The CEO of Fincantieri, Giuseppe Bono, has been looking for it for some time: the joint venture between the Italian naval group and the French Naval is finally official, born with the aim of building military vessels and strengthening European competitiveness in the face of the rise of emerging countries and China. The agreement was signed on board the frigate "Federico Martinengo", moored at the La Spezia Navy Arsenal, while the headquarters of the new company, whose constitution idea was launched on the occasion of the Franco-Italian summit in Lyon in 2017, it will be Genoa, with a subsidiary in France, in Ollioules.
For the first three-year term, Fincantieri will express the president (who will be Giuseppe Bono) and the Chief Operational Officer, while Naval Group the CEO (who will be the CEO of Naval Hervé Guillou) and the Chief Financial Officer. “This is the culmination of a shared industrial ambition, which is the long-term positioning of the European shipbuilding industry in an international market that has undergone a profound transformation,” said Hervé Guillou, Chief Executive Officer of Naval Group.
“We demonstrate great satisfaction with the result achieved and, above all, we would like to thank our Governments who have worked side by side with us in recent months, and continue to do so, to finalize an agreement that will ensure the protection of sovereign assets, promoting collaboration between the two teams. This commitment will allow us to better support our Navies, provide adequate support to joint export operations and concretely lay the foundations for the consolidation of the European defense industry,” added Bono in a joint statement.
The Airbus of the sea is therefore increasingly taking shape, as the Italian manager has always defined it. The Italian-French joint venture, which in this case succeeded without hitches and interference, already has a rich opportunity on the table: both Fincantieri and Naval are racing, until now separately, to a 1,6 billion tender launched by the Romanian Navy, for the construction of four new corvettes and the modernization of two frigates. "We'll team up and try to converge even where we're racing separately," Giuseppe Bono hinted.
