Loads don’t come any bigger than this: super-heavy presses, difficult to lift, the on-road transport of which is anything but easy and can be something of a nightmare where customers are located a long way from a properly equipped port. Italiansped resolves all these problems, and more: founded in 1970 and now owned by Sacmi Imola, it organises transport and shipment across four continents and ensures that ceramic-making machinery gets from the makers to the customers as efficiently and safely as possible.
Port of Ravenna, 10th May 2007, the shipping date for the last major load to be managed by Italiansped. Two 200-ton cranes loaded 13 presses and other machines onto a ship - an entire portion of which had been hired by Italiansped - headed for Brazil. The first port of call was Fortaleza, in the north of the country, on 27th May and the last is scheduled for 10th June in Navegantes, close to the border with Uruguay. An important feature of this delivery was the possibility of being able to proceed autonomously with loading/unloading thanks to the cutting edge equipment on the ship, thus allowing us to reach – almost as if it were a normal scheduled service – the port closest to the customer.
One of Italiansped’s key features is its ability to maintain a “panorama” of the machine market in a certain geographical area, thus allowing the achievement of ‘economies of scale’, commercial synergies – limited, of course, to the transport stage – between companies that are actually in competition with each other. The year 2008 has so far seen a strong recovery of the Brazilian market vis-à-vis the purchasing of ceramic-making machines and Italiansped is, in fact, perfectly positioned to come up with - once quantity, type of delivery and customer location have all been analysed - transport plans that involves boarding the machines on dedicated “self-lifting” ships: the best way of reducing the costs of massive loads.
This solution, put forward by Italiansped last March on the occasion of Revestir – the most important South American wall tile fair – was warmly welcomed by Brazilian customers, who will gain consistent economic advantages from this arrangement. Italiansped is able to offer such a guarantee thanks to extensive in-the-field experience from similar shipments previously made to Mexico, Egypt, India and the Far East. A similar project aimed at the North African coast is currently being assessed and will become operative in a matter of weeks.