About Vainer Marchesini
In a June 2012 interview on La7's *In Onda*, Vainer Marchesini, founder and CEO of WAM, discussed the impact of a series of earthquakes on his company's operations in the Modena area. He described the disaster as "unimaginable" and noted that while the company's factories remained standing with only minor collapses, employees were unable to enter the facilities to secure them. Marchesini expressed frustration with the situation, stating that he was waiting for authorization to re-enter the buildings and criticized what he called a "suffocating bureaucracy" that he likened to the Hydra of Hercules, blocking progress.
Marchesini also reflected on the history of his company, which he said he founded with 64,000 Lire 44 years prior and grew into a global enterprise with 44 subsidiaries and 2,200 employees worldwide. He noted that the earthquake had disrupted production and corporate communications, including server failures that cut off designers from technicians. He questioned whom an entrepreneur should address in such a crisis, expressing uncertainty about where to direct his concerns.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Vainer Marchesini's recent appearances.
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Transcript (8 segments)
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Host0:00
And we are at another face-to-face. In front of us is Vainer Marchesini, who leads the Won Group, based in the low Modena area. He was just awarded a very prestigious prize: Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Innovation. This prize is the face-to-face that you will now follow. Two of the commonplaces that scholars usually have: small and medium enterprises cannot innovate and cannot internationalize. These are stories, as demonstrated by Bayern at 16.
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Vainer Marchesini0:56
But the jury captured one of the two most interesting peculiarities of this company: innovation. Innovation is a culture. We have more than 100 international patents. We have a research laboratory that is one of the first established in Italy and recognized by the ministry, and I'm talking about 1987, twenty-five years ago. Among other things, a sign of how established the culture of innovation is, is that the first department that went into operation after the earthquake was precisely the research and development and production of prototypes, as proof of how much the Brazilian donation is precisely one of the two fundamental characteristics of this company together with internationality.
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Host3:19
I would say, playing the smart aleck, you're missing Africa.
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Vainer Marchesini3:19
Africa we are not there properly? We have dissolved and we have made branches or... but it's Egypt, Morocco, a green tourism, and South Africa, but they are only commercial offices anyway.
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Host3:34
What is particular, allow me to interrupt you, what is particular is that all this articulation of global presence happens not with a large group of hundreds of thousands of employees, but a group that has 2,500 employees. So a group that is usually thought not to have the size to go into the world, but you are demonstrating that this is possible.
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Vainer Marchesini3:58
But no one in 1984 when we made the first plant in the United States, we were a hundred people, and this pertains to the scale.
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Host3:58
I ask you another question: you have just received the Entrepreneur of the Year for Innovation award, so what is the innovation that makes the mother? Everyone puts something, numbers, a thing, and this continuous progress has stages that can present themselves as innovations, so you formulate patents and patent titles, something we do not do in the state. The earthquake, we have already made four patents from May, drops in between there was the earthquake, we do not want to talk about it here, but how much does this condition your growth project that you had in mind that you still want to pursue here?
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Vainer Marchesini4:43
So this year our company is active, a small setback compared to last year. It seems that the projection is about 10% less than 2011. It is not attributable to the earthquake, but rather to a crisis that has spread from Western markets to emerging markets. The earthquake certainly blocked us for two months totally, but after two weeks there were already a hundred people, after six weeks about 80% of people were at work, after eight weeks 100% were at work. So we are absolutely recovering the lost ground, even if unfortunately some customers had to, by force of circumstances, go to supply through other other ends. You who love jokes, amidst so much turmoil, you also found time to receive a prize. It was a great pain, only the pride... I don't take the prestigious, I hope they didn't think of the earthquake but thought of the merit of the beautiful story that knows Vainer Marchesini, indeed beautiful reality.
