Emilia Romagna also stands for entrepreneurship, being characterised by a galaxy of companies that, especially in the manufacturing sector, represent Italy’s driving force. And figures confirm this: in 2022, this sector’s regional supply chains returned to pre-Covid production levels, and even improved their export performance by 3.2 % over the previous year, bringing overall growth to over 11 % compared to the pre-Covid period, according to Italian Confindustria data. To give an idea of the extent of this sector’s effort is another value, once again provided by Confindustria: last year, gross investments grew by 10.7 %. The entire sector boasts impressive figures: of the twenty supply chains making up the Emilia-Romagna territorial ecosystem, as many as seventeen belong to the manufacturing sector and contribute to an overall turnover of over seventy-five billion euros, creating more than eighteen thousand jobs.
The Confindustria analysis shows how, compared to elsewhere, doing business in Emilia Romagna means securing better results.
Suffice it to say that the average turnover of a pharmaceutical company, for example, is five times higher in the Bologna-Modena-Ferrara area than that of a similar company operating elsewhere. Driving the economy in Emilia Romagna is the agri-food sector – over ten billion euros in turnover and nearly fifteen thousand employees –
as well as the automotive sector, which ranks fifth (and has three companies in the industry top ten, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati). There is room, of course, for further growth in key sectors such as fashion and tourism, which in any case represent consolidated realities in an area that is still, and this is one of its strengths, waiting to be discovered.