Italy's Sacmi Group, which last year sold the Negri Bossi injection molding machinery business, said 2014 was one of the best years in its history, with consolidated sales “firmly above 1.2 billion euros” ($1.35 billion).
The company has major businesses in ceramics, automation and packaging. The packaging business includes compression systems for closures, compression and injection systems for PET preforms, and blow molding systems for plastic containers.
“We're convinced that manufacturing in Italy provides real value, and believe it to be both a possibility and a duty for all businesses in our country,” said Paolo Mongardi, president of Sacmi, in an announcement.
“The international economic outlook remains complex, especially in certain geographical areas,” said Mongardi. “Despite this, the [company] has achieved outstanding results in terms of both volumes and profits, improving its business and industrial position on both consolidated markets and emerging ones.”
Sacmi said it generates more than 88 percent of its sales outside Italy, but added “the group has kept its technological and manufacturing heart firmly in Italy.”
“Doing business in a globalized, highly competitive world”, said Mongardi, “has made it necessary not just to set up a far-reaching sales organization but also to establish production facilities abroad, such as the Indian plant in Sanand, inaugurated earlier this year.”
The plant, which is about 43 miles outside Ahmedabad, is a 75,000 square foot manufacturing and spare parts facility and also has 5,000 square feet of office space. It produces machines and complete plants for Sacmi's ceramics, beverage and packaging businesses. This is the first stage of development at the Sanand site, where Sacmi purchased a 13.5 acre plot of land. In the next stage, it said it will build another manufacturing plant and expand office facilities to occupy another 100,000 square feet.
Discussing its plastics-related businesses, Sacmi said: “In 2014 the closures sector focused on the development of further solutions for the manufacture of ever-thinner, higher-performing caps, while the beverage sector achieved growth, in terms of volumes, of no less than 30 percent, the result of a decisive investment policy that, in 2014, established centralized sales management and saw completion of major technological projects on injection presses.”
Last year Sacmi sold Negri Bossi to Ausable Capital Partners LLC and Kingsbury Group, an industrial machinery company in Rush, N.Y. But Mongardi pointed out that Sacmi has retained a link with Negri Bossi, for which it continues to make large-tonnage machines at its Imola, Italy, plant.
“Those who deemed the sell-off of Negri Bossi to an American firm during 2014 as an evident withdrawal from the plastic business were very much mistaken,” Sacmi said in its statement.
Pietro Cassani said: “The plastic business has not only not disappeared from the Sacmi balance sheet but has, rather, actually increased its volumes and margins considerably by focusing on production of the high-tonnage Bi-Power hydraulic presses, for which Sacmi remains the sole provider to that same Negri Bossi.”
