Alibi sailboats: a Bangkok-built French catamaran brand
Alibi Catamarans was a French-founded brand that built its boats in Thailand and finished them in France, a cross-continental arrangement that proved unsustainable: the yard entered judicial liquidation a decade after it was founded. Its output was narrow but distinctive — one production catamaran, the Alibi 54, and one later trimaran concept that never reached production.
Origins and ownership
Loïc Goepfert, a French naval architect and engineer with a background in ocean racing, founded Alibi Catamarans in 2007; BoatIndustry.com reported the yard's objective was custom catamarans that were ultra-efficient and aesthetically pleasing. Goepfert set up the shipyard in Bangkok the following year to build the brand's first boats. Alibi later opened a finishing base at Le Canet-en-Roussillon, France — taking over the five-year-old former XL Catamarans premises in February 2017 — to complete boats there and avoid the added cost of shipping deck fittings from Europe to the Thai yard. That arrangement did not last: with no boat order that year, Alibi Catamarans stopped operating, and the yard was placed into judicial liquidation, reported October 4, 2017. Staff from the Thai shipyard transferred to a company manufacturing composite parts for industry and boating, and Alibi's own skills, per BoatIndustry.com, remained operational for the possible construction of a future catamaran.
Construction through the eras
Goepfert himself pointed to the Bangkok arrangement's logistics as a factor in the yard's economic difficulties: masts had to be imported in three parts, he said, with technicians from mast maker Lorima flown in to Thailand for assembly. On the Alibi 54, the hulls were foam-cored with carbon fiber concentrated in high-load areas and the rig was carbon fiber as well; the boat could be ordered with hybrid electric drives as standard equipment, in four versions — Stripped-out, Greenie, Worldfaring, and Tailormade. In February 2016, the yard — by then trading as Alibi Yachts and led by Goepfert, a former trimaran racer — unveiled a 35.35-meter trimaran concept, the Alibi 116 OneOff, drawing on his racing-trimaran background; its engine room was built around a hybrid diesel, hydrokinetic generator. The 116 OneOff was revealed as a concept, not a boat that reached production.
Who Alibi is for
Alibi's history is short and singular: one French-trained designer, one production flagship the importer Aeroyacht hoped to bring to American buyers in time for the 2011 fall boat shows, and one unbuilt trimaran concept, all bracketed by a shipyard that opened in Thailand in 2008 and closed in liquidation in 2017.