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Supporting a resilient company
sme stories
Imagine the Pyramid of Cheops and having to move it elsewhere, disassembled into millions of bricks: well, it would only take 50 days to move from Giza the 2.5 million cubic metres of material. This is possible by using the conveyor belt designed in Limena by the Bedeschi engineers, under the direction of Rino Bedeschi, CEO of the company, the fourth generation of the ultra-secular family ownership of this secluded jewel of Italian technology. There are 270 first-class human resources producing and selling all over the world. "Today, we place ourselves in the top tier of potential suppliers of anyone in the world," says Rino Bedeschi, "because we are more than global, we are multi-local, meaning that wherever we operate, we do it with the approach of a local operator. From Hong Kong to Florida to the Emirates. But it is clear that all the noble part of our projects, the engineering, is originated here in Limena. It is made in Italy. Today Bedeschi has 3 main lines of development. The strongest one is material handling, which includes handling with conveyor belts, park and retrieval of bulk materials of various types. Here, the search for solutions with a low ecological impact plays an important role. A second line is taken up by the sector where it all began, in 1908, from an idea of Rino's great-grandfather, i.e. the production of equipment and complete plants for the manufacture of roofing tiles and bricks, both traditional and decorative. Finally, there are the mega cranes, which cover all container handling needs: the loading and unloading of ships, and the handling and storage within the terminal.
"It's an industry where there is some patenting but what makes the difference is the engineering." Bedeschi is a kind of tailor's shop for industrial titans where steel is worked, inside an atelier made up of computers and young technicians who design everything in three-dimensional 'cad', producing truer-than-true renderings that make you see years in advance, and tens of thousands of kilometres away, what will happen in space and time tomorrow. "The key to success always remains the same, to be very diversified in different sectors and markets." On the operational side, the company mantra aims at continuous efficiency: “The secret lies in creating a virtuous circle between those who design, assemble and produce to make new machines better and better.” What will Bedeschi be like in 10 years' time? "Oriented even more towards sustainability in the production processes and in the output of our machines." And then it will look towards further commercial expansion: "For us it is essential to be everywhere, and to have eyes and ears everywhere. I'm not saying we will grow by much, but we will consolidate a lot from what we are doing. If then, as we all hope, world geopolitics will normalize, everything will be better!"
In this effort of presence, conception, and permanent redevelopment, Bedeschi found itself at the side of illimity, which in 2020, in the midst of Covid, provided an initial loan, which was then renegotiated last June, “with admirable speed,” Stefano Peracin, CFO of Bedeschi remarks: “Those funds, of course, were partly aimed at mitigating the impact of Covid and partly at supporting growth anyway. Subsequently, the financing was supplemented with factoring lines to support working capital... and reverse factoring on suppliers”. With speed and simplicity, as was once the case in many banks, today in few.
