18.01.2012

CTE restructures production

Italian based truck mounted and spider lift manufacturer CTE is having a tough week as it moves to restructure its operations in the face of a slow domestic market.

The week began with a strike at its Bertinoro plant (ex Bizzochi) were it is laying off 23 employees with more to follow, following the transfer of some production to its Rivoli facility. The disruption then moved to its Rovereto facility, which in future will only include the headquarters operations, distribution and product support business.

The company is rationalising all of its production between two plants, the Sequani Meccanica plant in Rivoli, which currently produces its Traccess spider lifts and Zed model articulated truck mounts, and which will now build all of the company’s smaller truck mounted units – including the small telescopics currently built in Bertinoro.

Bertinoro will in future focus on the production of the companies larger truck mounted lifts, custom products and fire fighting platforms.
President Lorenzo Cipriani said: "These changes are painful, but we had no choice. In 2008 we had €150 million of revenues, which fell to €90 million in 2010 and has now stabilised at those levels. After maintaining employment levels for three years, we had to move to a conservative plan in order to be more efficient and therefor competitive”

Speaking to the local press in Rovereto he added: "We will keep the headquarters - the brain of the company - here and focus our efforts on the distribution side of the business from here, including after-sales support. We believe that the market will come back and that we have a strong position, our products are well placed and reliable and around 85 percent of our production is now exported. Our problem is that the Italian market has all but stopped. As to the layoffs we have made no decisions yet about who will go and we plan to work with the unions on this matter.”

The company has said that it will issue an official release and update us later this week.

Vertikal Comment

The changes and the resulting ‘noise’ surrounding the announcement has kicked off a flurry of rumours and predictions of the company’s demise, largely from competitors enjoying a little wishful thinking.

The fact is that after CTE acquired Bizzocchi and Effer in 2006 it chose to maintain the operations pretty much as they were, focusing instead on improving efficiencies in each and on new product development and branding. The move to consolidate all small truck mounted lift production in a single plant makes eminent sense, with standard higher volume products
in one and larger more customised production in the other.

CTE was hit by the slowdown in 2009 as were most companies in the sector, but the timing of its acquisition spree just a couple of years before the crisis hit, added extra financial pressure, which it took steps to deal with. The company has some excellent products and a strong brand name and should benefit from the improving situation now coming through in many of its export markets.