The Hinge Division of Sabaf Group is scoring a double-digit growth. Due to its products, services and strategies, it can satisfy customers’ requirements with promptness and reliability.
Protagonist of a double-digit growth, the Hinge Division of Sabaf Group goes on attaining outstanding business results. As proven by numbers, with their usual clarity and objective evidence. The Hinge Division groups all companies of Sabaf Group, as well as the manufacturing locations that directly or indirectly take part in the hinge world: CMI Italia (Valsamoggia – BO) and Faringosi (Bareggio – MI), whose mission is the design and assembling of hinges; CGD (Valsamoggia – BO), operating in the sheet metal forming and in design/production of moulds; CMI srl SP.Z.O.O. (Myszkow – PL) and SABAF Turkey (Manisa – TK), they too expert in hinge assembly.
«In the first six months of the year, as confirmation of what surveyed in the Q4/20 and in 2021, the Hinge Division of Sabaf Group has achieved a decidedly noteworthy growth in its balance sheet: +42%compared to the first 2021-semester», comments Paolo Santini, General Manager and Managing Director of CMI. «Growth due to three primary factors: consolidation of new projects started in 2021; price effect due to the price list adaptation to market conditions (raw materials and energy); demand increase by some primary customers».
In the light of its soundness, the growth of Sabaf Group’s Hinge Division is far from fearing the current criticalities and tensions of international markets. «Worth highlighting that at the horizon we start perceiving a slight shrinkage of the household appliance demand, in some ways connected with the shortage of electronic components on the market, but the forecasts at the yearend are still anyway positive versus the budget, and steeply rising in comparison with 2021», Santini confirms.
A market in evolution
Concerning this, new trends and requirements by customers have already emerged, and for the Hinge Division of Sabaf Group they simultaneously represent demands to be met promptly as well as further business opportunities to be cultivated. «It is necessary to make a distinction between cooking and washing world», Santini explains. «Concerning cooking, the new frontier is the motorized hinge, able to open and to close the door automatically and with all inherent safety devices. About this issue, Faringosi has developed solutions for application both inside the oven and inside the door. Solutions already industrialized and presented to primary sector players».
New orientations are peeping in the washing world, too. «Here, and more specifically in dishwashers, the trend is to succeed in granting the perfect door balancing with panels, even if of bigger weight, without the need of the installer’s adjustments», Santini adds. «Concerning this matter, CMI is developing innovative solutions able to satisfy such need».
In addition to those under development, Sabaf Group’s Hinge Division has recently presented different new products. Santini highlights «the motorized hinge for oven doors; the hinges for dishwasher doors with possibility of activating a supplementary braking system that can increase the balancing range; in industrialization phase, the compact hinge for large-size refrigerators; soft open and dual soft (open and close) for ovens».
The most demanded products and services
Among the several products currently proposed by Sabaf Group’s Hinge Division, some in particular stand out for their capability of attracting customers’ attention and interest. Santini reminds «the hinges for dishwashers with self-balancing system and automated opening, then able to grant the balancing of doors with different weights, in a range of 6/7 kg, without having to carry out any adjustment, and with integrated function that allows the door to open at the washing cycle end, to permit a perfect dish drying».
In the cooking world as well, a product seems to beat the others and to conquer the highest step of the podium. «Certainly, the hinges with soft close and those with dual soft (with cushioned opening and closing)», Santini adds.
However, not only products: the Hinge Division of Sabaf Group supports customers also in terms of services. «Currently, manufacturing hinges does not mean any longer just assembling a product», Santini underlines. «For different years, in fact, we have been called to support our customers in the design of new ideas for new products or of additional solutions on mass-produced products. Moreover, the logistic support is very important: with actually just in time productions and deliveries (warehouse stocks no longer exist at our customers’) or with consignment stock logics for customers overseas».
Materials and energy: two challenges won
In the last period, Sabaf Group’s Hinge Division has successfully faced the challenges connected with the provisioning of materials, today issue of primary importance indeed. «We lived some complex times in the first 2021-semester for the provisioning of some raw materials, in the foreseen times», admits Santini, who however adds: «A careful preventive provisioning planning, and relying on the major national and international steel suppliers as partners, has certainly allowed us to face criticalities without creating any problem to our customers. Today the situation is much better. Unfortunately, the price stress remains very high». Concerning prices, Sabaf Group’s Hinge Division has worked to stem the phenomenon of expensive energy. «The hinge world has suffered, and still perceives the impact, of the expensive energy», Santini argues. Nevertheless, the Hinge Division has been notably committed to deal with such challenging scenario, too. «We have worked to negotiate and to establish some rates in competitive manner, exploiting the size of the Division and of the Group; at CMI, already for several years, a photovoltaic plant has been in operation and it allows satisfying about 20/25% of the requirements and, due to the new technologies in the photovoltaic panel sector (with unit yield capacity exceeding the one achieved in 2008, installation year of the plant), we are thinking of replacing the existing ones, to double the total production (from 160 to 320 KW/H)».
A sustainable company
The expensive energy matter, urging the Hinge Division to make costs more efficient, represents a precious access door to the sustainability matter, today more and more central and irremissible in business activities. «Sabaf Group has introduced into the 2021 – 2023 industrial plan a series of indicators connected with sustainability and safety, as demonstration of how much the Group, and consequently all companies that make up the Hinge Division, consider such themes central and essential», Santini confirms. «In the specific, there are various open projects to improve sustainability indicators (available in the Group’s Annual Report) and to make Sabaf Group’s activities more and more sustainable, as demanded by our primary customers, too».
In virtue of what told, Hinge Division’ s business targets for the last part of the year are reasonably ambitious: «Consolidating the business and organizational growth; accomplishing some important projects at which we are working with present customers; participating in new projects with new customers to enlarge the business; exceeding the threshold of 100 Mil/€ of turnover, by means of both organic growth and takeovers», Santini ends.
