Maccaferri

Maccaferri

Type	Private
Industry	Civil Engineering
Founded	1879
Headquarters	Zola Predosa (BO), Italy
Key people	Alessandro Maccaferri (Chairman), Luigi Penzo (Vice-Chairman), Andrea Marazzi (CEO)
Revenue	€503 million (2015)
Number of employees	~2.834(As of 2015[update])
Website	www.maccaferri.com

Officine Maccaferri SpA (Maccaferri) is an Italian, family-owned multinational company. The company is specialised in products and solutions for the construction industry. It is 100% owned by the Maccaferri family and has headquarters in Zola Predosa, Bologna, Italy. Maccaferri’s solutions are used for: retaining structures, soil reinforcement, embankment stabilisation, river and canal hydraulic works, coastal protection, erosion control, rockfall mitigation, debris flows and avalanche protection. The company provides technical support to designers, contractors and end-users. The 2015 consolidated revenues of Maccaferri were €503M.

Maccaferri is a global company with more than 70 subsidiaries, 32 production facilities and nearly 3000 employees.

Maccaferri operates 11 production facilities in ASIAPAC (including China, India, Malaysia and the Philippines), 10 in EMEA (including in Italy, Slovakia, UK, Turkey, Albania and South Africa), 3 in NAFTA (USA and Mexico) and 6 in LATAM (including Brazil, Costa Rica, Peru and Bolivia).

The company name can be traced back to the 16th century (the name Maccaferri is a literal translation of ‘he who strikes iron’), when Giovanni (Johannes) “Maccaferri” was registered with the blacksmiths guild. However, to join the guild a person had to be 20 years old. As Johannes was only 14 at the time, the Bologna Senate granted a dispensation and approved his membership on 28 June 1550.

Over 300 years later, on the 3rd May 1879, the Chamber of Commerce in Zola Predosa, Italy, recorded the registration of the workshop (“Officina”) of a certain Raffaele Maccaferri, head of the Maccaferri family at the time. This was based in Gesso, near Lavino.

As a blacksmith, the company of Raffaele Maccaferri manufactured items such as gates, fences, columns, staircases and railings used in the churches, houses and businesses in the Bologna area. Of the two sons of Raffaele, the eldest, Angelo, guided the commercial growth of the business, whilst Luigi was the industrial specialist. He expanded the capacity and introduced technology for wire-drawing into the factory. Soon afterwards the “gabion” was re-invented using wire mesh (gabions had been in existence for millennia prior to this, but had been constructed from natural materials).