, as he took his eye off the ball to focus on the stumbling superyacht yard. His difficulties were exacerbated by the self-inflicted distraction of the Benetti-built Azimut Atlantic Challenger, Vitelli’s all-Italian answer to Richard Branson’s headline-grabbing efforts in the two Virgin Atlantic Challenger boats. All was well in the end, but the situation took years to stabilize.

In characteristic fashion, under Vitelli’s leadership Benetti went on to pioneer the idea of semi-custom fiberglass superyachts, the 115-foot Benetti Classic model and its successors securing a huge share of a market that few industry watchers had even realized existed.

Azimut-Benetti’s acquisition in 2002 of Italian boatbuilder Gobbi went more smoothly than the Benetti takeover, thanks largely to Cala Demaria, the woman Vitelli brought in to manage the transition and launch the new Atlantis brand. Demaria was a veteran Azimut manager who, like Massimo Perotti, not only worked for Vitelli for more than 20 years, but remains one of the prime movers in Italian yachtbuilding. Within a few years she was headhunted by Beneteau to set up Monte Carlo Yachts, and is now CEO of Sanlorenzo’s Bluegame division.

Demaria was “deeply affected” by the sudden and unexpected death of the man for whom she first started working as a sales assistant back in 1985. “Before joining Azimut, I had never had any contact with the world of boating,” she told me. “Much of what I know today, I learned during the 22 years that followed.” This was a period of “extraordinary growth” for the company, she explained, during which she says she learned many important lessons from the man in charge. “But perhaps the most important one, which I still apply every day, is to never give up,” she added. “It is a lesson I strive to pass on to my colleagues as well.”

With managers of the caliber of Demaria and Perotti in place, along with a healthy order book across the group’s three divisions and annual revenues approaching half a billion Euros, in the early 2000s, Vitelli allowed himself to relax just a little, develop his other business interests in property and hotels, and spend more time on the water. While alternating his family’s annual holidays between the “luxury way” aboard a Benetti and the “sportive style” afforded by an Azimut, he also began to think about who his successor should be. Vitelli’s daughter Giovanna was initially resistant to the idea of joining Azimut-Benetti. “She is a lawyer in Milan,” he told me back in 2003. “She got the job by herself, so it appears she is professionally good. She wants to come only when she has proven that she is not the daughter of the owner. Me, I would like to have her here tomorrow morning.”

He eventually got his way. Giovanna Vitelli turned down a posting to New York in 2004 to take up a position at Azimut-Benetti in product development. She was appointed group chair in 2023. Today she sits at the helm of an enterprise that employs 2,000 people, with seven manufacturing plants building boats ranging from 42 feet to more than 300, and an order book worth $2.5 billion—the business that her father built.

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Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/currents/in-memoriam-paolo-vitelli