Apr 2, 2019

Celebrating the 2019 Transport and Logistics Innovation Week (SITL) and one day before the Maritime Day, Groupe Beneteau has confirmed its interest in the NEOLINE project for the transatlantic transportation of its boats.

Groupe Beneteau, the boating industry’s global market leader, has found a solution with the service offered by NEOLINE to facilitate its exports, while significantly reducing its environmental impact. 

NEOLINE is developing a highly energy-efficient transatlantic transport line with innovative cargo sailing ships specialized in rolling and oversized freight. Scheduled to start up in 2021, this route will link Saint-Nazaire in France to America’s East Coast and Saint-Pierre & Miquelon. 

Magdeleine Allaume, Groupe Beneteau Procurement and Supply Chain Director, explains: “Groupe Beneteau exports nearly 80% of the boats built in Europe. The United States is the main destination for these exports and the North American market represents almost 30% of our revenues. The exceptional dimensions of our boats and the need to safeguard their quality at every stage during their transportation makes this flow a real logistics challenge. NEOLINE offers a bespoke solution that is ecologically and economically relevant for our transatlantic flows, with loading also located very close to our yards. As the world’s leading builder of recreational sailing yachts, the use of sails for maritime transportation, effectively put in place with the NEOLINE project, was a natural choice for us”. 

Michel Péry, NEOLINE’s Chairman: “The Beneteau Group is one of the strategic shipper clients for our dedicated transatlantic line for rolling and oversized freight. We have worked together to define some of the ships’ features, including their exceptional door height of 9.8m, for the complete transportation of the largest boats produced by Groupe Beneteau. The 12.6m ramp width also offers the capacity for loading large catamarans. The Beneteau Group’s support represents an important step forward as we move towards commissioning our ships, which will truly be ambassadors for the excellence of the French boat and naval industry”. 

To meet the environmental challenges involved with maritime transportation, NEOLINE is developing an industrial-scale freight transportation solution that is powered primarily by a sailing propulsion system, that is clean, bespoke and competitive, and that is designed to meet shippers’ logistics needs. 

By combining cost-cutting speed and an optimized energy mix with wind propulsion, the Neoliner, a 136-meter long roll-on, roll-off (ro-ro) ship with 4,200 square meters of sails developed by NEOLINE, makes it possible to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 90% compared with a traditional cargo ship on an equivalent route. To achieve this, it features an innovative blend of technical solutions borrowed from the maritime transport industry, as well as from the world of competitive sailing, in order to make transport more logistically and economically proficient, while also setting the bar for energy efficiency. 

The NEOLINE project plans to build its first two ships based on this model and commission them by 2021 on a pilot route connecting Saint-Nazaire in France to America’s East Coast and Saint-Pierre & Miquelon.