A little more than a month after the exhibitions closed: already looking with confidence to the next appointment 22-25 February 2017-SAMOTER AND 2014 ASPHALTICA, GREEN LIGHT FROM EXHIBITORS-Initial signs of recovery in the sector also in Italy

Verona 17th June 2014.  High quality visitors; those who didn't attend the show missed a vital opportunity; signs of recovery, even in Italy. At just over one month from the end of Samoter and Asphaltica, exhibiting companies have drawn up their initial conclusions for attendance at an edition that was certainly unusual for many different reasons.

"Our impressions after the event are positive," says Vito Minunni of Cifa-Zoomlion; "yet of course it is impossible to make comparisons with pre-crisis editions. Clients and buyers turned up we found them to be very interested.  Especially those from the Middle East. In our case, for example, Iraqi buyers were already very well informed about our production and quality.  If they had been seeking merely price or convenience, they could have gone to Ankara to find cheaper machines. But they chose to come to Samoter. The same holds true for the Russians who gave considerable attention to our products."

Selena Bolin of Midi Europe which distributes Isuzu and Takeuchi also expressed satisfaction. "It was a rather good show for us and we are pleased with the contacts we made. We met very professional Italian visitors."

MAN was also among the big names taking part; Eleanor Migliorini sums up the results for the German brand as follows: "We had many contacts and even sold a number of vehicles, so we are satisfied with the investment; we also achieved good feedback from the outdoor area and the live demos of our vehicles, which were always very crowded with highly motivated visitors."

Mercedes, the other German giant attending Samoter, also had a rewarding show: "We could not miss the appointment with Samoter 2014," said Enrico Ferraioli, Marketing Manager at Truck Mercedes-Benz Italy. "We attended the event with an inside stand and an outside area - just a few kilometres away in a quarry, as the ideal terrain for test driving our new Arocs in live conditions. Samoter visitors also enthusiastically greeted the initiative that gave them the chance to learn about the characteristics of new vehicles, after having driven them over dedicated routes; in the four days of the event, visitors to Samoter were joined by more than 3,000 clients who crowded the Mercedes quarry site for a total of over 500 test drives. Excellent results in terms of attendance and satisfaction for sector clients and operators, which promises well for the future. We hope they will remember Samoter 2014 as the moment when the recovery in the Italian construction industry began."

Guido Peveri, Terex Dealer Manager, was to the point: "We are delighted. We finalised sales of machinery and created excellent contacts for new distribution points. We'll do it again tomorrow."

VF-Venieri also indicated positive final results: "Our expectations were low, to be honest," explains Filippo Muccinelli, "but everything turned out to be much better. Attendance was interesting and visitors were well-informed. We did not finalise sales during the show but we did generate interesting contacts that we will now bring to fruition."

Andrea Pavan, Marketing Director at Komatsu, summed up edition of Samoter: "Our expectations were not particularly high for various reasons: yet the event turned out to be impressive with good attendance and very interested and interesting clientele. We made positive contacts and this give us a lot of confidence for our future projects. We think of ourselves as an Italian company: we have a factory in Este and this is also one of the reasons why we decided to attend the event; we must also play our part to support this sector. We took a gamble and won."

Companies attending Asphaltica also highlighted positive results. Michele Turrini of Ammann Italy SpA (and the new President of Siteb) says: "For our company, feedback was positive with good contacts and a high-impact image. I would say that people who did not come along made a mistake. More generally, I feel that the strategy of linking Asphaltica with Samoter paid off, thereby offering a broader overview of the road sector. Of course, in a different situation, the input from Samoter would have been even better. Perhaps the road, for the future, may be to seek greater specialisation in certain key sectors to present a truly broad-ranging offering in the sector. Large machinery is easy enough to find, the Show is the place where you can find all services, workshops and components: in short, everything you need but is sometimes difficult to find."

Lastly, Cristina Baraldini of Atlas Copco Italy says: "The background context was certainly not the best but in the end there was good attendance by well-informed and interested visitors. We met people who knew exactly what they were looking for. Of course, we expected something extra from the co-scheduling with Samoter since its helped broaden the type of visitor interested in our machines positioned astride these two markets."