“Even with a full stomach you can go into crisis.” Riccardo Cavanna, president of the family business in Prato Sesia (Novara), 60 years of history and 80 million in turnover, leader in the construction of low-cost packaging machines, summarizes in a single sentence the situation of instrumental mechanics, builders of the systems used to produce, the industrialists of the industrialists. A leading sector of Made in Italy which in 2021 recorded a record turnover of 50.3 billion euros (+ 20% on 2020), and would still have orders to continue growing even in 2022. to confirm the most trite of clichés, a grain of sand may be enough to jam even a perfect mechanism.
The grain, which in the meantime has become a boulder, is the shortage of electronic components that began in 2021 and which companies are now struggling to tackle in an escalation that has forced them to bring delivery times from two to forty weeks for more machines. simple and from four to twelve months for the largest and most sophisticated. With a series of cascading problems to manage: the rental of warehouses to keep the machines ready but not deliverable; the reprogramming of logistics; price management (set one year after delivery but made obsolete by the boom in component costs); the collapse of margins; the risk of a liquidity crisis due to missed collections; budget management and depreciation. In a word: rethinking the company.
Boom in orders, shortage of chips
“Between September and December 2021”, says Giambattista Pedrini, president of Pedrini in Carobbio degli Angeli (Bergamo), a turnover of 70 million euros and 120 employees, a company active in the construction of machines for processing marble and stone, “after the braking due to Covid fears, we had a boom in orders and we started the production procedures. There was already the crisis in the supply of electronic components, but we were hoping to find the material during processing ».
To understand how an instrumental mechanics company operates – Pedrini is a typical example, present in sixty countries around the world, from China to the United States, from Turkey to Egypt, from Brazil to Ethiopia (“where there is a quarry, we are there », simplifies the president) – it is necessary to start from the size of the machines. A complete system is up to 150 meters long and is finished in blocks on a continuous production line. Once the job is done, ten to fifteen containers are needed to ship the machine. That is why, once an order has been received, it is necessary to start processing immediately. Even if there is not the availability of all the necessary components. In normal times the pieces arrive work in progress.
The problems begin when suppliers, the largest multinationals in the industry, from Siemens to Abb, extend delivery lead times from twenty days to 10-12 months. It happens that the whole machine, with values ranging from 500 thousand euros to five million euros in the sector, is ready but cannot be delivered because there is a missing card or a 100-200 euros inverter that cannot be found. «It happened to us – says Pedrini – that we had to park the ready car inside the factory, in the aisle, to make room on the line for the other systems being worked on. But it has also happened, and it happens more and more often, to search and find online, on eBay or Alibaba, the original pieces, complete with certification, that multinationals struggle to supply us but at prices up to twenty-thirty times higher. . Incredible how this can happen, even if it allowed us to complete some machines, but eroding margins ».