The biennial event that Siderweb reserves for the Italian iron and steel industry and metallurgy closed in recent days at the Milan Fair. During the three days in Milan, the Assembly of Federacciai, the association that brings together and represents the interests of the Italian steel supply chain, also took part.
In truth, the big press did not give the event the traditional information space even if the comments of those present and the strategy indicated by the president Antonio Gozzi impose a series of reflections that are certainly not marginal for a sector with a past full of successes, today condemned to face a perspective full of difficulties, threatened by massive production downsizings or, alternatively, forced to undertake demanding technological investment initiatives and corporate mergers.
Gozzi's report has raised many perplexities and created, at the same time, substantial disappointments. In fact, the cornerstones of the strategy indicated by the president rest on very fragile political supports and on very strong opposition dictated by European rules and by the equally binding rules of international competition which crosses the steel sector without borders.
Asking, as Antonio Gozzi has repeatedly repeated, public financial interventions in support of the rationalization of the Italian sector or invoking improbable and impossible energy incentives for the pre-reduction of iron ore in Italian sites, means not having the reality of the economic guidelines under control of the Governments of the Continent of the new Europe. It seems very strange that Antonio Gozzi does not know these stakes!
He should know that his urgent request for government aid will have a polite but firm "fin a non recevoir". Perhaps the objective conditions of the sector are hidden in this race for the public hand, the difficult management of production overcapacity in a tired market, the increased individuality and isolation of its protagonists which do not allow any prospect of aggregation of the country's steel production base.
Even on the complex and delicate story of Taranto, Gozzi's j'accuse should be seen as a screen to hide the identified limit of feasible proposals elaborated by Federacciai in the crisis that hit the most strategic plant for mechanics and the automotive sector of our system .
“Expropriation, injustice, a move that alarms foreign investors, an unjust receivership”. Words and judgments that irritated the representatives of the Government and the operational top management of Taranto who considered the accusations against a policy of safeguarding the Taranto plant to be superficial, forced to face the rigidity of a Judiciary deaf to every economic principle, a business legacy crumbled in managerial and financial bankruptcy, a request for production continuity that rose from the entire Italian mechanical sector and from vast sectors of the economy.
Someone in the room recalled how "noisy" the silence of today's critics had been then and the total absence of proposals received from the iron and steel entrepreneurial world. Too easy to say that what has been done now is not liked. Silence and accusations in the report that also touched on the Algerian intervention on Piombino indicated as a factor that will cause "disasters" on the energy level and on the scrap market.
Proposals, however, still vague and few: a liturgical reference to the past, the need to reconvert the product towards ever higher levels of quality, a pressing homily on the mandatory nature of alliances and mergers, things that have been felt for many years now and never followed by hard facts.
This is how the Italian iron and steel kermesse ended. Only a positive note and perhaps even auspicious for a replacement of the association's top management: Paola Artioli, from Brescia, conquers the Cavalierato del Lavoro with her work and with her commitment in ASO.
