Excellence
Being demanding is a cardinal value in the superyachting sector where mediocrity has no place. For La Ciotat Shipyards, this requirement applies primarily to themselves. The site has not experienced a service disruption for any reason in the past 20 years. Its operating teams demonstrate rare lifting skills every day, allowing vessels of all kinds to dry out without incident.
In return, La Ciotat Shipyards naturally expect the same standards from their partners. The initiatives for new developments that they promote together are thus based on world-class expertise in yachting, firm financial foundations and compliance with all their commitments in terms of business development and local employment.
Durability
La Ciotat has been a home to shipyards for centuries. This achievement is due not only to its economic dynamism and ability to reinvent itself regularly to adapt to changes in the maritime industry. It is also the result of an extremely strong social consensus, which was notably expressed firmly at the time of the social crises of the 1980s. La Ciotat Shipyards are committed to preserving this consensus through thoughtful economic management that always involves the employees in major strategic decisions. The company is thus one of the few local public companies that has an employee representative continuously on its board of directors. Today, this social consensus must include a new dimension: environmental protection. La Ciotat Shipyards want to be a model shipyard on this point. By achieving this, they will be set to continue their mission for decades to come.
Accountability
As the manager of iconic equipment in the public domain, which belongs to everyone, La Ciotat Shipyards are particularly committed to the transparency of all their actions vis-à-vis their stakeholders. La Ciotat Shipyards is a local public company (SPL) entirely controlled by the local authorities which are its shareholders. The board of directors, the body in which all strategic decisions are taken, is made up of locally elected representatives who guarantee democratic transparency in its functioning. Employees are also involved in all major decisions through their permanent representative on the board of directors.
Like all SPLs, LCS is also subject to analogous control procedures, exercised by the municipal, metropolitan, departmental and regional administrations, that are in place to verify the regularity of their actions. In addition to these elements of internal control, the company very early on wished to open up the procedures for competitive bidding, even before this became mandatory, for all the public sector occupancy authorizations granted within the public domain. These procedures are organized in a public manner via the company’s website using transparent selection criteria. Finally, LCS is one of the few shipyards of any type, let alone in the world of yachting, to publish its entire price list on the Internet.
