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[September 2009]
Solid Offer for Italy’s Nuova Fima
Sacmi (Imola, BO, Italy) has said that last Friday’s takeover bid for Nuova Fima will save 60 jobs and create excellent industrial synergy opportunities.
Automatic sorting lines for the ceramic industry, vision systems, robotised palletisers, packaging machines and laser-guided vehicles are all businesses in which, for years, Nuova Fima of Fiorano Modenese has been an international leader. However, when last April its Dutch parent company (the Favonius Ventures Holdings investment fund, which purchased the company in 2005) decided to wind up operations, there was a real risk that the company would be lost.
To prevent what might otherwise have been the umpteenth case of a business forced to close as a direct or indirect consequence of the financial crisis, Sacmi showed a clear interest in renting – with obligation to subsequently purchase – a branch of the company so as to ensure continued output and save 60 of Nuova Fima’s 125 employees. This represented a ‘rescue’ that, for Sacmi, brings with it opportunities for important industrial synergies while, for the Fiorano company, the takeover means not just the preclusion of a company collapse but the chance to become part of a major group that is the leading supplier to the international ceramic industry.
In the words of Fiorano Modenese’s mayor, Claudio Pistoni, “It’s the best possible result”. Or, as Emilia-Romagna’s industrial development officer, Duccio Campagnoli, with whom the relative trade union agreements were signed last Friday, put it, “it is the outcome of the Sacmi Group’s outstanding willingness to breathe life into a new industrial venture by making the very best of some of the most advanced technology offered by Nuova Fima”.
Moreover, thanks to Surface Inspection, the world’s undisputed leader in automatic inspection systems for ceramic tile quality control, Sacmi also aims to enhance its range of vision systems.
Sacmi reports that Nuova Fima will now present an agreement offer that – to prevent bankruptcy – must be accepted by the creditors. Nevertheless, a first step in the right direction has, again in the words of Fiorano’s mayor, been taken and is largely the result of “Sacmi’s far-sightedness and orientation towards investment despite the economic situation”; it is also the result of the determination with which trade unions, the company and local and regional institutions have dealt with the entire matter, thus restoring prospects for a part of the ceramic industry that risked going under and seriously damaging the local economy, concluded the company.
ENDS