Machine tools, record production expected in 2023: one billion more than in 2019

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Over 20 million a day, including Saturdays and Sundays. In spite of everything, supply chain crisis and energy cost boom, leap in interest rates and inflation, geopolitical crises and slowdown in global trade, 2023 will still be a year to remember for Italian machine tools.

After the double-digit increase in 2021 confirmed the following year, in the forecasts of Ucimu-Sistemi per Producing in December we will be able to celebrate a new record, with the production of machinery rising by more than six points to 7.75 billion euros, a abundant billion more than what happened before the crisis, in 2019.

Growth facilitated by constant progress on international markets, with Italy in fourth place in the world, but driven above all by the domestic market, which, as with production, achieves new all-time highs.

The internal consumption of plants, relaunched after years of stagnation by the robust package of tax bonuses launched with the Industry 4.0 plan, rises to 6.8 billion, the highest ever, two billion beyond the levels reached in 2019.

«The results of recent years – explains the president of Ucimu Barbara Colombo in front of the members gathered at the annual meeting – testify how the Italian machine tool comes out strengthened by the health crisis, which it has faced more effectively and energetically than many competitors from Germany”. If the mass of orders collected in the past continues to saturate production, new orders are however less brilliant and the first quarter has already shown a drop of almost 24 points. A slowdown that makes it even more urgent to face the main challenges of the period, first and foremost the combination of digitization and sustainability. “For this reason we ask the government authorities to confirm and strengthen the transition plan 4.0 which – in our opinion – must provide, on a structural basis, a modular system of tax incentives that can be combined and combined with each other and which reward more those who invests in new machines where digitization is also an enabler of sustainability». Another critical issue is that of finding personnel trained to operate in one’s plants.