Staged at the BEC on September 25-28
Cumbre Industrial y Tecnológica 2007 ("Industry and Technology Summit"), held at the Bilbao Exhibition Centre on September 25-28 in a lively atmosphere as far as order books are concerned, especially for the wind-power and machine-tool industries, has come to its conclusion. As the only fair of its kind in Spain and a benchmark event for Europe as a whole, the summit maintained its high standards of activity and the diversity of the products on show thanks to the presence of companies, business groups, chambers of commerce and trade specialists from 33 countries.
A total of 13,069 trade visitors from all Spain's autonomous regional communities and from France, Portugal, Italy, Venezuela, the UK, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Morocco, among other countries, took part in the event. Indeed, trade visitors from outside northern Spain increased again this year to more than 30% of the total number of domestic visitors. Visitors from outside Spain accounted for just over 7% of the total.
The high rank of visitors to the summit in general is worth mentioning: 42.5% were decision-makers and market makers, including owners, general managers, managers and department heads.
Representatives of the leading purchasers in the automotive and aeronautics industries attended the event, along with top-ranking technical and purchasing staff from the railway, machine-tool and consumer goods industries, among other regular visitors. Cumbre Industrial y Tecnológica 2007 met its objective of bringing together supply and demand and energising business relationships.
Statistics drawn up during the event indicate that the sectors in which visitors were most interested were machining and processing of workpieces, casting, moulds, dies and stamps, industrial supplies, industrial maintenance, automatics and welding, along with the event as a whole.
MCC wins Nexo Award
During the Summit, the second Nexo Award was presented to Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa, the biggest business group in the Basque Country, for its increasing efforts to develop industrial subcontracting in recent years.
Rafael Barrenechea, Deputy Chair of Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa and General Manager of the Machine-tool Division, collected the award, whose significance is enhanced by the fact that it was won by a cooperative, i.e. an organisation that represents the collective efforts of its worker remembers, said José Miguel Corres, CEO of Bilbao Exhibition Centre, upon handing out the award.
Concurrently with the summit a wide range of other activities were staged, including technical seminars on casting, maintenance and galvanising, assemblies of trade associations, etc, involving around 800 people in all.
EVE (Ente Vasco de la Energía), the Chamber of Commerce of Álava, AEM (Spanish Maintenance Association), The TABIRA Foundry Institute- AZTERLAN Foundry Association, ATEG (Spanish Technical Galvanising Association) and CESOL (Spanish Association of Welding and Joining Technologies) are just some of the organisations responsible for the programmes drawn up. A seminar was also held by Observatorio Industrial del Metal ("Industrial Observatory for the Metal Industry") in which it presented its activity report for 2006. A meeting organised by ASIMECO (Industrial Association for the Improvement of Competitiveness ) discussed how to save more than 30% on day-to-day purchases, and a presentation by Lantek Expert III centred on the best management solutions for the metal plate processing industry.
Subcontracting Catalogue
The Basque chambers of commerce (Cámaras Vascas-Eusko Ganberak) have published their 10th Basque subcontracting catalogue, covering 2007-2009, to provide instruments and information services to help improve competitiveness in this sector.
This catalogue for industrial subcontracting in the Basque Country 2007-2009 offers technical information on 314 Basque companies (159 from Gipuzkoa, 91 from Bizkaia and 64 from Alava). It is published in hard copy, on CD-ROM and online www.subcontratistas.com
. There is a technical file on each company which indicates its production activity, its machinery, the certificates and approvals that it holds, its handling equipment, the sectors from which its customers are drawn, the raw materials that it uses and the checking and control equipment available.
The latest study of industrial subcontracting in the Basque Country drawn up by EuskoGanberak lists 4173 subcontracting firms in the area, which between them employ 67,612 people and account for 27.5% of industrial activity. Basque industrial subcontracting firms are highly specialised. Most of them are SMEs, with predominantly domestic capital but high international profiles. They tend not to have their own products, but to be capable of custom manufacturing the products needed by industrial companies.
Cumbre Industrial y Tecnológica has more than fulfilled its mission to energise the sector, as evidenced by the high occupation rates of the leading hotels and restaurants in and around Bilbao and Barakaldo.
The summit was opened by Basque Government Minister for Industry, Trade and Tourism Ana Agirre. In all, 1144 firms attended the summit, including representatives of the most important industries in the sector from 33 countries including Germany, China, Spain, the USA, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, the UK, Sweden and Switzerland, among others. They presented the latest advances in the sectors of capital goods manufacture, subcontracting, machinery, equipment, accessories, supplies and technologies.
