Major Italian film maker to slash workforce

Nuova Pansac, headquartered in Mantua, northern Italy, and with factories in Marghera, Mira, Portogruaro, Ravenna and Zingonia, appears to have been hard hit by a combination of the global economic crisis and some poor decisions at board level. It says job cuts will see its Portogruaro and Ravenna plants close completely, while the 484-strong workforce in Mira will be cut to 269, and at Marghera 23 of 69 jobs will go.

The plant in Mira was opened as recently as 2004, to satisfy global demand for breathable film, bucking a trend that saw many film makers ship out of Western Europe for lower-cost countries.

The effect of the cuts will be to almost halve production capacity, which is currently understood to be over 130,000 tonnes/yr. Turnover at its height reached somewhere near €275m.

According to the company’s managing director Fabio Gandolfi, the redundancies are the only way out of the crisis for the company, which has debts understood to be around €180m. Local media report him saying that Nuova Pansac is paying the price of high levels of investment, poor cost control and expenditure of resources on non-strategic activities. The company’s president, Fabrizio Lori, is also chairman of second division football club Mantova.

Until quite recently, Lori was considered to be one of Italy’s most innovative young businessmen. He inherited the company from his father in 1993, when he was just 24, and transformed it from an also-ran company making general purpose packaging film into one concentrating on high added-value films, many based on its own patents. The company numbers Kimberly Clark and Procter & Gamble among its customers.

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