MILAN, November 10, 2020 - Five thousand businesses. Five thousand suppliers and service providers that are doing their part to help Italy grow, from the Brenner in the Alps all the way down to Sicily.

They make up the supply chain for some of the biggest public works being developed by Webuild in the country today. Five are the projects being led by the Group: the Bicocca-Catenanuova, a section of a railway between Palermo and Catania; the Terzo Valico dei Giovi, the high-speed/high-capacity railway that will link the port of Genoa with railway networks in northern Italy and the rest of Europe; the Brenner Base Tunnel, which will connect Verona and Munich with a railway under the Alps; the M4 metro line in Milan; and the Naples-Cancello, a section of the Naples-Bari high-speed railway. These projects are receiving the expertise of precisely 4,921 businesses: 2,185 of which are suppliers and 2,736 sub-suppliers. The combined value of the contracts awarded to them is €4.4 billion, a figure that clearly demonstrates the impact that these public works have on employment, the local economy and the development of the country – even before they start offering their services to the people that will use them.

These businesses are 98% Italian – 4,847 to be exact. Thanks to their expertise, they project an image of a country where safety, investment, and sustainability feature strongly in its construction of the future.

And sustainability – or sustainable mobility – is in clear evidence in all five projects. Four of them (Bicocca-Catenanuova, Terzo Valico dei Giovi and the Brenner Base Tunnel and Naples-Cancello) will join the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), the initiative to link railways across the European Union. The fifth and last project, the M4, will connect the Linate city airport with Milan’s centre in a mere 15 minutes.

Among the thousands of businesses working on these projects can be found those that are deploying expertise and technologies that are unique in the world. There is Drafinsub, a specialist in the removal of ordnances from previous wars that are found buried on future construction sites. Fagioli deploys machinery that improves the safety of workers during the preparation and installation of spans for new bridges. On the Naples-Cancello project, Fratelli Gentile is showcasing its patented technology to collect and dispose safely waste produced on the construction site. Then there is Clivio that prepares the soil to be excavated under the Isarco River on the Italian side of the Alps where the access tunnel for the Brenner is being opened. On the Bicocca-Catenuova, there are 193 businesses the value of whose contracts total €104 million.  On the Terzo Valico dei Giovi, there are 2,314 for a total of €3.1 billion in contracts. A little more than 1,740 of these are based relatively close to the project itself in northern Italy, so the economic impact is being felt in the regions of Liguria, Piedmonte and Lombardy.

On these and the other construction sites being developed by Webuild, the best of “Made in Italy” is on display. It is at the service of a country that is entering a new season of infrastructure development. And it is being supported by Progetto Italia, a plan to consolidate the country’s construction sector by Webuild, which has taken control of Astaldi and other companies to create a group with the scale to not only help develop public works in Italy but also compete for others overseas.