Italy’s earth-moving equipment market closed 2010 in deficit with an 8.9% fall on 2009, according to figures released by Comamoter, the specialised sector under the UNACOMA umbrella grouping the manufacturers of equipment for building and civil engineering.
The figures for 2009 were just as poor, with a loss of 37% on 2008, when the loss was 22.3%. The generally poor state of the economy was the main cause, wince it has depressed construction activity and hence the related equipment sales.
In 2010, there was an 8.5% fall for traditional equipment such as bulldozers, tracked and wheeled diggers, powered levellers, and tracked and wheeled loaders. There was a fall of 6.6% for compact machines such as mini-diggers, mini-loaders and tracked mini-loaders, while the biggest loss of all, 27.6%, was suffered by backhoe loaders. Road works machines such as rollers and vibrofinishers fell by 17.7%.
“The deficit in 2010 was less than the collapse we saw in the two previous years,” commented Massimo Goldoni, UNACOMA’s president, “and this leads us to hope that it may be a signal for a progressive reversal of the trend, in small part also encouraged by scrappage incentives which saw earth moving receive 7% of the almost €80 million assigned to our machine makers in all. But the earth-moving sector remains linked to the trend in the construction industry, which is not expected to show an effective recovery before 2012.”
Source: Unacoma
