In the superyacht world there is a threshold that matters more than any metre of length: 500 gross tonnes. Below that line, a vessel remains within a lighter regulatory and operational regime; above it, the rules, crewing requirements and costs all change. It is precisely on that boundary that Kingship has positioned its new concept, the KS125: a 500 GT long-range multihull explorer that declares war on monohulls not with length, but with space.
The logic of the twin hull is, after all, ruthlessly simple. For the same tonnage, a catamaran spreads its volumes across a far wider platform, and the Hong Kong shipyard – the first in Asia to build superyachts with steel hulls and aluminium superstructures certified by Lloyd’s Register and the MCA – pushes that logic to its limits. The result, on paper, is a layout the press release describes with no false modesty: not a home away from home, but a small floating community.
The yacht’s features
At the heart of the arrangement is a full owner’s apartment complete with office suite, flanked by four large guest rooms, each with a private balcony – a feature that remains a rare luxury on monohulls of comparable tonnage, and which here becomes the standard. Around it, the programme of shared spaces has the ambition of a small resort: three bar areas, a TV lounge and a family room, a sauna and massage rooms, a main-deck gym, and generous sunbathing areas fore and aft with open-air jacuzzis.
But it is the explorer vocation that gives the project its coherence. The KS125 promises a declared range of up to 4,000 nautical miles – enough for an Atlantic crossing with margin to spare – and the load-carrying capacity of a true support vessel: space on board for a 9-metre tender and a second of 7.5 metres, plus multiple personal watercraft and, in the typical ambition of this generation of concepts, a mini-submarine. The crew, the yard points out, also enjoys comfortable quarters – no minor detail on a vessel conceived for long passages at sea.
The exterior lines
The KS125 does not arrive in isolation. Kingship is methodically building its multihull offensive: at the 2025 Cannes Yachting Festival the yard unveiled the KingCat 90, designed with Spanish studio Barracuda Yacht Design – a catamaran with a hull length under 24 metres and 308 GT of interior volume, comparable, according to the yard, to that of a 40-metre monohull – having previously developed the KingCat 85 with Canada’s ER Yacht Design. The strategy is always the same, applied to different thresholds: maximise volume while staying just below the regulatory limit, whether that is a 24-metre hull length or 500 gross tonnes.
The exterior lines – which the yard describes as sharp, bold and edgy – will need to win over an audience, that of explorer yacht owners, that is traditionally rather conservative. And like every concept, the KS125 will have to pass the hardest test of all: making the leap from rendering to first steel cut. But the direction is clear, and it confirms a trend the market can no longer ignore: the catamaran is no longer a niche for tropical charters. It has become the most efficient weapon in the race for volume – and monohulls, for the first time, find themselves on the defensive.
