HARBOURVIEW MARINE HOLDINGS LTD EASTERN REGION MARKET ASSESSMENT SPECIMEN. Constructed for teaching. Harbourview Marine does not exist. Neither do the Coastal Marine Trades Council, the Office of Regional Statistics, their publications, or a single number below. Nothing here should be cited as fact about anything. To: Board, Harbourview Marine Holdings Ltd From: Strategy & Commercial Date: 14 April Subject: Eastern Region small-craft berthing - market assessment supporting the Eastport capacity paper Status: Draft for comment. Not for external circulation. Desk research only. 1 - SCOPE, SITES AND METHOD This assessment covers the small-craft berthing and marina services market in the Eastern Region, and is intended to support the Eastport capacity paper going to the Board in June. It does not cover commercial shipping, fishing fleets or dry-stack storage, all of which the Board asked us to treat separately. Harbourview operates two sites. Eastport Marina holds 210 pontoon berths on a lock-free frontage immediately inside the harbour entrance, with fuel, a chandlery and a 60-tonne hoist. Kingsmill Boatyard & Moorings holds 96 berths and swinging moorings four nautical miles up-river, with a 30-tonne hoist, a paint shed and hard standing for winter storage. Kingsmill's tidal access is restricted to roughly five hours either side of high water; Eastport's is not restricted. This is desk research. We commissioned no primary research and ran no customer survey. Two external sources are used, and they are not of the same kind: - ORS. Office of Regional Statistics, "Marine and Coastal Services: Annual Business Survey", 2025 release. Compulsory return for businesses above the registration threshold. Sampling frame, response rates, imputation method and revision policy are all published alongside the release. - CMTC. Coastal Marine Trades Council, "Sector Confidence Survey", press release of 3 March. The CMTC is the sector's trade body; its published remit is "to promote the interests of the coastal marine trades and represent them to government." Where a figure below comes from one of those two, it says so. Where a figure comes from our own systems it says that too. Nothing here has been cross-checked against a third source, because there is no third source we are aware of. 2 - MARKET SIZE AND STRUCTURE The ORS 2025 release puts Eastern Region marine and coastal services turnover at GBP 412m for calendar year 2024, up 3.1% on 2023. It counts 340 registered businesses employing 5,900 full-time equivalents. The top ten operators by turnover account for roughly 38% of the total. On the ORS turnover measure Harbourview ranks seventh. Three qualifications on that number, none of which appear in the ORS headline and all of which are in its methodology note. The 2024 figures are provisional; the 2023 first estimate was subsequently revised down by 1.8 percentage points at second release. The 2025 release covers calendar 2024, so the most current official picture available to us is roughly fourteen months old. And the survey is organised by business registration, not by asset: ORS does not count berths, moorings or occupancy at all. Any berth-level figure in this paper comes from CMTC or from us. Structurally the market has not moved much. Two of the top ten changed hands in the last three years without changing capacity. We are aware of no new entrant at scale since the Fenhaven development, which remains part-built. 3 - DEMAND SIGNALS The CMTC press release of 3 March, headlined "Record demand as the boating recovery holds", reports that berth demand across its membership rose 14% year on year, that waiting lists at member marinas now average eleven months, and that 71% of members expect to raise rates during the year. We would not put the 14% in front of a lender without qualification. It rests on 38 responses from a membership of 210 businesses, self-selected, with no published weighting. The CMTC has not published the questionnaire, and "demand" is not defined in the release - it may mean enquiries, waiting-list entries, or something else. The body that produced the figure exists to promote the sector. None of this makes the figure wrong. It means we cannot tell whether it is right. Our own enquiry volumes, from the booking system, rose 6% across the two sites over the same twelve months. That is a different measure on a different population and the two are not strictly comparable, but the gap is wide enough to note. Our Eastport waiting list stood at 31 names at 31 March; we do not record how long people have been on it, which is a gap worth closing before the June paper. 4 - SUPPLY, OCCUPANCY AND CONSENTED CAPACITY Occupancy at 31 March, from our own berth ledger: Eastport 94%, Kingsmill 81%. Both figures are annual-contract berths only and exclude visitor moorings, which are managed separately and reported in the trading pack. The Eastport expansion designed last year would add 48 berths on the eastern arm. Planning consent was granted in November. The marine licence remains outstanding; the regulator's published service standard puts a decision in the first quarter of next year, and our advisers think that is realistic but not certain. Construction is estimated at fourteen months from licence, and no start date has been set or budgeted. The Board should read the 48 berths as consented on land and unconsented on water. On competing supply: one operator upriver has applied for a 20-berth extension, and the Fenhaven site retains outline consent for a larger scheme that has not moved in two years. We have no basis for putting a probability on either. 5 - PRICING AND YIELD Our own average annual berth rate across both sites rose from GBP 3,150 to GBP 3,390, an increase of 7.6%. That is the blended figure across pontoon berths and swinging moorings and it moves with mix as well as with price; the Eastport-only figure is higher and the Kingsmill-only figure lower. The CMTC release quotes a regional average annual rate of GBP 3,600. That figure is not comparable to ours. Its stated basis is "premium coastal marinas" and it excludes river and tidal moorings, which is most of Kingsmill. Reading it as a market benchmark against which we are cheap would be a mistake, and we make the point here because the comparison has been drawn informally more than once. Ancillary revenue - lift-out, winter storage, brokerage commission, chandlery - ran at 22% of site revenue for the year, and is materially higher at Kingsmill than at Eastport because of the storage and paint-shed business. 6 - RISKS, AND WHAT THIS ASSESSMENT DOES NOT TELL YOU This section is longer than the Board usually wants it and we have not shortened it. The 14% demand figure is unverified, is inconsistent with our own enquiry data, and comes from a body with an interest in the answer. The ORS market-size figure is authoritative, provisional and roughly fourteen months old. Those are different problems and neither is solved by the other. Beyond that, three things this paper is silent on, stated plainly so that nobody reads them into it: - Price elasticity. We hold no data on customer switching between marinas and no basis on which to estimate elasticity. Nothing in this assessment supports a view on how far rates could rise before occupancy falls. - Why occupancy differs between the sites. We report the two occupancy figures. We have not investigated the difference, and no explanation for it is offered or implied here. - Customer intent. With no survey, we know what berth-holders did last year. We do not know what they want, what they would tolerate, or where they would go. Prepared by Strategy & Commercial. Comments to the author by 30 April, please, marked against section numbers.