The World Wide Order Book yacht listings are compiled through surveying shipyards and consulting other yachting industry sources around the world. This year’s research proved even more challenging than previous efforts due to an apparent trend toward more yacht owners binding builders with confidentiality agreements. As a result, several key builders may have given us partial listings. Feadship is one example. Sources say the Dutch powerhouse is building twice as many yachts as it will admit to in print.

"Out of respect for the privacy and confidentiality of our clients, our list only shows some of the yachts under construction at Feadship," said François van Well, director and CEO of Feadship America.

Other shipyards hinted at the total length of yachts on order, but they provided no details about individual projects, forcing us to turn to other sources for information. For this reason, we cannot guarantee our results are comprehensive, but the editors of ShowBoats believe that the 2008 Global Order Book remains an authoritative and invaluable economic snapshot of today’s luxury yacht industry.

One thing is incontrovertible: Not only are there more new large yacht orders than ever this year, but the yachts themselves are getting bigger. The 2008 Global Order Book shows orders for 23 yachts in the 76.2-plus-meter (250-plus-foot) category, a 27.8 percent increase over 2007. Three of these yachts are over 100 meters (328 feet) long, with top yacht honors going to 160-meter (525-foot) Hull No. 978 being built by the ThyssenKrupp shipyard group in Germany. All details of this project are confidential, but if she remains this length when launched, she will be equal in overall length to the reigning largest state yacht in the world, Dubai. If she goes into private ownership, she will beat the world’s largest privately owned yacht, 139.3-meter (457-foot) Al Salamah, by a considerable margin. Also noteworthy is the 120-meter (394-foot) ThyssenKrupp Hull No. 970, rumored to be Safari, the next yacht in build for Russian serial superyacht owner Roman Abramovich. And the largest yacht to be built in the United States since the early twentieth century, an 85-meter (280-foot) project designed by Tim Heywood, is scheduled to be launched by Derecktor Shipyards in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 2008.

One of the biggest revelations in this year’s Global Order Book is the large jump in orders in the 61- to 76-meter (200- to 249-foot) yacht segment. Our results show 47 projects in this size range, which is a 67.9 percent increase over the 28 yachts we reported in 2007. With yachts in this exclusive category costing upward of a million U.S. dollars per meter to build, this is a strong indicator of the amount of affluence in the world today. Until now, the world’s superyacht owners have been a fairly small and intimate fraternity.