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FORKLIFT EQUIPMENT SPEAKS ITALIAN
Rome (Ign) - The European leader in the sector of equipment for forklifts is Italian, based in the province of Piacenza. Bolzoni, established in 1945 to provide solutions for moving construction materials, and renamed Bolzoni-Auramo after the takeover of the Finnish Auramo in 2001 (http://www.bolzoni-auramo.it/), today has 6 production facilities in various parts of the world and at present employs around 550 people.
The winning factors for the company, which owns nine patents, have been the invention of the travelling lift integrated in the forklift truck (today almost 50,000 per year are produced), and constant improvement of the range (products are restyled on average every five years), through changes to production. 14 people work full-time in Piacenza and Helsinki on research and development, whose budget is 1.5% of profits. At the moment "intelligent" equipment is being tested for moving goods. This will be produced by an innovative production line aimed at eliminating manual labour, in which the company is investing €6m.
One of the products which has made the company internationally famous are its grippers for rolls of paper, which - mounted on the machines - have become the primary choice for leading paper producers and printworks the world over. The range of grippers for AR rolls instead has a hydraulic circuit of the AR range designed to take into account the technical characteristics of modern forklift trucks, which gives full control over pressure during all operations, control valves on the gripping cylinders and rotation cylinders and effective control of the jaws, in addition to 180° rotation. The ETX-G3S "intelligent" cardboard gripper is instead designed to provide safe movement, without risk of damage for electrical appliances and is particularly suitable for moving high volumes of cardboard boxes, being equipped with advanced microchip technology for the control of gripping operations. The KS-Z "Quattro" grippers for cardboard boxes and electrical appliances are mainly used for moving materials packed in cardboard boxes.
Bolzoni, the second largest producer in the world in the sector with a market share of 20% - number one is America's Cascade with 50% - and the European leader with 30%, in 2005 recorded growth in profits of 12.5% to 95.7m, while its EBITDA rose by 19.7% to 10.59 million. The margin on turnover improved from 10.5% at the end of 2004 to 11.2%. Even if the activity of the group from Casoni di Podenzano is concentrated in the production of this type of equipment (which accounts for over 80% of its consolidated turnover), the company also builds lifting platforms and manual pallet movers. The first quarter of 2006 highlighted an even more positive trend of growing profits, compared to 2005, up 14.9% to 25.3m. Prospects are in fact rosy: in the international sector of logistics, experts forecast average annual growth of 6.4% until 2008 and of 6.5% in the sector of forklift trucks. There are also encouraging forecasts in China, where the group has a joint-venture. Bolzoni is listed in the Star (Segment of High-Requirement Securities) market of the Italian stock exchange, which was set up to answer the need to exploit all the potential of Italy's small and medium-sized enterprises, which represent an internationally-acknowledged successful business model.
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