September 27, 2016
Webuild celebrates 110 years of history
PRESS NOTE
SALINI IMPREGILO CELEBRATES 110 YEARS OF HISTORY
PIETRO SALINI: “READY START IMMEDIATELY ON THE STRAIT BRIDGE PROJECT”
Milan, 27 September 2016 - On occasion of the 110th anniversary of Salini Impregilo, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi set a challenge for Group Chief Executive Pietro Salini concerning the project to build a bridge over the Strait of Messina.
“We have to bring Sicily closer by creating 100,000 jobs,” Renzi said in a speech at the inaugural event at the Triennale di Milano museum. “If you are in condition to show us that your papers are in order and can unblock what has been halted for 10 years, we’re behind you.”
Salini accepted the challenge at the event “Present and Future of Infrastructure”, which was attended by U.S. Ambassador John Phillips, Lombardy Governor Roberto Maroni and Jeffry Frieden, professor at the Department of Government at Harvard University.
“The negative stories about Italy’s lack of competitiveness are proven wrong by the men and women of business and engineering,” Renzi said.
Renzi then lauded the Italian companies that had ventured abroad.
“Long live the companies that risk and give it all they’ve got and are not satisfied with simply looking at the past. Recovering the ability to dream is very much tied to engineering and planning. In Italy, planning for the future has been missing for years.
“During the crisis we lost 927,000 jobs in construction, more than half of that in civil buildings. We have to start again as much with small projects as we do with big ones,” he added.
“That is what I am talking about when I talk of dreams and the horizon,” Renzi concluded. “The stories of companies that believed in the future and built this country make us proud - but that is not enough. It is nice to look at the past but it is even better to look towards the future.”
In his reply, Salini spoke of the need to plan for the future and set in motion measures to help the country grow.
“We can no longer wait,” he said. “We are in a country that lives in a globalised world. We cannot always say no – to the Olympics, the country, the future, children… because we will reap tomorrow what we sow today. We cannot rob our children of the future.
“Infrastructure is not beautiful in itself,” he continued. “But it serves to fill a need, to help imagine a future for a country. This means that it is necessary to plan for infrastructure. I would like to see this happen in our country - a plan that foresees the generation of the future will do.”
Attending the event were many representatives of Italy’s public and private sectors, including Renato Mazzoncini of Ferrovie dello Stato, Gianni Vittorio Armani of Anas, Claudio Costamagna of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, Fabrizio Palenzona of UniCredit, Alberto Nagel of Mediobanca, Mauro Moretti of Leonardo, Urbano Cairo of RCS MediaGroup, Gaetano Miccichè of Intesa Sanpaolo, Luigi Abete of BNL, Diego Della Valle of Tod’s, Marco Tronchetti Provera of Pirelli and Giorgio Squinzi of Mapei.
The event also saw the inauguration of the multimedia exhibition “Beyond – Delivering the Future for the Past 100 Years” which opened to the public at 1800 in the presence of Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala and will run until November 6.
Sala received a new stamp commemorating Salini Impregilo’s anniversary by Poste Italiane, the “110 Years of Future” book published by Rizzoli and a video documentary on the history of the Group.
EXHIBITION
“Beyond: Delivering the Future for the Past 110 Years” celebrates the role of large, complex infrastructure in the world by offering an immersive multimedia journey, an engrossing experience that presents the beauty and functionality of these public works. It takes visitors to the new Panama Canal; to dams and hydroelectric plants that produce clean energy instead of big nuclear plants, like those in China, Ethiopia, Argentina and Colombia; the roads and bridges that are the backbone of vast countries such as the Unites States; the railways that transport cargo; the metros that move people in cities like Paris, New York and Riyadh; and iconic buildings that replicate nature's beauty such as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens; the Auditorium of Rome and the Grand Mosque of Abu Dhabi.
It is a journey through eight zones, each of them telling the story of iconic public works.
THE GROUP IN NUMBERS
Salini Impregilo is present in 50 countries with 35,000 employees of 100 nationalities. The Group is expected to reach €6.1 billion in revenues in 2016 and arrive at €9 billion in 2019 under a new industrial plan. Its Construction Backlog is expected to reach €39 billion by 2019.
SALINI IMPREGILO IN THE WORLD
From 1906 to the present day, Salini Impregilo has completed about 2,000 projects on five continents. Of these, 1,017 in Europe, 412 in Africa, 222 in North America, 213 in South America, 66 in Asia and Oceania and 54 in the Middle East.
The Group ranks first in the water segment and is one of the leaders in the construction of large, complex infrastructure as a whole. It has done 257 dams and electric plants; 7,230 kilometres of railway and metro lines; 1,450 kilometres of tunnels and 350 kilometres of bridges and viaducts.
COMPLETED WORKS IN 2016
This year the Group has delivered some of the most significant public works in the world, such as the Panama Canal (for further details, go to ), the Gibe III dam in Ethiopia () and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens ( ).
FUTURE PROJECTS
By July 2016, Salini Impregilo had won €6.8 billion in new orders. Among these are the Koysha Dam in Ethiopia worth €2.5 billlion; the light transit rail in Perth, Australia for €792 and in Maryland for €543 million, as well as the Rogun dam in Tajikistan whose first lot is worth $1.7 billion.
HISTORY OF THE GROUP
In 1906, Vincenzo Lodigiani in Milan and Umberto Girola in Piacenza founded their respective companies, building projects close to home. Thirty years later in 1936, Pietro Salini began his own business.
It is a story of more than a century of families and infrastructure that have contributed to the development of countries throughout the world, families whose companies would eventually merge to create the Salini Impregilo Group.
WHY PUBLIC WORKS
The International Monetary Fund estimates that every dollar spent on infrastructure generates three in direct output. So its impact is decisive.
As shown by the projects built by Salini Impregilo, they are investments that help improve people’s lives.
The Gibe III dam, opened this year in Ethiopia, has increased the amount of energy produced in the country by 85%.
The new Panama Canal opened in June 26, giving a boost to maritime trade and increasing income for the Central American country from $2.5 billion to up to $6 billion a year.
Once completed, the Rogun dam in Tajikistan will allow for the doubling of energy production in the country.