China's Next Port of Call: Luxury Yachts

Caprice Lam took 90 minutes to close his first luxury-yacht sale. That's all the time it took for the customer to step aboard his company's 62-foot, 13 million yuan ($2 million) vessel on China's tropical Hainan Island and order his bank to wire a 35 percent deposit. "I don't even have his card," says Lam, a salesman at Xiamen Hansheng Yacht Building of Fujian province. "He just gave me his cell phone number, called his bank, and paid the deposit."

China's economic growth has resulted in flush times for the country's emerging yacht industry. A half dozen or so Chinese yacht builders are now competing bow to bow against established Western builders like Azimut Yachts, Ferretti Yachts, Princess Yachts International, and Brunswick (BC) for wealthy consumers on the mainland. "This is a sign of China's own industrial confidence," says Ryan Swift, editor-in-chief of magazine.