The recession doesn't scare everyone, indeed there are those who look to 2012 with optimism and those who are achieving their best results these days. These are companies such as Datalogic (barcodes), Piquadro (stock exchanges), EidosMedia (editorial systems), gathered in Bologna by Borsa Italiana for a meeting entitled "Creating value in times of crisis: new capital and new markets", which was attended by , among others, Tamburi investment partners and Bank of China Milan Branch.
“2011 will be the best year in our history in terms of net profit and ebitda – assures Maurocchetto, CEO of Datalogic – and in the last few months we have made two acquisitions and brought the number of employees in Vietnam from 100 to 650”. For Eidosmedia, the crisis was even a panacea. “The best contracts – says the CEO Gabriella Franzini – have matured since 2009, when the economic situation put newspapers with their backs to the wall and publishers had to reorganise. Our platform has offered them a solution to contain costs and ensure that the newsrooms cover multiple channels, from print to the web".
At the basis of these enterprises there is a great intuition, the idea of an entrepreneur-researcher, but also the ability to choose a financial partner and, in some cases, the Stock Exchange at the right time.
“Staying on the Stock Exchange costs us more than 200 thousand euros a year – says Piquadro's number one Marco Palmieri – but it is absolutely worth it, because every three months it forces us to check our choices and gives us great visibility, a an important fact for a company like ours which invests a few million euros in advertising”.
Successful investors such as Tamburi (Datalogic shareholder) look with interest at realities like these, which however ask small and medium-sized Italian companies full of ambitions for an act of courage: “Give up putting your children in the company - says Alessandra Gritti, CEO of Drums – because this is the worst risk they can take”.
Talents are one of the most important resources for businesses: "and you have to find them - observes Gritti - by looking around without prejudice and without having already assigned the positions".
In this field what counts, clarifies Sachet “is to be glocal. In Vietnam we hired Vietnamese managers and this guaranteed us a selection of qualified personnel, so in a few months we reached 650 employees and things are running at full speed. It is a lesson that can be easily learned from google, which is international yet on our PC it always opens in Italian”.
The choice is practically obligatory in China, where a partner with slanted eyes is indispensable. A difficult identification for entrepreneurs who are not adequately equipped. But Bank of China can provide for this, which has opened a corporate division in Milan. "We're interested in small and medium-sized Italian enterprises - assures Lorenzo Malaterra, relationship manager of the Chinese bank - both in terms of credit and to help them understand what it means to land in China and perhaps identify the right partner".
