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The blows of the government on the Italian bus industry of Leonardo and Invitalia

The blows of the government on the Italian bus industry of Leonardo and Invitalia

The top management of Industria Italiana Autobus has been torpedoed and continues, remaining in public hands, with the majority shareholders Leonardo and Invitalia. But the Meloni government sticks out (“It was a serious mistake to state it”) and is looking for new partners. Facts and insights

That between this government and the Italian bus industry ( here the most recent insight from Start Magazine on Iia), Leonardo's company (28.65%) and Invitalia (42.76%) in perennial crisis with the activities of the former Irisbus in Flumeri (Avellino) and the former BredaMenarinibus in Bologna, relations were not optimal, it was already understood in April, when the Minister of Enterprise and Made in Italy, Adolfo Urso (Fratelli d'Italia) ran to celebrate the inauguration of a new Iveco plant costing 20 million euros from the Pnrr. This is good news for the sector, but it clashes that the funds of the recovery and resilience plan are used by giving priority to a private plant that competes with what remains of the production of buses of Italian origin merged into Industria Italiana Autobus.

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE ITALIAN BUS INDUSTRY

And it became clear a few days later, i.e. on 24 May last year, when during a meeting between the institutions, the top management of the company, the Invitalia and Leonardo shareholders and the trade union organisations, after having illustrated the state of implementation of the industrial plan and having highlighted the operational and management difficulties despite the liquidity injections made by public shareholders, also following the 25 million euro recapitalization decided in early March , the ranks of the executive blurted out: "We are not an ATM".

THE DRIVER IS NOT GOOD FOR THE GOVERNMENT

The undersecretary in charge of business crises, Fausta Bergamotto , would have said it leaving everyone stunned, stigmatizing the current situation and the operational management of the company, asking the shareholders Invitalia and Leonardo to implement any urgent initiative to achieve the objectives set by the business plan and imposing in practice "a change of pace even in the sign of discontinuity if necessary".

A change of pace that has arrived in the last few hours, with the capitulation of the president and managing director Antonio Liguori and of the entire Board of Directors, following the approval of the financial statements. Now we will have to wait for 24 June, the date on which the next shareholders' meeting will meet and we will know, in addition to the name of the president who will take over from Liguori, also the new company organization chart.

THE STATALIZATION OF 2019

In short, there seems to be no redemption for Iia. And to think that the swerve seemed to have taken place at the beginning of 2019, with the rescue of Leonardo and Invitalia which in a nutshell had meant a capital increase of 30 million.

Invitalia took over as the new shareholder of Iia. Leonardo was already a shareholder of Iia with 11.7%, the Turks of Karsan – today at 28.59% – also with 5% since the end of 2017, when Stefano Del Rosso with the Tevere group had 83.3 per hundred. The former Finmeccanica joined Iia from its birth, at the end of 2014, when the then CEO, Mauro Moretti, sold the ailing BredaMenarinibus to Del Rosso's King Long Italia, which later became Tevere Spa.

According to Moretti, the aerospace group should have suddenly left the bus sector. This was not the case, because Moretti himself agreed to acquire up to 20% of Iia, operational since 1 January 2015, in which also ended up the Irisbus (formerly Fiat-Iveco) that the then CEO of the FCA Group Sergio Marchionne wanted to dispose of.

THE DREAM OF THE NATIONAL CHAMPION FAILED

An Alitalia on wheels: a lot of public money has arrived in recent years, burned by a company unable to recover. And now we're back to square one, as summarized by Repubblica : “There's the company, there's the market, there are the orders, but in the end the assembly lines don't leave the number of buses envisaged in the contracts. So much so that the Municipalities of Rome, Palermo and Bergamo are ready to put the Italian bus industry in formal notice. Result? […] The company should have built 151 vehicles by the end of May. Missed industrial objective, despite the fact that the financial problems have been overcome and related industries supply the factories of Flumeri, in the province of Avellino, and Bologna. However, the supply would not have been in line with production needs: which is why there are an abundance of unfinished buses, around 140. […] In 2023, 120 were produced and 70 delivered”.

URSO WANTS TO GET OFF THE BUS?

And now the backlash is awaited, which if it does not come from the new Board of Directors will probably come from Rome as Adolfo Urso , a guest of the Forum in Bruno Vespa's Masseria, hinted: "Serious mistakes were made by those who decided to entrust the group to a public consortium. A large Italian company which should be the second bus manufacturer after Iveco and which is unfortunately blocked. But we will intervene on that too ”. In short, every reference to the conduct of Giuseppe Conte 's government is wanted.

The ministry continues to look for the partner who will join Karsan's Turks: among the interested parties there would be the Campania groups Sira and Seri Industrial as well as – underlines La Verità – the Portuguese Caetano bus which focuses on hydrogen and which above all has a giant like Toyota (in December 2020, Toyota Caetano Portugal became a direct shareholder of CaetanoBus). But the feeling is that we are proceeding with flat tires and that the objective of taking what remained of Italian bus production, putting Irisbus and Menarinibus in a single package to create a new national champion, is not exactly feasible.

A true paradox considering that the State is currently as much a shareholder as it is a customer, through the Municipalities, and would in short be creating an ad hoc market for Industria Italiana Autobus, once so facilitated and not hindered by Brussels, which with the dictates on the ecological transition imposes sudden changes of means in remittances. In short, it is difficult to imagine a more favorable situation for the group in the hands of Leonardo and Invitalia.


This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/le-mazzate-del-governo-sullindustria-italiana-autobus-di-leonardo-e-invitalia/ on Tue, 13 Jun 2023 08:55:36 +0000.