Fasteners
Three questions for Mecavit
Mecavit is since 30 years a major player on the Italian industrial market of steel screws. Considering the productions of both standard and special parts made of steel, high-strength steel and stainless steel, this year the company plans to reach about 3,600 tons. During the last years the trend of the sector has led the Italian enterprise to increase the products made upon customer drawing, while maintaining a good 30-35% of unified production.
We asked Giuseppe Verdoliva, commercial director, three questions, to take the pulse of the current situation in the fasteners industry.
1. How's the market for fasteners? Can one say that the crisis is over?
Indeed we can declare that the first part of 2015 began auspiciously for the fasteners industry; the factors that have brought some vitality for Italian manufacturers seem to add up: the strengthening of the dollar against the euro has caused a sharp rise in products and import costs, which drastically reduced the convenience to import from the Far East. Asian producers, due to the increase of orders from their target markets (first of all, the US), have also lengthened the delivery times making it difficult to restore punctual assortments in European stocks. This basically covers the unified product. With regard to the production of customized, Germany has always the lion's share especially with the automotive industries, which this year have expressed interesting predictions, increasing car production and causing some turmoil in the nearby fields. Furthermore, there's also a tentative economic recovery in Europe, but these are words I should avoid using - just for superstition!
2. Who are your customers today, which fields do they mainly come from?
The evolution of the market, but also the decrease in price levels of the standard products, forced Mecavit to gradually reduce the unified production in recent years in favor of special customized products. Consequently we addressed our marketing action, technology investments, and state of the art production processes to grant us access to customers of great prestige, especially abroad. Mecavit has maintained in assortment something like 4,000 pallets of unified screws, thus the distribution of these items was not penalized at all, plus we inserted also new product families available from stock. It was an obligatory path for Mecavit to put major efforts in increasing the quality of the product offered, trying to convey the image of a reliable manufacturer - although sometimes less competitive. One of the biggest market outlets is typically found in the automotive sector.
3. What are the most popular product features at the moment?
Focusing more on special products from design, dedicated to the automotive sector, we recorded on the new projects an increasing demand for screws with higher mechanical strength, so products in classes 10.9 and 12.9, as well as an evolution on the surface treatments, which are required to be always more efficient: for the same thickness a much greater corrosion resistance, measured in terms of hours spent in the salt spray chamber, is needed. Furthermore, the demand for selected products with certificated PPM has stimulated an evolution of technologies as for what regards sorting machines; Mecavit has adopted equipment with cameras and sensors specifically designed to certify the discard of any non-conforming parts, thus adding value to their production.