Every day, we look for inspiration from the creators and captains of Italian industry, analyzing how they turn massive, structural hurdles into masterclasses in resilience.
When your daily job is building truck-mounted aerial platforms engineered to safely lift human operators 70 meters into the sky, you quickly learn that there is absolutely no room for shortcuts. You cannot cheat physics, and you cannot cheat the ledger. Navigating this roaring, high-stakes sector requires thousands of tons of high-grade steel, advanced aluminum alloys, massive amounts of energy, and an unshakeable strategy.
In ‘Challenge‘ latest episode, on Amazon Music, I sat down with Fabio Pagliero, CEO of Multitel Pagliero S.p.A., to discuss how this historic, fourth-generation family powerhouse managed to absorb the brutal macroeconomic shocks of recent years while preserving both its global market share and its human soul.
Absorbing the Shock: Client Loyalty Over Corporate Margins
The industrial manufacturing landscape has been forced to navigate a punishing gauntlet since the geopolitical crisis of 2022. The outbreak of war in Ukraine triggered an immediate, devastating shockwave through global supply chains, causing the costs of energy and foundational materials like aluminum and structural steel to skyrocket out of nowhere. For an organization like Multitel Pagliero, which was already sitting on a massive backorder book of sold machines, this presented a terrifying commercial dilemma.
Rather than taking the easy way out and retroactively raising prices on their clients to protect their corporate margins, Fabio and his leadership team made a bold, highly ethical decision: they honorably absorbed every single Euro of the price increases themselves. To survive the sudden crunch, the company executed a massive, rapid operational counter-offensive. They successfully ramped up their internal factory production by a staggering 40% in a very compressed timeframe to deliver volume, while their technical and engineering offices worked overtime to creatively re-engineer components.
Our conversation revealed just how brutal the open market became during the peak of the shortages. Essential electronic microchips that normally cost a mere five cents suddenly spiked to an insane one hundred Euros apiece on the spot market. To keep assembly lines moving, the company relied heavily on deep financial liquidity. Maintaining healthy cash reserves gave Multitel the crucial leverage needed to purchase raw materials in massive bulk quantities, stabilizing their pricing and granting the factory the operational resilience required to survive a secondary inflationary wave.
“If young people have the desire, they will go far. Desire is what truly makes the difference in the working world to succeed in emerging, to push past any obstacle. Resilience is a factor that you have inside your head.”
— Fabio Pagliero, Multitel Pagliero S.p.A.
Navigating Red Tape and the Lifespan of Italian Quality
Operating as an agile, independent champion in a global arena heavily dominated by massive multinational conglomerates requires an exceptional export playbook. Today, Multitel Pagliero exports between 65% and 70% of its entire production line. However, conquering foreign territories means constantly fighting through dense layers of international bureaucracy, complex safety regulations, and aggressive protectionist trade barriers.
Fabio shared that their export division has become incredibly sophisticated at outmaneuvering defensive local tariffs, which can soar as high as 110% in certain fiercely protected international markets. Their expansion has successfully pushed far beyond European borders into the United States, Canada, Australia, North Africa, and rapidly growing markets across Asia, including Japan, South Korea, China, and Thailand.
The primary reason global buyers choose to absorb these logistical and bureaucratic hurdles boils down to a single factor: the long-term lifecycle of Italian engineering. In the heavy machinery world, buyers look far beyond the initial purchase price. They recognize that a machine built by Multitel Pagliero is engineered to operate seamlessly over a six-to-seven-year lifespan with significantly fewer mechanical or electronic failures than cheaper, mass-produced alternatives. Over time, that built-in reliability turns an expensive piece of capital equipment into a highly profitable investment.
The Family Ethos and the Power of Precision Craftsmanship
Despite scaling up to an international operation of over 500 employees, Multitel Pagliero has fiercely protected its identity as a family-run business. For Fabio, maintaining a genuine corporate family spirit is a non-negotiable metric of success, ensuring that employees are treated as human beings rather than mere cogs in an industrial machine. This ethos is directly reflected in their progressive labor practices, including an absolute commitment to a zero gender pay gap for equal operational roles.
Today, around 34 women hold critical positions across Multitel’s technical design offices, corporate administration, shipping, and specialized industrial departments. Most notably, the company’s ultra-delicate carpentry sanding and finishing department—the final quality gate before components receive their industrial coatings—is staffed exclusively by women. The company has found that women bring an exceptional level of tactile sensitivity, meticulous patience, and focus that this highly precise phase of heavy manufacturing demands, consistently outperforming their male counterparts.
The Ultimate Engine: Cultivating Hunger and Desire
As we reached the end of our conversation, accompanied by the powerful, symphonic notes of Queen’s iconic Bohemian Rhapsody—a track that defied every standard radio convention to achieve immortality—Fabio left our listeners with a beautiful piece of advice for the next generation of industrial leaders and young entrepreneurs.
Reflecting on what it truly takes to survive inside a ruthless, shifting marketplace, Fabio pointed directly to a single human trait: desire (la voglia di fare). He reminded us that technical skills, university degrees, and corporate strategies are entirely hollow without a burning internal drive to build, experiment, and execute. In an era where many crave immediate comfort or expect to command an office from day one, true industrial resilience belongs to those who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Capital and technology are just tools; it is the raw hunger to overcome obstacles and turn a grand dream into physical reality that keeps an enterprise moving upward.
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