Sustainability as a driver for growth and development and a competitive factor.
It is around this theme that the Pordenone stage of Top 500 took place in the Electrolux Innovation Factory in Porcia.
To tell how sustainability is declined within some of the excellent companies in the area, entrepreneurs and managers interviewed by Roberta Paolini, journalist of Nordest economia.
Born in Porcia in the 60s, the Rosa Group, which deals with the molding of plastic materials, owned by the Sandrin family, is now worth 150 million euros in revenues and a thousand employees divided into 4 companies and 8 factories between Fvg, Veneto and Poland.
Customers are important multinationals «who choose us – explains Annalista Sluga, head of administration and finance – for our factors of success: a production with high technology and excellent quality that we guarantee with continuous investments in research and development, in the product and in the process, and through collaborations with universities.
And thanks to one of these collaborations, the Rosa Group has entered another sector: the monitoring of bridges, viaducts and tunnels.
The commitment on the sustainability front comes from internal drives, ethics and customer requests: and from the desire «to always be in step with the times, to guarantee high standards of sustainability, which translates into innovation – again Sluga – aimed at maintaining and conquer market shares, and create barriers to the entry of new competitors».
With one million customers served, BoFrost is the main Italian production company active in frozen foods, to which it now also adds fresh products, delivered to homes.
Here the attention to the quality of the products is maximum: “the standards required for all products are stringent – says the CEO Giuanluca Tesolin – from vegetables, to those coming from fishing or breeding” with certifications on cultivation methods and breeding and also on quality standards on working conditions».
But it will take time – and legislative changes – to make Bofrost products travel on electric vehicles. «The supply of vehicles is lacking – explains the CEO – but even if there were, the cost is 3, 4 times higher than a diesel-powered vehicle, and this makes the approach difficult unless, as happens in Germany , there is no intervention by the State which today covers 80% of the higher cost between a vehicle with an internal combustion engine and one with an electric motor».
Not only that, an electric van with a refrigerated cell exceeds the weight threshold expected to be driven by a person with a B license, a C license would be required. And this obviously poses other problems.
Brovedani is part of the automotive supply chain which is also experiencing an epochal transformation linked to the announced farewell to the endothermic engine.
«To which we add the problems of a reconfiguration of the supply chains following the de-globalization triggered by the pandemic – explains Sergio Barel, president and CEO of the Group -. For us who deal with precision mechanics, there is the issue of repositioning ourselves in other sectors and new businesses, something we are already doing by looking at growing sectors, such as air conditioning».
The more general context requires “the rebirth of supply chains that in the past we had delegated to others”. In a phase of profound changes, “every company will be called upon to change, orienting itself towards the product, and not just the components, learning to make alliances: a great challenge that must be taken up quickly”.
That of the USA «which believed that factories could be far away, keeping one’s head, turned out to be an illusion – concludes Barel – because sooner or later one loses one’s head. The factories and also the heads must be brought home”.
In the first part of the year, the race in energy prices pushed heating products and systems powered by energies other than gas and electricity: stoves and fireplaces. Good for Palazzetti, which has seen demand grow ((today it generates 80 million in revenues with around 260 employees).
A sector in the running, but an anomalous race “sustained by the fear of not knowing how to heat ourselves, which arrived this year with the question of energy prices – recalls Palazzetti – and which makes 1922 another anomalous year after the previous ones” . Here too, the prices of wood and pellets have skyrocketed, «we are confident that the situation will stabilize in 1923.
«We see ourselves as part of a supply chain that begins with sustainable forest management that recovers the raw material wood for a noble use, valorising its waste for energy. We are a cog – concludes Palazzetti – of a circular and sustainable economy».