24 THE NEXT... MONACO
MONTENEGRO

Pity the poor superyacht owner. Not only has the recession knocked a few billion off his net worth, he can’t even find anywhere on the Côte d’Azur to park his boat. It’s not just that there are too many yachts in the western Mediterranean; the marinas in the millionaires’ playgrounds of France and Italy were designed a generation ago, when a 30m boat was big even by Monégasque standards. Today, that would barely count as entry-level for the aspirational oligarch; even production line boatbuilders such as the UK’s Sunseeker are bringing out models up to 50m and the biggest superyachts are more than three times that size.

By the end of the 1990s, the shortage of suitable berths was already so acute that Hungarian-Canadian gold king Peter Munk decided to build his own and began looking for a development site in the eastern Mediterranean. In 2003, he settled on a disused naval base near the town of Tivat, on the south side of the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro and – with investment from other billionaire boatowners including Bernard Arnault, Nat Rothschild and Oleg Deripaska – began work on a 24ha marina, residential and commercial complex.

It was an ambitious project. The Bay of Kotor wasn’t entirely undiscovered – in the 1950s and 1960s the exclusive resort island of Sveti Stefan had attracted the likes of Sophia Loren and Kirk Douglas, and towards the southern tip of the bay are the the twin UNESCO World Heritage towns of Perast and Kotor. But with the Serbian navy based at Tivat, a large commercial shipyard opposite at Bijela and most of the local villages pumping their sewage directly into the gulf, its main attraction for the smart yachting set was as a safe haven in rough weather.

Since Munk took over, that has all changed. He made his investment contingent on substantial infrastructure spending by the Montenegrin government, and with the help of lavish funding from the EBRD and The World Bank, which has now been completed. The road and sewage systems have been substantially upgraded, and a project to bring fresh water to the whole coastline was finished earlier this year. The naval base has been razed, and the Bijela shipyard is being turned into a superyacht service facility to complement the marina development.

When complete, Porto Montenegro will have 150 superyacht berths and 500 places for more modest boats, as well as a yacht club, a sailing school and a slew of waterfront properties. This summer saw the soft opening of the first 85 berths but phase one of the development will officially launch next year, with 29 apartments, 1,000m2 of retail space and another 180 berths – one of which, rumour has it, will be occupied by Roman Abramovich’s 170m Eclipse, the world’s largest yacht.

And space isn’t the only attraction in Kotor. Even superyacht owners apparently count their pennies, and duty-free fuel, 9% income tax and no capital gains tax are powerful incentives. As are the unique charter opportunities; according to superyacht specialist Camper and Nicholson, there is huge demand for high-end charters along the nearby Croatian coast but supply has been limited by local regulations that prohibit the hire of foreign-flagged boats.

Add to that stunning scenery, an international airport 7km from the site by water taxi and property prices 75% below those on the French Riviera, and it’s easy to see why the first tranche of berths and residences has sold out. As Oliver Corlette, managing director of Porto Montenegro, points out: “Our investors are exactly the kind of people who would have been in Côte d’Azur 10–15 years ago. They’re now moving east because they’re sick and tired of that part of the world; it’s evolved so much that it’s lost some of its character and charm. They’re now looking for places that still have that.”

25 THE NEXT... LUXURY EXPERIENCE
WEB DESIGNS

THE LUXURY-GOODS industry may be in a slump from which it won’t recover until 2011 according to analyst Bain & Co. And Jean-Jacques Guiony, chief financial officer of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury-goods company, may be sighing: “I don’t think we can say the crisis is over, but we can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, even though the light is far away.” But there are still some brightish spots, such as a projected 12% increase in sales this year in China (although this is down on the 30% rise seen in 2008), with Asia as a whole up by 10%.

There is more bright news in cyberspace. Luxury e-tailers selling designer goods at discounted prices are flourishing as the slowdown has simultaneously produced unsold inventory and a new breed of bargain-hunter. US e-tailers such as Gilt Groupe, HauteLook and Rue La La, and French rival Vente-Privee. com, are selling last season’s designer stuff for as much as 80% off the original price.

Low prices are not the websites’ only allure; the sites are open only to those who have received an email invite to join from an existing member. This lends them an air of exclusivity and creates the sort of buzz marketers crave.

Creating even more buzz is Vente-Privee itself. Although the company began in 2001 in France, it has only recently become a power-house in Europe and is set to turnover €650m globally this year. According to techcrunch. com, Gilt, Amazon and eBay are all actively looking at acquisitions in the European private shopping club space. The price for VentePrivee alone is said to be around €1bn, with some sources putting the figure between €1.35bn and €2.7bn.

26 THE NEXT... GREEN HONEYPOT
SMART GRIDS

DELIVERING ELECTRICITY more intelligently has become a global obsession. Every country and their commercial acolytes have their own vested idea of what a smart grid should be. But the basic idea remains the same throughout: replace what is essentially a dumb one-way energy infrastructure controlled by monopolistic utilities with a complex two-way system that will exchange real time power and information between customers and power providers. In the process, countries reduce their dependency on oil and gas reserves, save both homes and businesses considerable sums in energy bills — and stave off a climatic meltdown that much longer.

On a macro level, smart grids allow disparate energy sources to be linked in ways that make eminent sense: solar would be used during daylight hours and wind would pick up the slack at night when air currents are more forceful.

Enabling this logistical pipedream will require massive investment — €111bn in the US alone says the Electrical Power Research Institute — and will involve the annual deployment of some €13bn worth of communications gear. Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Google and Siemens are just some of the entities charged up for this mother lode.

But it is on a micro level, as homes take advantage of smart meters to reduce electrical usage or make money selling energy back into the grid, where the real torrent of commercial activity could be unleashed. Just as PCs and mobile phones opened the door to third-party software and services, so we will see energy entrepreneurs make fortunes from new technologies for generating, storing, and conserving power. An entire new marketplace is about to be energised.