On the evening of 9 September 2026, during the Cannes Yachting Festival, the fifth edition of Asia Night brought together around 150 brand representatives, dealers, brokers, designers, media and supply-chain professionals from Europe, Asia and beyond. The association took part as a supporting organisation and convened the event's first Chinese Yacht Brand Showcase.
Asia Night was founded in 2022 by Chao Yachting, Amal Yachting, Voyager, V Yachts Asia, Lodestone Yachts, Marine2go and Starship Yachts, with the support of the Hong Kong Yachting Association and this association. It is deliberately a social reception rather than a stand-based showcase. At a show as tightly scheduled as Cannes, conversations between stands are cut short by the clock; a reception provides the space to set the agenda aside and actually connect people. Over five years it has become a fixed meeting point between the Asian and international yachting industries during the Cannes show.
The most closely watched element of this edition was the first Chinese Yacht Brand Showcase. Senior representatives of HeySea, Eastar, NYX, Diamond Yachts, ePropulsion, ZGYRO and NautiFlux appeared together, alongside the Shanghai International Boat Show (CIBS), now in its thirtieth year, and the organiser of the 2027 ICOMIA World Marinas Conference. Builders, equipment suppliers, service providers and exhibition platforms in one room presented something other than a handful of isolated brand names: an industry with a supply chain, support functions and platforms behind it.
The showcase was initiated by Xu Zheng, president of the association, who said at the event:
At an international venue like Cannes, an individual Asian brand has limited channels through which to be heard, and its voice is easily lost. When manufacturers, equipment suppliers and service companies appear together in a more concentrated way, a shared understanding of an “Asian yachting industry” forms much more readily. The value of tonight is not exposure alone, but converting that exposure into lasting relationships between dealers, builders, media and potential customers. That is where the long-term value of going abroad begins.
For Chinese yacht companies, the difficulty of entering the European market has never been the product alone. It is channel, recognition, and the time it takes to build trust. Opening a market alone is expensive and slow; when an industry appears collectively, both access to dealer networks and visibility in international media improve markedly.
This is the direction of the association's longer-term work: consolidating the industry, building routes to international markets for member companies, and lowering the institutional cost of going abroad through policy advocacy and trade facilitation. The association will continue to organise collective appearances of Chinese yacht brands at major international shows and industry conferences, and will use platforms such as the 2027 ICOMIA World Marinas Conference to deepen engagement between the Chinese and international yachting industries.
