1 ACM Yacht for Sale

Updated 7 October 2026 · By Hulls.io Editorial

About ACM

ACM was a French motor-boat builder from Normandy, and the name is not an abbreviation of a shipyard title: the initials stand for its founders, Albert and Marthe Charpentier. The Normandy regional heritage inventory, whose record of the old works is published in the French national Mérimée database, describes Albert Charpentier as an architect by training and dates the creation of the business to 1947. According to oral accounts gathered for that record, the yard moved into a former industrial laundry in Cabourg, on the Calvados coast, towards the end of the 1950s. Other accounts give a later date: Ouest-France, reporting the yard's liquidation, described it as a family business born in Cabourg in 1954, and the French Wikipedia article gives 1955. The dates have not been reconciled.

The yard made its name with its construction method. In 1961 it brought out a hull built as a polyester-balsa sandwich, designed to make the boat unsinkable, and the inventory records that it received the Label européen de la prévention nautique for it. The ACM 1200 and ACM 980 followed: motor launches sold to private owners and also fitted out for coastal surveillance, for the French customs service and maritime-affairs administration and for the Mauritanian, Guinean and Togolese authorities. In 1972 the yard employed 40 people, and its gradually enlarged works included joinery and cabinet-making, painting and varnishing, moulding, metalwork, electrical and furniture-making shops.

Ownership changed several times from the 1990s onwards, and the chain matters if you are tracing an older boat. Olivier Prouvost took the business over at the start of the decade, when it employed 60 people. In 1997 ACM joined the Dufour group, which moved production from Cabourg to Colombelles, also in the Calvados. Under Dufour the yard concentrated on cruising motor boats, with a range of four models: the Elite, Héritage, Dynasty and Excellence. In 2001 the yard was taken over by Bertrand Vogèle, and in 2004 it passed to Arcoa SA, together with the investment fund Green Recovery. Under Arcoa the Colombelles yard was run as Chantier Naval de Colombelles, and French used-boat sites such as Bateaux.com list the builder as ACM - Arcoa.

The yard ran into financial difficulty under its later owners. Its operating company, Chantier Naval de Colombelles, headed by Philippe Guglielmetti, went into receivership in July 2009 and was placed in liquidation by the Paris commercial court in February 2010; the heritage inventory likewise records that the yard closed for good in 2010. In January 2012 ActuNautique reported that Arcoa, by then based in Lorient, planned to relaunch ACM as an entry-level line of catalogue motor boats, with two models planned at first, one of them 16 metres long. We have found no record of that relaunch reaching production, and ACM no longer builds boats. According to the inventory's 2011 survey, the old Cabourg works were occupied by Atelier Service Marine, a company set up by former ACM employees.

For buyers, an ACM is a French-built motor boat from a yard that no longer exists. Before you buy one, check which era the boat comes from: the Cabourg-built launches, the Dufour-era cruisers from Colombelles, or the later ACM - Arcoa boats.