60 years building concrete plants

Federico Furlani, Simem’s president

Simem is a family-owned manufacturer of concrete plants, located since 1963 in the Verona province, Italy.

Like many other small and medium manufacturing companies in this area, Simem was founded by the intuition of one single entrepreneur, Piero Furlani, who started with the production of cement mixers with reversing drums.

In the 60 years since, the management of the company has been passed on to the two sons: Federico, now president, and Michele, managing director. Together they now manage an international enterprise which can be counted among the top players in the market for concrete plants worldwide.

Simem has supplied its plants to many key construction projects around the world, among others the Panama Canal expansion, the Hong Kong airport, the EuroTunnel under the English Channel, the Petronas Tower in Malaysia, the Olympic Stadium in Sydney, and until the Brenner Base Tunnel currently under construction.

Simem employs 250 people in the Italian headquarters and in several subsidiaries located in its major markets: Canada, United States, India, and more recently in Germany. The company has also opened its second production plant in India from where it serves areas in the Middle East and Asia.

In other countries, Simem has distribution agreements with company that represents well-known OEMs as Caterpillar and John Deere.

The expansion into international markets got a major boost in 2016 when Simem acquired two companies that are now fully integrated in the group: Simem Underground in Canada that produces technologies for underground construction, and Simem Spil in Treviso, Italy: a specialist in automated systems for concrete precast.

Simem’s plant in Minerbe, Verona, Italy

According to the President, Federico Furlani, the construction market is going through a fourth industrial revolution which is driven by digital transformation and by Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG): “Digital and ESG are new directions the whole industry is embracing, and Simem is fully committed since quite some time to anticipate the opportunities that these changes will bring to the concrete market. We are confident that the next 60 years will bring even more growth to our company.”

Simem celebrated its 60th anniversary at the Italian headquarter, hosting a gathering of partners, customers, and experts from the construction industry.

Santo Accogli, GSC Pl&Eq - Plants Dept Head, Senior Manager at Webuild Group, celebrated the cooperation between his company and Simem spanning over 15 years, in which WeBuild utilized about 30 million cubic meter of conventional concrete and roller-compacted concrete (RCC) produced by Simem.

He reminded to the guests at the anniversary celebration some of the projects his company realized with the contribution of Simem, as for example the Panama Canal expansion where Webuild used two Simem RCC plants.

Another project is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Project (GERDP): a fully Italian, gigantic project realized with RCC produced in plants by Simem. The building site reached a production of almost 12 million m3 of concrete, with a maximum peak of 1,450 m3 per hour.

Federico Furlani said that the company’s growth and success derive from the work of all the employees who strive every day to imagine, design and build some of the world’s biggest concrete plants. “Among the projects in the works right now, we have a large 3D printer for dam construction, a system for CO2 sequestration from concrete (using wood chips and lime), and a digital platform that will integrate BIM, IoT and Blockchain.”