Grow and stay young… inside

Marchesini Group is now 40 years old and celebrates by opening the gates of its Pianoro works. A showroom, a museum that tells the history of the company, routes that show the new organization of production and many, many machines. Numerous the visitors, including the 150 sector operators that came by plane during Interpack, and great optimism in the words of President Maurizio Marchesini: regarding the company and the market. Stefano Lavorini

As ever on time for our encounter. Courteous and ironic, Maurizio Marchesini gave a positive balance of the 19 days of Open Factor, and the Interpack fair, where the group was present with a stand of notable visual impact. He is aware he has aimed high, playing on the simultaneous holding of the two events, and he is rightly proud of how his organization was able to live up to the challenge.
But not only that. In response to our questions, Marchesini makes some considerations on the present and on the market, asserting that Italian automatic machine builders can field years of knowhow and the capacity to develop systems that are always “that one step ahead”.

Everything truly well done, certainly a great demonstration of vitality and competitivity. Hence everything is proceeding splendidly?
I would say we are happy with the way things are going. We closed the financial year 2013 with a consolidated turnover of 206.5 million euros, a growth of 1.5% compared to the year previous, and with 87% of our output exported abroad.
In actual fact the results would have been better had we not suffered from a delay in deliveries, due to the political crisis in Ukraine.
On the other hand, the worries for companies that operate on the global market are for the most connected to macroeconomic factors, in particular as far as countries and geographic areas such as Russia, Syria, Egypt, Central Africa, Latin America are concerned. Now we wonder as to the future of Iran or Venezuela, or how the crisis in Argentina will evolve….
Overall, over and beyond socio-political worries, looking at 2015 the prospects for the pharmaceutical sector appear bright, due both to the demographic explosion in far-off countries, and for the spread of models of living where the availability of pharmaceuticals features as a qualifying element, also due to the western countries, where the aging of the population remains a decisive factor for the market.

You are in an extremely strong position…
Yes and no. Everything centers on our capacity to sell in markets with a large domestic production, such as China or India. The user industries of these countries buy from us what local builders are not capable of producing due to their deficit in technological skills, or that is the sophisticated high performance or specific machines for creating advanced forms of pharmaceuticals, like for example pre-filled syringes.
Here though one should not under-estimate the trend towards the levelling off of costs per hour between China and the USA and, more in general, of western countries: specialised, skilled personnel are now also costly in the Far East. Another thing…. Visiting Marchesini, today you do not see “products”, but technology applied to products; products can be copied (as has already happened to us and others in India and in China) but replicating a system that leads to these results is a lot more complex.
In other terms, at the moment in time, competition is with concerns that are capable of producing, but not of developing in the same way. And if the capacity to innovate will be needed in the coming years, we can rightly think that we will win out.

And as far as Italy is concerned?
In 2013 sales in Italy went well. Things are a bit uncertain for the year at hand. Perhaps due to fears tied to modifications in the price of pharmaceuticals, to new rules, but all might change in the second half of the year. New projects are in the offing and they are indeed solid.