Bialetti revival highlights Italy’s small-business scale challenge

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Bialetti revival & Italy’s scale

Highlights

Bialetti, acquired by NUO in 2025, refocused on core Moka pots and branded coffee after restructuring from €115 million net debt and persistent losses.
In 2023, Bialetti's revenue rose 11 percent to €166 million with 4.5 million stovetop pots sold—2.5 million outside Italy—and over 60 percent of revenue from Mokas.
OECD data show 95 percent of Italian companies have fewer than 10 employees, contributing to 25 years of productivity stagnation and weaker GDP growth compared to scaled European peers.

Bialetti reset centers on coffee growth

As reported by Financial Times, Bialetti is trying to revive its business under NUO, a Milan-based investment firm that acquired the company in 2025 after years of debt-fuelled expansion beyond its signature Moka pot failed to deliver sufficient returns. The group is now refocusing on the stovetop coffee maker and on branded coffee, with chair Giuseppe Morici saying the goal is to position Bialetti clearly as a coffee company in markets ranging from China to the U.S.

The Moka Express, invented by Alfonso Bialetti in 1933, remains the core of the business even as the company updates the product through new colors and licensing tie-ups, including collaborations linked to fashion labels, football clubs and entertainment brands. Bialetti is also pushing the product more aggressively abroad, while keeping its capsule coffee machine business concentrated in Italy, where the brand already has stronger recognition.

The strategic reset follows a difficult period in which Bialetti expanded into cookware, kitchen appliances and coffee capsules, bought factories in Turkey and Romania, and built out a store network as capsule systems gained ground in the at-home coffee market. By the end of 2024, the company was lossmaking and carrying 115 million euros in net debt, equal to roughly one year of sales, before restructuring and the NUO acquisition improved its financial position.

Morici says the industrial and commercial base had already been stabilised under chief executive Egidio Cozzi through asset sales, store closures and a retreat from lower-margin cookware. Last year, Bialetti’s revenue rose 11 per cent to 166 million euros, more than 60 per cent of it still coming from Mokas, while the company sold nearly 4.5 million stovetop pots, including 2.5 million outside Italy, and employed just under 1,000 people.

Italy’s scale problem weighs on productivity

Italy’s manufacturing model remains heavily shaped by small and family-owned companies, a structure that supported decades of postwar growth but now sits uneasily with a global economy that rewards scale, capital access and continuous investment. OECD data cited in the report show that nearly 95 per cent of Italian companies have fewer than 10 employees, while micro and small businesses still account for more than 62 per cent of employment, versus about 40 per cent in France and Germany.

Economists and business specialists argue that this fragmentation is one reason productivity has stagnated for 25 years alongside weak GDP growth. Smaller businesses tend to invest and innovate less, struggle more to attract talent and find it harder to professionalise management, while medium-sized and large Italian companies perform as well as or better than comparable French and German peers in productivity and exports once they reach sufficient scale.

That tension has become more politically sensitive as consolidation often requires foreign capital, fuelling concern that prominent Italian brands are passing into overseas hands. At the same time, academics cited in the report say the companies that endure increasingly combine international operations, external managers and stronger governance structures, suggesting that the challenge for Italy is less about preserving family ownership than about adapting it to global competition.

Our earlier coverage of SME Corp Malaysia’s Sinar programme detailed how the initiative is helping micro, small and medium enterprises cope with supply-chain disruption and rising operating costs through targeted financing and support. The article also outlined the broader Budget 2027 push to strengthen MSME resilience and scaling, including funding for automation, market access and human capital, alongside additional allocations for SME development schemes.

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