While syncopated news arrives from Reggio Emilia on the fate of Silk Faw, with a request for a negotiated settlement of the crisis presented in the Court by the CEO Giovanni Lamorte which would block any recourse from creditors and the prospect – claims the newco – of restarting the electric supercar project small-scale Sino-Americans still in the Gavassa area, there are those who have worked for a long time with the Chinese public giants, still in the engine sector, and do not believe and have never believed in the grandiose plan announced three years ago by American financier Jonathan Crane, having managed first the investments of the Chinese and then their retreat from Emilia.
It is Andrea Bedosti, with a long career in agricultural machinery and commercial vehicle multinationals (Landini, Same Deutz-Fahr, Merlo, Volvo Trucks), who managed the arrival of the giant Lovol Heavy Industry Ltd of Weifang (the largest agricultural machinery in China, over 3 billion euros in turnover and 13,000 employees) in Europe, becoming its advisor and senior vice president
Engineer Bedosti, the Chinese from Lovol announced in 2015 that Emilia would become the epicenter of their European R&D and agricultural machinery production hub, instead they took the know-how, trademarks and designs of the historic Goldoni brand and abandoned all after less than five years. How can you trust the public companies of the People’s Republic?
The parallelism between the Silk Faw affair and the Lovol-Goldoni affair is not correct. Arbos Group Spa, the European subsidiary of the current Chinese group Weichei Lovol, has never filed the books in court, is still active and has significant real estate assets and liquidity (thanks to the recent sale of the subsidiary Matermacc to the Austrian Pottinger, for value close to ten times the Ebitda). Lovol had commissioned Arbos, from 2012 to 2020, to design three families of tractors through regular contracts and punctual payments: the know-how has therefore always been Chinese property. Arbos acquired Goldoni at the end of 2015, after a year and a half of production shutdown of the company under composition with creditors, saving 360 jobs, investing 90 million euros in the operation and in relaunching the factory and did not put it into liquidation in 2020, he sold it to Keestrack.
The fact is that even Goldoni’s books in the Chinese version ended up in court…