Still burning brightly Sabaf

Still burning brightly

Italy’s Sabaf, a global leader in components for household cooking appliances, continues to see strong growth even in the current market conditions

Despite the difficult circumstances experienced across European industry during the pandemic, Italy’s Sabaf Group has been able to announce revenues for the third quarter of 2020 of €47.2 million, 16.8 per cent higher than €40.4 million of the third quarter of 2019.

In the first nine months of the year, preliminary sales revenues totalled €125.4 million, up by 8.8 per cent over the same period of 2019. This performance reflects the company’s success in launching new gas burner supplies to strategic customers on a global scale and marks the peak of a design and industrialisation strategy that has been implemented at the Group in the last two years,.

In 2019, the Group invested €10.5 million to acquire 68.5 per cent of the Italian company C.M.I. s.r.l., one of the main players in the design, production, and sale of hinges for household appliances

(mainly for dishwashers and ovens). The acquisition of C.M.I. s.r.l. has allowed the Sabaf Group to achieve a leadership position on a global scale in the hinges sector, making it a reference partner in this sector for all manufacturers of household appliances.

Over the last year the Sabaf Group also carried out organic investments of €12 million mainly aimed at increasing and automating the production capacity for special burners and the manufacturing of machinery and moulds for new burners.

Worldwide market

Founded in 1950 in Lumezzane, Brescia, originally for production of brass taps for the farming industry, Sabaf S.p.A. is today a company that produces components for household cooking appliances for customers worldwide. It has more than 650 employees and five manufacturing sites in Italy, Brazil, Turkey, and China.

The company’s core production is of taps, thermostats, and burners for gas appliances. In 2015, it opened a new production plant in Kunshan, Jiangsu, in China, to produce burners for the Chinese market, and the following year, it acquired a controlling stake in ARC Srl, a leader in the manufacture of burners for professional cooking, allowing Sabaf to enter a new market related to its traditional sector

Sabaf continued to expand its product range with the 2018 acquisition of Okida Elektronik, a Turkish company specialising in the design, manufacture and sale of electronic control boards, timers, display and power supply units for ovens, kitchen hoods, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and freezers.

Sabaf invests about 3 per cent of its annual turnover in research and development. A large part of this investment is in the design and development of new safer components that help to reduce atmospheric pollution and to save energy both during their production and their use by the final user.

The strong vertical integration of its production plants enables the company to manufacture much of the machinery it uses to produce and assemble its products, delivering maximum optimisation in both processes.

Rewarding excellence

In May 2019, SABAF received the Deloitte Best Managed Companies Italia 2019 award The award, now in its second edition in Italy, was established by Deloitte in Canada in 1993 and since then has been awarded to over 1,200 companies worldwide, establishing itself as a brand of excellence in business organisation.

Pietro Iotti, Sabaf CEO, said at the time: “The award given by Deloitte is particularly satisfying because it is the result of an overall survey of our company based not only on numerical parameters, but also on the analysis of the strategy, the governance model and the involvement of all categories of stakeholders. This award is for the work of the entire organisation, encouraging us to continue along the path of growth that we have outlined.”

A complete service

Sabaf has been designing and manufacturing a wide range of taps and thermostats for gas cooking for over 60 years. The taps, which can be made in brass or extruded aluminium alloy, are used in free-standing cookers or in built-in hobs and are available with and without flame failure devices. Sabaf taps can be fitted with microswitches to light the burners or for additional functions.

Sabaf gas thermostats are used in free-standing cookers and built-in ovens and are available in one- or two-way versions (to power the oven and grill burners).

To meet the multiple market requests and culinary traditions of countries all over the world, Sabaf has also developed new models of gas cooker burners, which differ in power and distribution of the flame.

Production takes place in highly advanced plants with the latest generation robotic casting working centres, making possible the combination of very large production volumes with a very high level of product quality.

Through its Turkish subsidiary OKIDA Elektronik, Sabaf also supplies electronic control boards, timers, display and power supply units for ovens, kitchen hoods, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and freezers.

A technology leader

Sabaf is acknowledged in the appliance component industry as being an undisputed technological leader at a worldwide level. Its capacity for technological innovation, of both the products and the machinery to manufacture and assemble them, is a distinctive characteristic of the group. Thanks to the choices and investments made, both in the development of technology and in innovative products, the company has been able to anticipate in time the evolution of global demand, offering increasingly safe and efficient products.

Crucial to its growth strategy has been its ability to meet the needs of the many global appliance manufacturers who, for reasons of internal efficiency, stopped their own production of gas components and looked for collaborations and co-design relations with specialized companies capable of producing components of high quality and reliability.

Thanks to this development in the worldwide supply chain, Sabaf has been able to ensure that its technology is recognised as stateof-the-art by the largest international manufacturers, as well as by the most important companies in its domestic market of Italy. n