Jamaican American entrepreneur Denton Douglas is confident a US $25 million investment in a Jamaica yacht-building and repair facility will pay off.

Due to open later this year, the venture will operate under his Florida-headquartered company Monarch Yachts and will create jobs and add manufacturing capacity to the island’s economy.

Douglas said the facility would make Jamaica a regional production base. He said it would be easier and cheaper to build and ship yachts to the United States than at his current operations in Türkiye and China, and would give local workers skills they could use elsewhere in Jamaica.

Plan to make Jamaica a manufacturing hub

Douglas said his wider aim is to help move Jamaica away from dependence on primary goods and into manufacturing. He said the island already has the skills, the logistics and the basic conditions needed to support the business.

“I want Jamaica to be a manufacturing hub. Over the years we have been mainly on primary goods; we export bananas, we export ore, but we never make something. We import our cars. We import everything else. I want to move Jamaica from that primary [producer] to a manufacturing hub, and I think we have the know-how. For sure we have the skills, and we have the logistics to do it,” Douglas said.

He said Monarch Yachts made luxury yachts, commercial boats, ferries and patrol boats, with yacht repair and marine manufacturing also parts of the business. He added that the company’s current work also included brokerage, charters and refits and repairs. Douglas said those services could all be carried out in Jamaica.

“We make luxury yachts and commercial boats like fishing boats. We also have ferries… for shuttling people… and our biggest business now are military boats, which is surprisingly patrol boats. We have a line of patrol boats and we have a contract for a country in Africa to do 20 to 40 small ferries and about 10 patrol boats. We want to do that here because those are easy to build,” he said.

Why Jamaica appeals to the company

Douglas said Jamaica offers practical advantages over his existing shipyards. Monarch currently operates two plants in Türkiye, and the company set up in China before moving its business base to Florida. Douglas said travel time, shipping costs and access to buyers all made Jamaica an attractive option.

“I want to come here and build yachts. Why? First, to be selfish. I fly 12 hours every time to Turkey and Italy to the shipyard, or 21 hours to China. An hour and a half [from Miami to Jamaica] is a lot better than flying so long,” Douglas said.

He said a customer in the United States could fly to Jamaica in the morning, inspect a yacht under construction and return the same day. He said that would not be possible at the company’s present sites in Türkiye.

“For example, my 45-footer, to take it from Turkey to the United States, it’s US$50,000. If I build that same boat here, I’m saving that much money. To take that boat from China is another US$25,000, so that’s US$75,000,” he said.

Douglas’s plans have also drawn a positive response from the marine industry in the Cayman Islands, although one operator said the economics of boatbuilding there were more challenging.

A spokesperson at Scotts Marine Cayman said: “Jamaica’s investment is a positive development, but the cost of building yachts and boats in Cayman makes local manufacturing difficult. Lower construction costs in countries such as the United States make those markets more competitive for boatbuilding.”

Site talks, training plans and local jobs

Douglas said he was in talks with Jamaican authorities to identify a site for the project. He said he would have preferred St Elizabeth, where he was from, but said practical considerations meant the main shipyard would likely be in the eastern end of the island - in the Corporate Area, St Catherine or Portland, including Kingston as a likely base for the shipyard.

He said the chosen location would need access to skilled labour, a port and an airport. That would allow American clients to fly in, view their boats and leave the same day. Douglas said the plant might sit in one place, but the work would not be confined there.

“I want to adopt the European model, where the shipyard may be in Kingston, but the woodwork could be in St Elizabeth. The piping could be somewhere else, so the wealth and the labour skills are spread throughout Jamaica. So everyone benefits, not just one area,” he said.

Douglas said the business would need carpenters, welders, seamstresses and other workers to support yacht production. He said the goal was not simply to assemble boats, but to build a wider industrial ecosystem that could create work across the country.

He said Monarch had already contacted the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce and the Jamaica Promotions Corporation, or JAMPRO, as the company sought special economic zone designation. The company was also working with the Caribbean Maritime University, which Douglas said had indicated it was ready to help train workers.

Training Jamaicans for the shipyard

Douglas said the first stage would include sending Jamaicans to China and Türkiye for on-the-job training. He said the company would teach workers the practical skills needed for marine welding, fibreglass work and epoxy work before they returned to Jamaica.

“What I would do first is take a bunch of Jamaicans to China and Turkey and teach them on-the-job how it works. Then, once they get a basic understanding of whether it’s aluminium welding, steel welding for marine, or fibreglass, or epoxy work, then they will come back and start working,” Douglas said.

He said the operation would rely mostly on Jamaican workers, with a smaller number of foreign nationals brought in to teach them. Douglas said that if the workforce reached 100 Jamaicans, only about 10 foreign nationals would be needed.

“It’s more of a teaching model, not a working model,” he said.

Douglas said Monarch would be prepared to pay tuition for Jamaicans to study at CMU and then work for the company under a bonded arrangement. He said many of them might later move on to better-paid work overseas, including in Germany and Italy.

“One of the highest-paid engineers on a yacht now is Jamaican,” he said.