The return to the yellow zone and the acceleration of the vaccination campaign are the (optimistic) background to the improving data of the Romagna industry. “Orders and turnover are recovering and the prospects for relaunch are also broadening on the international front, opening up new scenarios for the second half of the year”, underlines Paolo Maggioli, president of Confindustria Romagna, presenting the data from the flash survey on the first quarter conducted from the associative study center between the companies of Forlì-Cesena, Ravenna and Rimini.
The economic situation of the first quarter
Turnover is expected to increase by almost six out of ten companies and steady by 26% of the sample; production is also growing for 58% of entrepreneurs and orders are even better (up for 62% of interviewees) with pessimistic shares at the lowest level for all indicators. The relaxation of the restrictive measures further pushes confidence, “even if the increase in procurement costs (raw materials and transport) and the difficulty in finding not only the same raw materials but also a specialized workforce weigh heavily, a problem that in the tourism sector it is added to the delay with which the summer season starts and the need for a deep redevelopment », remarked Maggioli.
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The agile approach to work remains of the Covid experience, with almost two thirds (64%) of Romagna entrepreneurs who intend to continue with the use of smart working even with the return to normality. Confidence is driven above all by data from the export front: 55% of the sample judges their experience on foreign markets to be a success also in 2020, in full pandemic, 45% say they expect exports to recover to pre-pandemic levels down this year and another 20% foresees more optimistic pre-Covid scenarios between now and December.The president of Confindustria Romagna takes the opportunity of the economic situation to bring attention back to the key issues of the territory – infrastructure and energy in the first place – and to arrange choral responses, in view of the call to the polls in the area in the autumn, for the renewal of many municipal councils, including those of the capitals Ravenna and Rimini.
Romagna’s Achilles heel: infrastructure
“On the infrastructure front, the list of nodes is long and well known,” says Maggioli. And he recalls the theme of the airports of Rimini and Forlì which risk going to war, after a painful restart, and instead need coordination, like the fairs (the reference to the announced and troubled wedding between Bologna and Ieg-Rimini is understood) ; the port of Ravenna, at the center of the mega-yard for deepening the seabed that must make good use of the 130 million additional resources arriving from the NRP to compete in global maritime traffic; the development of high speed along the Adriatic ridge which has hitherto been an orphan of investments, “without forgetting the other road networks – he adds – from the indispensable adaptation of the E45 / E55 axis to the fast connection between Forlì and Cesena, from the construction of roundabouts on the SS16 of Rimini, at the Marecchiese ». In order to reconstruct the current and planning state of the infrastructures, Confindustria Romagna has launched a study that will be carried out by ITL (Institute of Transport and Logistics) to define concrete project proposals that will be presented in the summer as part of the “Città Romagna” (a development project launched two years ago by Confindustria in concert with the other associations in the name of over 4 thousand companies that employ 104 thousand workers and 39 billion euros in turnover).
The split of the front on the topic of energy
«Romagna must and can be one of the national poles of the energy transition – concludes the president -. All the Ravenna companies that animate the offshore and energy sector have prepared and signed a document of observations to Pitesai (the Plan for the sustainable energy transition of suitable areas, ed), sent to the Ministry of Ecological Transition, with the aim of returning to a medium / long-term planning of activities with certain times and rules, putting an end to the limbo of interpretative uncertainties and postponements in which the sector has fallen for over two years ». At stake is not only the exploitation of methane under the Adriatic to accompany the green transition, but Eni’s CCS project for the “capture and storage of carbon” (to be conserved in depleted fields at sea), the wind farm at off the coast, the fate of the petrochemical and the future of the most important oil & gas industrial district in Ravenna.