Malö sailboats: one Swedish yard's boats, carried through four owners since 1939
Malö Yachts has built sailboats at Kungsviken, on the island of Orust on Sweden's west coast, since 1939, when Johannes Olsson founded the company to build wooden yachts. The yard has changed hands several times since, and its ownership history since the 2000s runs through more turbulence than most production builders'. Yet the hulls have kept coming out of the same corner of Orust through all of it. For a buyer weighing Malö against other Scandinavian builders, that continuity of place, more than any single owner, is the throughline.
Origins and ownership
Johannes Olsson's sons, Bo and Orvar Olsson, took over the company in 1963 and built the yard's first fiberglass (GRP) boat in 1969, moving the business on from the wooden-boat era their father had started. In 1984, Bo's own sons, Lars and Bengt Olsson, took over running Malö Yachts, and the third generation of the family stayed in charge until 2008, when investor Bob Erixon bought the yard.
Erixon's purchase is where the brand's ownership is easy to misread. Since the late 2000s, Erixon has owned both the Malö and Sweden Yachts brand names and the Kungsviken yard itself, through his company Elgudden Invest AB. Malö Yachts is grouped with the Sweden Yachts, CR Yachts, and Regina of Vindö brands under the wider Sweden Yachts Group name, and for a period the Kungsviken yard operated with Mattias Rutgersson at its head. But Rutgersson's company, Sweden Yachts Group AB, built boats there under license — it never owned the Malö or Sweden Yachts brands, which stayed with Erixon throughout.
That distinction matters because Sweden Yachts Group AB went bankrupt at the end of 2023. Rutgersson's case went to the Uddevalla District Court in western Sweden, which on 11 June 2025 sentenced him to a year in prison and a three-year professional ban, in connection with the shipyard's collapse; YACHT (yacht.de) reported that the court found he had cheated buyers out of more than four million euros in advance payments over the years. The brand and the yard survived him: production at Kungsviken has continued under a new builder, Martin Hallgren Marine AB, which took on several of the former employees, while Malö's hulls continue to be moulded at the company's own factory in Dalsland, a separate site from the Kungsviken yard where boats are finished.
The designers
Through the decades when the Olsson family and, later, Sweden Yachts Group ran the yard, naval architect Leif Ängermark was Malö's most consistent designer, credited with the 38, 40, 45, and 46, and, working alongside Malö's own design team, the 36. The 34 was designed by naval architect Bo Olsson — a different Bo Olsson from the yard's former co-owner of the same name.
Construction through the eras
Malö's fiberglass hulls have generally been built as a sandwich laminate with a balsa core, a method documented on the 36, 39, and 106 and carried into the 45/46, where the hull was cored in balsa above the waterline and solid laminate below, with the hull and deck mouldings bolted and bonded together and bulkheads laminated directly to the hull rather than dropped in as a pre-built module. Keels on the 36 and 106 were cast in lead. Below decks, Malö leaned on teak decking and mahogany joinery on boats as different in age as the 50 and the 38.
Lines and generations
The earliest fiberglass Malös, including the 50 and the 40 (also sold as the 40 H), were built under the company's original name, Olsöners Båtbyggen, before the Malö Yachts name took over; only two examples of a companion model, the 140, were built under that old name. The numbered range that followed, launched across the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, comprised the 116, 106, 96, 38, 34, 42, and 39, and culminated in the 36 — the highest-production model in Malö's own archive, at 102 built.
A second wave of numbered models followed in the early-to-mid 2000s. The 41 arrived in 2001 and the 45 in 2002; after a new coachroof and other cosmetic changes, the 45 became the 46, and that same design carried forward into the 47, which entered production in 2011 and is offered only with a Classic stern and a stainless bow platform. Alongside that continuing line, Malö also introduced the 37 in 2006, the 43 in 2005, and a new 40 in 2005 — a different design from the 1970s-80s 40/40H despite sharing its number.
Who Malö is for
Malö's story is really two threads that share a single yard: a family that built boats at Kungsviken for nearly seventy years, and a brand that survived its most recent operator's collapse without losing its factory, its hull moulds, or its name. Buyers drawn to Malö are typically drawn to that continuity — a Swedish-built, balsa-cored cruiser with teak and mahogany joinery, produced under the same roof whether a given boat left the yard in the Olsson years, under Sweden Yachts Group, or under Martin Hallgren Marine AB.
