Insight

A review and preview of the global fastener market

Named after the Roman god who is often depicted as having two faces – due to its ability to look to the future and to the past – the Janus Perspective is a unique feature that includes a wide cross section of global fastener business leaders, who have all contributed their retrospective of 2021 and thoughts on prospects and challenges for 2022.

Enrico Brigatti, chief commercial officer

What exciting times! Despite the worldwide situation, SACMA Group core values have been proven by a strong strategy to consolidate its own main philosophy: ‘Excellence in providing Winning Technologies® to our customers worldwide’.

To provide Winning Technologies^®, we had to review many features of our organisation, in every location where we want to supply our product lines. For a long time, SACMA Group sales were 80% dependent on the automotive industry. After the introduction of electrical cars in the market, we focused our strategy to approach more sectors, such as aerospace, construction, electrics, as well as general industry.

During 2021, the sale share was roughly 40% automotive and 60% other industry sectors, which is a very successful achievement for us. Along with this, as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the transportation difficulties, many countries started to relocate their production, especially with the trending topics of ‘Km0’ and a ‘low carbon footprint’.

As a consequence of this new situation, SACMA Group became very busy with an important orders portfolio for all our brands – SACMA, Ingramatic, HS Aspe and Tecno Lift. Despite the pandemic, we also introduced new branches and agencies around the world, to ensure the installation and the maintenance of our machines by local services, which are close to the customers. For instance, we created a new SACMA Machinery branch in Taiwan, where we supply many machines to this important market. We have also increased the service technicians in the USA, France, Turkey and Poland. In fact, SACMA Group has five interconnected production sites in a range of 100km within Italy, 300 employees worldwide, 5 branches with local after sales staff (USA, China, Taiwan, Germany and Brazil), 24 agencies, as well as offering 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on-site and remote services.

In addition to our worldwide organisation, SACMA Group recently made important investments in the production factories with new machining centers and Flexible Machine Systems equipped with up to date automation and Industry 4.0 features – reinforcing our competitivity and enabling us to dedicate more human resources to critical operations, such as process engineering, programming and quality control.

To date SACMA Group has been able to face the various problems coming from the disrupted supply chain, thanks to our wide parts and components stock – ensuring the delivery of new machines, spare parts and service interventions. This model has led to a large number of cold forming specialists to choose SACMA Group for their new projects.

Looking forward, 2022 starts with a great achievement for SACMA Group – the new location of HS Aspe in a brand new plant in Ciriè, close to Turin. This new factory is designed according to the SACMA concept, including design, manufacturing, assembly, as well as the testing of automatic tapping machines, combined machines, transfer and multi spindle turning machines. This new plant will allow the Hs Aspe team to increase the output of secondary operation machines and to enlarge the product line of SACMA Group.

2022 will also be marked by the start-up of the first KSP12-R, which is our brand new 1D2B combined header producing M3 to M8 screws, all in one, with integrated threading unit. SACMA will also introduce the new SP18 series, with a more efficient and ergonomic soundproof enclosure and extended capacity. Other new machines include the new combined threader RP820 – RR20 from Ingramatic, which includes a rotary thread rolling station before the flat dies threading unit – enabling it to run multishaped parts in one operation. HS Aspe will also present new tapping machines for bigger parts, such as the high productivity model T30-HC, which can work on four parts, up to M30, at the same time.

Tecno Lift will continue to provide ancillary equipment to load and unload parts for SACMA Group operating machines, as well as other machinery. Beside conveyors, the product line of Tecno Lift includes, lotifiers, bin tilting units, automatic loaders and vibrating hoppers.

In 2022 SACMA Group will also continue to focus on Industry 4.0, both internally and for its own products. It will introduce a new App, which will be available for customers who want to supervise the machines from a tablet or smartphone. This App will allow both technicians and managers to monitor every piece of data of the machines while running in production. The maintenance teams can also be informed live and it enables them to plan technical intervention.

Finally in 2022, our Group will implement a SAP system to manage and connect the headquarters with the factories and branches worldwide. This step forward is a condition to get the Group to be monitored for at least the next 20 years and it will help support steady growth, with an optimal governance, which is a key factor to challenge the macroeconomic events and the fluctuation of the markets.