Alongside the traditional Naval Shipyard sector (connected with heavy mechanical industries), the Province has recently consolidated its relationship with the sea by setting up new pleasure sailing industries. The origin and development of these new divisions have been favoured by factors like the presence of available areas along the coast, good accessibility, easy links with the Port of Marina di Carrara and the need to decentralize the nearby focal points in the Province of Lucca, which, at a certain point of their history, faced the necessity of redistributing a part of their activities.

This sector had been built up recently and it is made up mainly of small centres of production and their specialized suppliers. Although this is a new sector, we can already record extremely positive results: from 1998 to the end of 2003 there was a documented growth in active units in the territory of 181.5% (from 48 to 135 companies in 6 years); these figures are well above the regional (44.6%) or national (32.7%) averages.
The Province of Massa Carrara is the third nautical pole in the Region, after Lucca and Leghorn, helping to put Tuscany into third place in Italy as concerns the number of nautical – pleasure sailing industries.
The results for 2004 were good considering other growth parameters, with increases in production (+ 6%), in turnover (+ 7%), in internal demand (+ 27.1%) and with plant usage percentages of 88.1%.

The reasons for this success are to be found in the quality of the product in terms of workmanship, style and the degree of technological innovation used, as well as in the vicinity to the shipyards in the Province of Lucca, which creates concrete possibilities for an exchange of competence and synergies.
The top products consist of cruisers of over 20 metres (super and mega-yachts), whose strong points are design, the care taken over their interior workmanship and the their high degree of technological sophistication.
At present the sub divisions in the sector have reached complex configurations, guaranteeing coverage of the whole process of production in the respect of extremely high standards of quality.

To find out more read the Dossier Navigation in PDF format >>>