Machines, technological made in Italy goes and does maintenance with big data – Corriere.it

Servitisation is the keyword, but for Made in Italy machinery it will be the broader theme of innovation that will be decisive in the coming years. Up for grabs is the confirmation of the competitive advantage that makes it today not only an absolute protagonist of the total of Italian exports, but a player of global value. A meaning of made in Italy centered on the light sectors (fashion, design and food) often prevails in the vernacular, thus forgetting that mechanics is the other great passe-partout of national manufacturing identity around the globe. Ingenium has now come to do justice to many clichés, an extensive work by the Confindustria Study Center (Csc) conducted in collaboration with the trade association Federmacchine. The work analyzes the international context, compares the Italian offer (5,100 companies, 206,500 employees, 55 billion in turnover, of which 35 in exports) with that of the main competitors and identifies some strictly necessary policy guidelines.

We were talking about servitisation and the importance of providing additional services to the finished product as an element of competitiveness on the markets. More advanced services are rapidly being developed, such as e-learning or augmented/virtual reality, to increase the specific knowledge of staff and customers. Tullio Buccellato, CSC economist explains: The world we are heading towards requires predictive maintenance, even remotely, to check the performance of the machines, predict operating problems, avoid forced stops. In order to offer this service, the collection and management of a large amount of data is essential and as a consequence it requires our machinery industry to move more and more towards a mechatronic profile.

The scenery

In facing the international scenario, Italy can already count on highly sophisticated exports of capital goods, in particular those that stand out for their high intensity of automation, creativity and technology and which are identified with an acronym as Act goods. There are 202 categories of products united by high levels of precision, by the increasingly qualifying presence of electronics compared to mechanics and by a growing content of services in the sales offer. Well, for many of these categories of goods Italy is well positioned, it expresses a competitive advantage both in terms of price and for the high quantities of machines sold and therefore it is no surprise that it is the world leader in the production of many of those 202 categories. By studying (and multiplying) the combinations between the categories of machinery and the country-destinations, an all in all small territory like Italy manages to be present in 22,000 cases against the 23,000 of the RFT and the 31,000 of China. An astonishing result which alone explains the exceptional degree of specialization and market presence of the Italian machinery industry. We manage to get almost everywhere, only Chinese and Germans are present in more markets.

In 2022, the Italian companies of Act machinery recorded an improvement of 14% compared to the three-year period 2019-21 which sees us overtaking France and Germany. In 2022, Italy grew twice as much as France and eight times compared to Germany in the export of textile machinery, for example. Even more positive are the results in power transmission systems and, in relation to the comparison with the Rhenish partners (which are losing share), in machinery for foundries. Overall, the export Act is worth almost 28 billion euros for our trade balance and this value can be divided by destination markets. Western and more advanced ones absorb a good portion of it, 18 billion, the remainder goes to emerging markets. But according to the CSC there is a potential of another 16 billion in exports, which despite the prospects of a slowdown in world demand, are within the reach of our companies divided equally between advanced and emerging markets.

The United States

As far as Western markets are concerned, the weight of the USA as a significant outlet still has room for growth. But further growth can be achieved in France and Germany followed in this hypothetical ranking of chances by Canada and Austria. The additional potential of the emerging markets is driven – and it could not be otherwise – by China which also has the advantage of predicting growth rates above the world average. In second place for growth hopes is the Turkish market, followed by India, Mexico and Brazil. But to bring home these potential increases estimated by the CSC, the Italian offer still has to contend with its usual competitors, namely Germany, China and Japan. With the Germans, the battle continues primarily on advanced markets, while the Chinese are the main competitor on emerging ones, even if in the end their companies produce products of lower quality than the Italians. Buccellato observes however that the exploitable potential in emerging countries has to deal with a greater credit risk linked to many situations of different signs among which the geopolitical dynamics of the post-Ukraine world are increasingly important. One path indicated by the CSC report is to insist – also from a geopolitical point of view – not only on China but on the ASEAN countries that come from a negative trend: they have slowed down purchases in recent years due to the pandemic and recorded a new decline in 2022.

Coming out of the analyzes on international markets and bringing the reflection back to a micro level, Buccellato underlines how in the sector of capital goods the request of customers is increasingly oriented towards greater customization of products. And here we return to the key word (servitization) which for our companies also means the ability to anticipate customer needs, manage data, organize the entire company and arrive at the design of products and the use of data to respond to the needs of the request.

The competition

Servitization and sustainability go hand in hand – claims the CSC – and there are the conditions for achieving a cultural synergy between the two directions. To combine purpose and competitiveness. Reuse of machinery, low environmental impact products, lower energy consumption and systems that can be repaired rather than replaced are all components of the above synergy. And therefore of a profound integration between the dynamics of the digital and ecological transitions. But how do these scenarios marked by increasingly fierce international competition and growing rates of system innovation impact on the structure of Made in Italy, characterized by small-sized and often family-owned businesses? It is certainly extraordinary that, despite this structure of the offer, the performances mentioned in the work of the CSC have been achieved, but can the future hold negative discontinuities for us?

The answer is unfortunately obvious: it is clear that our competitors, starting with the Germans, boast a very different supply structure which puts them in a position to implement the necessary changes more easily.. Surely the management of companies made in Germany has a prevailing managerial character and is often external to the owners, while here everything coincides and risks representing a factor of less dynamism and difficulty in defending the competitive advantage. In theory, then, the possibility must be taken into account that, precisely because of the aforementioned characteristics of relative fragility, innovative Italian SMEs are prey to targeted acquisitions by competitors, especially the Chinese who in recent years had already scored more than a few coups . The opinion of the experts that the wind has changed and there is a low risk of sales to Asians by virtue of the profound geopolitical upheavals we have witnessed. And it can also be added on the basis of a fairly recurring tendency of the Meloni government to make use of golden power or even to adopt an extensive interpretation of its prerogatives.

PS Professor Marco Taisch claims that the Italian machinery manufacturers should move in time before a Tesla-bis case arises. That an operator outside the sector, but rich in high tech and AI skills, enters the business by offering servitisation to customers.

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