BTicino will also produce in India

At midday, in Varese’s BTicino, the siren rings. “It’s still a factory”, an executive points out. As the workers go to the canteen, the top management of the multinational, which belongs to the French group Legrand, inaugurate the new technical training centre “BTicino Innotech”: three avant-garde didactic rooms where to study the theory and the practice, with a look at what it is done in the world, as far as the sector of switches and boards is concerned. This is a 850sq.m area with 24 workspaces, 20 wiring spaces and a lecture room that holds 50 people. All of it  built without changing radically the old industrial architecture of the 60’s wanted by the founder Luigino Bassani.

“We’re in a phase of deep renewal of a high-tech product supply,” explains Paolo Perino, BTicino’s managing director and chief executive, “and we’re widening our trade offer. The new training centre is also a way to make us know.” Despite the crisis BTicino faced, by investing in research and development, the firm of viale Borri, acquired another company in Reggio Emilia, Metasystem. It is not a giant, but a small company specialised in the production of UPS for photovoltaic, with 50 operators, a 16 million euros turnover and a series of interesting patents. Those are all positive signs and encouraging clues, but they do not represent the overcoming of the great crisis yet. “There has been a slight increase,” Perino goes on, “but maybe, we’re dealing more with a rebound due to the huge growth of photovoltaic which is now questioned because of the stop to the incentives, than with a restart. Our export share is still 40 per cent, which is pretty high, but the real problem is represented by the different speeds of growth between the old markets and those of the emerging countries like India, Brazil and China. We control this differential, anyway.”

For BTicino “to control” does not necessarily mean exporting products to emerging countries, since the amounts are what they are. “We export know-how, besides we invest 7% of the turnover in R&D”, the managing director ends. “For example, we have new products conceived in our Bergamo branch that we could manufacture in India. This way, it is possible to attack those markets competitively, by keeping the head of the company here. The products made in BTicino are already world-wide.”