Italian industry will record a drop of just under 3% in 2012 and the contraction will be widespread in all sectors, with the only exceptions of pharmaceuticals and metallurgy. As for manufacturing, the producers of durable consumer goods in particular (Cars and motorcycles, Furniture, Household appliances) will suffer the most significant drops, while mechanics, chemical intermediates and electrical engineering, more competitive on foreign markets, will obtain better results.
It will be precisely this competitiveness that will sustain the results also in the medium term. Thanks to the good pace of exports, in the four-year period 2013-16 it will be possible to restart a widespread recovery process in terms of production and income: turnover will grow by almost 2% per year, facilitating the recovery of the ROI, expected to be above 6% at the end of the forecast horizon. This is what emerges from the eighty-first Report "Analysis of industrial sectors" by the Prometeia study center and Intesa San Paolo.
A newfound competitiveness
Italian industry showed gradually better performances on foreign markets. In the two-year period 2010-11, in addition to achieving growth similar to or higher than that of the main European competitors, including Germany, Italian exports showed greater resilience than in the past on their reference markets.
In recent years, newly industrialized economies have been protagonists of world trade, not only as exporters but increasingly also as importers. The weight of their demand for manufactured goods on the world total has in fact progressively increased, going from 33,5% in 2000 to 45,8% in 2010. Imports from these countries have increased for goods in all price ranges, in particular for medium-high range products, in which companies in advanced countries are specialized (Fig.2). In this context, Italian producers have been able to take up the challenge, managing to direct growing export flows towards these new high-potential markets.
The repositioning of the offer towards higher priced products, which involved almost all industrial sectors, was rewarding (Fig.3). Thanks to this process, in the past decade most of the Italian sectors have achieved, compared to other advanced competitors, an increase in shares in the new markets. Standing out, also due to the importance they have on our exports, are the fashion system, which has managed to successfully grasp the growing presence of high-income consumers in these countries, and mechanics, which have been able to increase their shares in emerging markets in all quality ranges. Good results also concerned metal products and electrical engineering, capable of entering international supply chains and participating in the infrastructural process underway in these countries.
However, there is still considerable room for improvement, especially in the more distant markets (Eastern Asia and South and Central America), where Italy's lag is more pronounced than its international competitors and growth prospects in the coming years are more substantial.
Income criticality
The lack of recovery in terms of profitability which emerges from the analysis of the 2010 financial statements and from the first estimates for 2011 is worrying: Italian industry is struggling to raise profitability from historic low levels, discounting a still largely inefficient allocation of resources and the the need to fill at least in part, even to the detriment of margins, the heavy underutilization of production plants. These weaknesses could lead to greater difficulties in finding the resources to support the development and strengthening plans and trigger new selection processes as early as this year, in a context where competition, in particular that coming from other producers Europeans, will be particularly heated.
Our comparative advantages change
In the medium-term scenario, the sectors that appear to be more capable of seizing opportunities on world markets will be able to record more significant growth in turnover and achieve a good recovery in terms of income. Thus, even in an increasingly competitive international context, the role of the foreign channel is confirmed as a catalyst for efforts to raise the quality and profitability of the offer of Italian companies, which for a decade now have been forced to focus on different strategic factors from the price to challenge global competition from more efficient producers (Germany in the lead) or with much lower production costs.
