Days of Clarity

November 4, 2005

Attending the Marmomacc stone trade fair in nearby Verona usually means several days of the familiar haze, with a thin humid film overhead dulling the sunlight and the horizon. It’s a regular condition here in northern Italy and it invariably remains until I drive away and up the Brenner Pass on the way home.
Not on this day, though. From the hotel-room window, I could see long stretches of farms and vineyards, along with the surrounding mountains. In the distance, the outline of the TV antenna that towers over the VeronaFiere – the home of Marmomacc – even came into view.
This would be the perfect place to compare that bright morning with the dawn of a new day in the stone industry, or some other peppy sleight-of-word. I’d also be fooling myself, along with you in the bargain. The 2005 Marmomacc won’t be known as the show of some kind of revolution in the stone trade.
The clear skies did bring some parts of the event – and the industry – into better focus. Maybe the sunny Italian day cast a different light on the show, and what it can tell us about stone in the next few years.
On the surface, Marmomacc is always going to be deceiving because it’s just big. The enormous square footage can be mind- (and feet-) numbing as you walk in building after building of equipment, tooling and stone. It looks overwhelming and could convince anyone that the stone industry is unstoppable.
After a few years under the belt, though, Marmomacc begins to look a bit different. The event’s still huge, but you begin noticing the same companies in exactly the same places as the year before. The repeat locations not only make the event less intimidating; it’s also easier to gauge what’s changing by the types of goods exhibited.
If anything, Marmomacc 2005 reaffirms that CNC is the growing technology. Bridge saws and edgers (along with the occasional gang saw) dominate several halls, but CNCs remain the stars of any display area.
And, it’s not just CNCs as a standalone device, either. At least three companies – CMS S.p.A., Löffler Maschinenbau GmbH and Thibaut S.A. – plan to integrate the machines in a slab-to-countertop production line with saws and other equipment.
The concept got plenty of first-hand attention from roving groups of folks from the United States, who also took a good look at everything else at Marmomacc. The U.S. contingent is always a minority at a show where Italians make up more than 60 percent of the 62,000+ attendees, but something happened this year: You could see the Americans.
Nobody wandered around in packs led by bearers of the Stars and Stripes, but you could regularly pick U.S.-based attendees out of the crowd in nearly every part of the event. They weren’t the usual faces of suppliers and distributors, either; several fabricators showed up to take in the industry offerings straight from the main source.
One indication that there’s going to be more to see at Marmomacc 2006 provided plenty of noise and dust that didn’t come from any stone machinery. During this year’s show, workers diligently erected the walls on a new hall that will expand VeronaFiere’s permanent exhibit space.
Marmomacc isn’t the only big show that comes to Verona; the facility also hosts, among other events, the large Vinitaly wine and spirits show. Another hall shouldn’t be hard to fill for Marmomacc, however, as some machinery and stone suppliers still can’t find permanent exhibition space in the existing nine pavilions.
And then there’s Pavilion 10, a large temporary structure that made its debut two years ago. Since then, it’s increased in size every year, and it’s not surprising given the home country of all of its exhibitors: China.
Feelings about China’s influence in the European market aren’t exactly cordial. A recent dispute concerning textile imports led one of Italy’s TV satire series, the Le Iene (The Hyenas) Show, to broadcast a gauche “against the Chinese danger” segment (ironically during the week of Marmomacc) that would’ve brought a howl of protests in the United States.
Nobody seemed to protest the Chinese presence at Marmomacc this year, given the action seen in Pavillion 10. If anything, the area seemed busier than any other part of the event, in a hot, noisy hurly-burly of crowded aisles and plenty of multilingual deal-making.
Given the expanded influence of China earlier this year at Stone+tec in Germany and Coverings in Orlando, it’s a cinch that the inhabitants of Pavilion 10 will move into the new exhibit hall in Verona with an even larger share of fellow vendors. Nothing – even the barbs of Italian TV – will stop the increase in China’s market share.
When I packed up a few days later to head over the Brenner Pass to Austria, Germany and a flight back home, a hazy soup began to drop again over Verona. The picture of a strong, growing, multinational stone industry, however, remained crystal clear.