Extrusion International 1-2024

14 Extrusion International 1/2024 INDUSTRY NEWS have limited relative weight in the overall equation. In light of its excellent performance in January to September 2023, Africa as a whole now boasts nearly a 6% share of the total. Sales to all coun- tries bordering on the Mediterra- nean have increased greatly, while worth mentioning are South Africa and Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa, the largest markets in that region with values that have more than doubled since last year. Beyond the import-export statis- tics, the concerns of Italian firms in the sector are focused on the pro- gressive downturn in orders in re- cent months. However, at year's end 2022, no one would have wagered on the positive results we are seeing for 2023: there were fears of a crisis of demand already in the first few months of the new year although it did not actually materialize until the second half of the year. There are a number of economic and geopolitical criticalities char- acterizing the international con- text. The post-pandemic rebound – which reaffirmed the capacity of the industry, which suffered less than its counterparts, to response positively to adversity – was fol- lowed by other negative impacts: from wars to shortages in electronic (and other) components and the volatility of raw material and ener- gy prices, from slowdowns in some global economies (such as Germany, closely linked to Italy) to increasing inflation and cost of money. While some commodity prices have re- turned to relatively acceptable lev- els, there remains an underlying un- certainty that hampers investment planning by firms, which is falling back this year and expected to come to a standstill in 2024. The CONFINDUSTRIA Statistical Unit sees Italian GDP growing by a mere 0.7% in 2023 (thanks mainly to gains in the first half of the year that then began to erode in the sec- ond), and 2024 could be even worse at +0.5%. The responses of Amaplast mem- ber companies to economic surveys covering the first three quarters of this year corroborate this climate of uncertainty, evidencing that revenues from domestic sales have contracted from one quarter to the next and at an increasing rate with each passing month. While reve- nues from sales abroad have grown, this trend showed signs of slowing down in the third quarter. The domestic market has also not been kind to these Italian manu- facturers as regards orders, which remained significantly below 2022 levels in the first three quarters of this year. Again, while the same in- dicator is positive when considering foreign customers, the trend is pro- gressively weakening. In effect, the slowdown in domes- tic demand may be considered cycli- cal to some extent, especially after the peak recorded in 2021, boosted by investment incentives. "Precisely to address the challeng- es of the markets," underscored Massimo Margaglione, Amaplast President, "it is increasingly impor- tant for companies to implement digital development plans, applying the models that will govern the fu- ture of the entire industrial machin- ery sector and revolutionize com- pany organization, products, and services." He added that "Digitali- zation is now coupled with serviti- zation, which not only favours and optimizes industrial relations – that is, the relations between technol- ogy suppliers, machinery manufac- turers, and end users – but offers benefits in terms of sustainability." Margaglione concluded by not- ing that "Another new and rapidly evolving reality, one which compa- nies are having some difficulties in embracing, precisely due to the ceaseless introduction of updates, is generative artificial intelligence, which offers application potentials that have yet to be fully grasped." AMAPLAST www.amaplast.org Top Employer in the Medium-Sized Business Sector  SIKORA is one of the top employers in the medium- sized business sector 2024 and ranks place 7 in the area Electric/Electronics, according to Focus-Business and its research partner, FactField GmbH. As part of the survey, 650,000 employee evaluations, which resulted from an online survey and existing on- line evaluations of employers, were analyzed from 36,000 companies. Companies with at least one location in Germany and a size of between 11 and 500 employ- ees that achieved at least ten company evaluations with an average rating of at least 3.5 on a scale of 1 to 5 via all data sources were taken into account. The final ranking of the companies resulted from the rating average and the number of ratings depending on the number of em- ployees. Around 4,000 employers with the best scores across all groups were included in the final ranking. SIKORA employs around 400 people in Bremen and its 13 international subsidiaries. In addition to its own com- pany restaurant and company health management with massages and yoga classes, the company offers many benefits such as flexible working hours, capital-forming benefits, individual training opportunities and regular employee events to promote exchanging and getting to know each other. At the "Creative Deck" on the top New work environments in the “Creative Deck”