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Home > Focus On
Lifts are Italian too
Rome - (Ign) - Scholars of industrial economics consider it an exception and, at the same time,
an example of excellence.
This is the sector of
lifts (www.anie.it, www.anacam.it), in which Italy can boast a dynamic fabric of companies, able to compete with the major international leaders, and which continue to be a feather in the cap of the national manufacturing industry reality. What makes Italian industry in the sector so special, almost worthy of a case study, are a number of peculiarities - some generalised and international, others specific to the domestic market.
The first aspect to consider is that while lifts are extremely widespread and common, they belong to a specific category of plant engineering. This means that the device is literally assembled and built at the final customer's premises, and that every plant has particular characteristics, so much so that there are basically no two lifts identical to each other in the world. This means that the possible scale economies, aimed at reducing costs and, at the same time, innovating and improving products, may only be implemented on the component level, before installation of the system. And it is precisely in this sector that Italian industry has had the successful intuition of investing with increasingly satisfying results.
Of course, when in the early 1970s the sector began to become international, Italian companies started with an advantage: lifts are more widespread in Italy than in any other country in the world. There are almost a million systems in operation, a sixth of all those present in the European Union. Basically, this is an extremely dynamic market, which developed an excellent rate over the years of post-war reconstruction and which only settled down in the 1980s. The statistics for Italian industry in the sector are as follows: 1200 companies, among installers and maintenance companies, accounting for 15.000 jobs; and an overall turnover in 2004 of almost €1.6 billion, almost 40% of which was accounted for by a foreign markets. This is of extreme significance, if we consider that the product is used in plant engineering. This industrial fabric is represented above all by small and medium-sized enterprises, which have been able to resist the competition of large multinationals in the sector thanks to the quality of their products, to their flexibility in adapting to specific needs of customers and to their capacity to be competitive in terms of component supply. 60% of the European market is in fact dominated by three large companies, only one of which is actually European. But in Italy, where demand is so intense, small and medium-sized domestic companies fully control around 50% of the market of new installations. This is thanks to a component supply system of over 100 companies with around 5000 employees, who guarantee the companies which build the systems the possibility to adapt to the specific needs of each single installation, thus ensuring costs which in line with the competition. Moreover, in many cases, important components used by multinationals in the sector are made in Italy. Then of course, there is the aspect of finishings. And here the quality and inventiveness of Italian design comes into play. In this sector, so close to that of furnishing, this is often an element which makes the difference and provides a competitive edge.
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