David King, founder of Princess Yachts, has passed away at the age of 83 following an illness. His passing leaves a lasting mark on the entire European motor yacht industry, of which he was one of the great pioneers of the first generation, alongside figures such as Robert Braithwaite (Sunseeker), Sam Newington (Fairline), Paolo Vitelli (Azimut-Benetti), and Norberto Ferretti (Ferretti Group)—builders who, for decades, competed and pushed each other toward excellence.
Born in Dundee in 1942, King studied engineering at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth while serving in the Royal Navy. In 1965, after leaving the Navy, he founded Marine Projects—the precursor to what we now know as Princess Yachts—with his partners Cliff Viney and Brian Phillips in a modest shed by the water in Plymouth. The original idea was to start a charter business, but the trio soon decided to build their own boats.
Even before the first boat—the famous Project 31—was finished, it had already been sold, along with two others. They sold for 3,400 pounds each, although they later discovered that the actual cost of construction had been 3,460 pounds per unit. King often recalled this anecdote as one of his favorites: a lesson that every successful business is built on mistakes that are owned up to, and that the willingness to improve matters more than getting it right the first time.
The company continued to grow with increasingly larger models, as King was convinced from the outset that building small boats was not profitable. Over time, Princess would come to offer yachts up to 40 meters in length. In 1982, it launched the Princess 45, then the largest production motor yacht built in the United Kingdom, and by the early 1990s, exports accounted for more than 60% of production, earning the company the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in 1988.
In the early 1980s, Marine Projects was acquired by South African wine magnate Graham Beck, although King remained at the helm of the company and served as an influential member of the board of Renwick PLC, Beck’s investment vehicle, which for years also owned Fairline Boats. During that decade and the first half of the 1990s, the company combined production of the Princess line with contract manufacturing, which for years included the Moody line of sailboats. By the late 1990s, however, growing demand for Princess yachts led the company to set aside that activity and focus all its capacity on its own brand. In 2001, the company adopted the name Princess Yachts, having already become one of Plymouth’s largest employers.
In 2008, Princess Yachts was acquired by L Capital, a fund linked to Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man and owner of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy). King played a key role in closing that deal. Since then, the company has continued to grow, and in the spring of 2023, it changed hands again: its current majority shareholder is the U.S. private equity firm KPS. Today, Princess Yachts employs nearly 3,000 people, has annual revenue of over 300 million pounds, and builds around 150 boats a year, with a range spanning from 14.6 to 36.5 meters in length.
Those who knew him remember him as a down-to-earth, modest, and deeply generous person. King built great boats because he truly cared: he sailed and maintained his own Princess boats, knew firsthand what worked and what didn’t, and remained part of the brand’s product development team long after stepping down as president—more than a decade ago. In fact, in February 2026—just a few months before his death—he was still actively involved with the company. In 2025, on the occasion of the brand’s 60th anniversary, King was the star of the celebration, reminiscing about the company’s early days and the construction of that first Project 31.
