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PACKAGING MACHINES
Rome - (Adnkronos Multimedia) - Specialised production, continuous technological updating, ability to adapt to the different needs of a market in continuous evolution: these are the ingredients contributing to the success of an industrial sector and a range of products that continue to keep the Made in Italy flag flying high the world over: packaging machines. This represents a unique case on the Italian and European industrial panorama: around 250 industrial firms and a hundred or so artisan production units, almost all of them located in Emilia-Romagna (which has the largest concentration of the sector in the world) and in Lombardy. These are the salient figures: more than 15 thousand employees, sales bordering on 3 billion euro, 80 percent of which take place abroad; a 2003 which, despite the poor European and international cycle of business trends, closed with a further increase in exports of 4.5 percent.
Leadership in this sector on international markets is mainly in the hands of European producers. The largest manufacturers are Japanese and American, but their production is mostly for their own home markets. Thus Germany and Italy take up 70 percent of international trade in the sector, so much so that this Italian industry for packaging machines has become an object of study on the part of a number of research centres.
The reasons for this success are fourfold: a large productive flexibility, combined with ability for technological innovation; client-orientation (Italian machinery is built to order). Much attention is given to planning, experimentation and quality control: a strong competitiveness exists, deriving from the combining of production between the main leaders in the sector and the super-specialised SMEs, and finally the industrial structure of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, with its great professionalism, perpetrated thanks to excellent training activities.
With these trump cards in hand, Italian industry has been able to strengthen its position both during periods of favourable business trends as well as during unfavourable periods, facing up in a positive manner to factors of change, substituting electronic technologies for those traditionally used, offering complete packaging lines instead of single machines, developing new solutions to satisfy a demand which is always more complex and selective, becoming more international through service centres attached to branches and local agents.
The major part of production consists of the food sector, representing 30 percent of sales, followed by pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, covering more than 25%, followed by 5 percent for chemicals. Looking at the different categories of merchandise, there is clear evidence of a growth in the export of systems destined for beverages (machines for filling, closing, capsulation, labelling, and machinery for the cleaning and drying of bottles or other containers) and, in a minor way, machines to fill and package the goods. However, no particular changes are to be seen with regard to the importance of each category in the composition of the flow in exports: machines for the packaging of goods represent the largest share (45%), followed by machines for filling, closing, capsulation and labelling (33 percent). The markets showing the highest interest and development are those in North America (the target for 11 percent of total exports), the European Union (especially France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom) and European countries outside the European Union and Asia. The increase in growth which has characterised the emerging Asian economies has, in fact, encouraged the further expansion of Italian exports, above all towards China and South Korea, which in 2002 overtook Japan in the classification of the main countries of destination of Italian production, thus becoming the second largest Asian market for Italian industry.
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