When in mid-February the SEB French buy Italian Saint Mark, historical leader of the coffee machines, someone will have thought it was yet another anecdotal news. However, as soon as it appeared on the agencies' web, it was immediately understood that it was not a trivial story of international shopping.
But let's start from the beginning: San Marco, a family business controlled 85% by Massimo Zanetti, one million turnover and 94 employees, located near Gorizia in the North East, a prestigious brand of professional coffee machines, brutally ends up on the SEB stock exchange, 8 billion turnover and 3.000 employees. The renewed French entry into the world of Made in Italy: it had started a few months earlier not so much because the Partnerke reinsurance company of the group Exor had been bought by the French Covea, but why the Lifebrain AG (pharmaceutical sector) had been swallowed up by the Cerba, while the cellar of the Chianti “The Olena Islands“, a lively and innovative 56-hectare Tuscan area, was captured by investor Christofer Descours' ÉPI.
Questions about the meaning of these operations will be fueled by statistics. Which certify that today France is the second foreign investor in Italy after the United States while Italy remains in fifth place in France. Between 2007 and 2020, the French paid out almost 38 billion euros to give birth and prosper to 2074 branches that employ 290.269 people in Italy, especially in the North and East and then in Lazio. It was the French Minister of the Economy who certified it. The disproportion between the two countries is accentuated if we consider only the last 5 years: 518 French investments in Italy against 318 Italians in France.
These figures are accompanied by a discovery: the French are almost exclusively interested in SMEs, small and medium-sized Italian clothing and food companies, these often family-run creative planets, decimated and weakened by the pandemic, and by the rising cost of 'energy and raw materials This is how the pandemic has prompted many producers to exit the market, or to make contact with new partners, or to cede control of their company or finally to sell it to a foreigner.
Helped by advisors and specialized operators who had sifted through the Italian productive fabric for a long time, the investors across the Alps knew this and had understood for a long time that there was little purchasable left of the large luxury conglomerates, of the universally celebrated fashion jewels, such as Gucci, Loro Piana , Bulgarians. And that those who remained were on the alert to avoid being hit by the right of veto (Golden power) that the sovereign and protectionist government of Giorgia Meloni could use after qualifying them as "strategic".
Therefore, "only" small and medium-sized enterprises remained. And this is how the authentic pioneers of innovation who populate the peninsula, eternal craftsmen of a succession of "Italian miracles", have often assumed the role of "prey". Arousing the inevitable reactivity of the circles of power, who wondered subtly if this wave of foreign investments did not hide a desire for a "predatory" dolce vita.
But a very attentive and expert observer of the Italian reality who was a minister in the Prodi government and who is currently vice president of IREFI (Institute for France-Italy economic relations), Linda Lanzillotta responds to these suspicions with great calm and wisdom. For her, French investments "are not a simple purchase operation". It is not the case, she says, to evoke any predatory logic. Because French investments in Italy have an "integration function of the two economies". Whether it is "human capital, management, research, new technologies or digitalisation", they serve to "enhance the know-how of the two countries, creating greater competitiveness on the European stage". And “they assist small and medium-sized industry on both sides of the Alps“. To conclude, Linda Lanzillotta is keen to underline it: France and Italy "resemble" each other, "with their similar growth prospects and their competitive industrial system" and this counts. A reading key that helps to understand and correctly frame what is behind the French shopping of companies in Italy.
