Squinzi: “Italy help us!”

Giorgio Squinzi speaks off the cuff. Malpensafiere crowded audience is not offended. “I haven’t thought about standard speeches for meetings”, says Confindustria new chairman, with a tentative tone. Mister Mapei has an anchor and it is a message for the Monti Cabinet: “We are ready to go all out, but we need that the country helps us.”

He repeats it at least four times, after having mentioned the points already discussed during last week handover with Emma Marcegaglia. Squinzi lists Italian urgencies: public administration expenses and reduce the late payments by the State cuts (“disgraceful situation”), consumer products revitalisation (“I work with chemical products for construction and I can witness to the fact that the division was cut about 25% and that many companies are likely to fail”), more credit to enterprises, because the Country expands, if we create employment.”

Squinzi also thinks about the north of Italy, which is not different from the south, but the way to give an answer to both of them is not the secession, it is Europe. Confindustria chairman says: “I’m an earnest supporter of Europeanism and I believe our future is towards United States of Europe, even keeping autonomy, as it happens in the USA. We can’t maintain the Euro, if we don’t have the possibility to share welfare, fiscal and energy systems and also a central bank.”

Words expressed in Malpensafiere have a distant echo: research, innovation, internationalisation and competitiveness. Squinzi adds one more word: “modernisation”, which has to look at enterprises and at all systems. Univa chairman Marino Vago’s praise seems an assistant to the masters of the house. Actually, Squinzi already believed in the reform submitted by Vago some years ago and that then was shelved. He believed in it also when he was not “viale Dell’Astronomia” (Confindustria site) number one. “I’d really like to start from his proposals in order to reshape future Confindustria.”

Corporate increase is one of the torments of an entrepreneurial activity that has its perfect dimension in small and medium enterprises, at least until globalisation entered without asking permission. Enterprise systems are the perfect tool to get it. Indeed, industrialists’ chairman announces the birth of at least two thousand system agreements. It is an ambitious aim, considering that up to now system contracts have been little more than 300. 

Expo 2015 will have direct effects on the province of Varese and on the rest of Italy. Squinzi finishes: “People who have already joined us, will appreciate our country attractiveness.” This is the reason why we do not have to disregard the digital agenda: without the tools, Italian entrepreneurs cannot do anything.