Hosted by Shari Liu, Paris Baloumis joins Superyachts.com at the Monaco Yacht Show to discuss a year of change at Oceanco — from the way the shipyard approaches collaboration and innovation to the growing role of lifecycle support alongside new builds. With Leviathan and Draak together in Monaco, and new thinking coming into the business from beyond traditional yachting circles, the conversation explores how Oceanco is evolving both what it builds and how it works.
"Seeing [Draak] and [Leviathian] together is like a perfect opportunity to showcase what custom really means"
Newell's gaming background brings an unusual lens to a famously conservative industry, where iteration and player co-creation are standard practice long before anything ships. Whether that same appetite for constant input has filtered into how owners now engage with a build — and how much say they expect to have along the way — is one of the more interesting questions raised by his involvement.
"Owners want to have much more part in the building process - it becomes an experience of its own"
That openness to outside thinking extends beyond gaming. Collaboration has become something of a watchword inside Oceanco over the past year, with cross-industry perspective increasingly shaping decisions that might once have stayed within traditional naval architecture and yacht design circles entirely.
"At the end of the day, the people closest to the experience usually have the most valuable input and insight"
It's also visible in where the business is putting its energy beyond new builds — rebuilds and lifecycle support are taking up a growing share of the workload, a shift that says as much about how owners now think about their yachts long-term as it does about Oceanco's own strategy.
A year in, the full picture of what Newell's involvement means for Oceanco is still forming. But between the pairing of Leviathan and Draak, the growing emphasis on collaboration, and a lifecycle-support business quietly expanding in the background, the direction of travel already looks unmistakably different from the Oceanco of a few years ago.
