During the fifth leg of the tour sponsored by ItalyPost and L’Economia del Corriere della Sera, held at the San Gaetano auditorium in Padua, Saomad was honoured as one of the 1,000 Best Performer companies in the province of Padua. Companies with excellent and balanced ratings and healthy balance sheets. Companies that grow and achieve concrete results.
On Monday, November 14 at the San Gaetano auditorium in Padua, Italy, our company was named one of 1,000 Best Performer companies in the province.
The event was one of the legs of the tour sponsored by ItalyPost and L’Economia del Corriere della Sera, with the collaboration of Banca Finint, CUOA Business School, Auxiell, Aba Babeg (government associations of Austria and Carinthia), aimed at identifying the 1,000 best companies in Italy’s main industrial provinces: Reggio Emilia, Modena, Vicenza, Padua, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Treviso, Bergamo, Bologna, Monza Brianza and Brescia.
These are a total of 10,000 Italian companies that share two basic characteristics: their balance sheets are healthy and have held up brilliantly, even in 2020. Some are “giants” but most are medium- or small-sized businesses, sometimes very small but with a strong will to grow.
The meeting began with a presentation of the project by Filiberto Zovico, founder of ItalyPost, who pointed out that although 1,000 companies might seem like a large number they actually represent only 4.2 percent of Padua’s businesses, which total about 23,000.
The study, therefore, made it possible to obtain an overall picture of the most significant portion of the entrepreneurial fabric, identifying those companies that achieve actual results.
The selection criteria
After the presentation, Caterina Della Torre, project leader of the study and an equity partner at Special Affairs, explained the stringent criteria used to conduct the selection.
The rating, i.e. creditworthiness, was considered, including only companies with excellent and balanced ratings (AAA-AA-A-BBB-BB-B), gross and net margins, positive operating result in the year 2020 (a rather stringent parameter, as closing 2020 in the positive despite Covid proved far from easy), and the average NFP to Ebitda ratio for the last three years (which indicates as a first approximation how soon the company is able to repay its financial debt)
She then presented a market analysis that showed that 85 percent of Padua’s businesses advance, grow and develop. A very good figure that comforts us seeing that the driving sector is mostly the engineering sector, namely ours.
The challenges our company is called to face
During the event various entrepreneurs were interviewed, all of whom had experienced ups and downs but showed great strength in getting back up, partly because this is how business is done: you take risks and you may or may not win but, as a Japanese proverb goes, “fall seven times, stand up eight”.We fully recognise ourselves in these professional figures.
One of the questions the interviewees were asked was “how did you positively overcome the year 2020?”. For us, 2020 was a year of instability and insecurity, during which the decline in orders was sorely felt, but from this experience we took the time to do research and develop innovation so as to come back stronger than before.
Our network of contacts allowed us to never stop, to keep moving forward with smaller but still important steps, allowing us to bring home results even in an exceptional crisissuch as the pandemic.
What will 2023 look like? For us, the watchword remains innovation. In the new year, we will present something completely new, something that our target market needs.
We have no certainty about how the markets will develop. Unfortunately, we are experiencing a period of ups and downs but we are well structured, with an organized plan that clearly indicates the goals we want to achieve.
After all, as Caterina Della Torre points out, the ability to produce value over time, even in situations of major discontinuity such as the current ones, and to achieve and maintain constant growth, are the two strategic pillars that businesses and economic policy guidelines alike must look to in order to preserve and consolidate the economic fabric of our country.
