Sardinian coachbuilders and mechanics, a category that is renewed

In Sardinia, 79% of the bodywork supply chain and the car repair sector are craftsmen.

With 2,329 micro, small and medium-sized maintenance and repair companies, out of a total of 2,960 companies, the sector of artisan companies offers work to approximately 8,900 employees.

This is the picture of the automobile supply chain that emerges from the analysis of the Research Department of Confartigianato Imprese Sardegna, which examined UnionCamere's 2019-2021 data on the "Dynamics of the maintenance and repair of motor vehicles" on the island.

A sector, the Sardinian craftsman, which this year records a decline of 3.3% on 2019 and 0.5% on 2020, a slightly better trend if compared to the national average (-0.6%).

At the provincial level, most of the artisan auto repair companies operate in the province of Cagliari, 971 realities (+ 0.8% compared to 2020), followed by Sassari-Gallura with 751 (-1.7% on 2020), by Nuoro with 440 (+ 0.7% on 2020) and Oristano with 167 (-5.6% on 2020).

The growth of hybrid and electric cars is important, albeit still slow: out of a total of 1,068,000 cars registered on the island, those with electric propulsion are 730, while those with mixed hybrid / electric formulas are 6,945, for a total of 7,675.

"The sector has not yet recovered from the strong pandemic shock and the severe penalties that hit it in the past years - commented Daniele Serra, secretary of Confartigianato Imprese Sardegna -, the crisis, as for all sectors, has forced Italians to spend less on maintenance, because they are often not in the economic conditions to do so, and consequently the vehicles circulate in a dangerous state ”.

“As we have been saying for years - he continued -, one way to restart the category and, at the same time, facilitate users, consists in tax exemption for repairs. This is a request that we have repeatedly made to all governments and we believe that this time the decisive moment has come to implement it ”.

The category must also deal with the expenses for the continuous updating of equipment and personnel, necessary to guarantee both quality standards adequate to customer requests, and to cope with increasingly complex bureaucratic requirements.

"During the lockdown we auto repairers remained open to provide a service to operators in the essential sectors - recalled Giuseppe Pireddu, delegate of Confartigianato Sardegna for the auto repair -, consequently we have not had refreshments, although the drastic drops in turnover have already arrived in that time. Today we face an even more complicated situation: the machines have remained in the garages, also due to the lockdown and smart working, for many months and so the number of interventions has greatly decreased. Yet, care must still be taken to keep the vehicles safe, so that they keep their performance unaltered and do not represent a danger on our roads ”.

While on the one hand the artisan car repairers address the fundamental issue of safety, on the other they appeal for the difficulties of the sector to be considered: "We must work to reduce fixed costs to keep the workshops open - he added - for this we ask the government and local authorities to halve the burden of taxation. I am referring to waste removal, to the IMU, to VAT on the bills of the various users, for example, all costs that affect our businesses, despite the objective reduction in revenues ".

Another crux is represented by the question of the guarantee of the replaced and assembled spare parts. The latter, in fact, are bought by the car repairer with a 1 year warranty. Immediately after installed on the car, however, the garage must guarantee the customer two years of coverage.

“It is a truly complicated situation - concluded Pireddu - which we intend to present first to our parliamentarians and then to bring to Europe. Someone has to start denouncing this fact that can really put us in extreme difficulty ”.

Beyond these problems, the sector grows and renews itself.

The growing use of digital technologies, in fact, profiles a demand for work that is increasingly characterized by a greater diffusion of digital skills.

The data coming from Unioncamere show how in 2020 companies were looking for more than 25 thousand artisan mechanics, car repairers, at a national level. 66.8% of these required digital skills, such as the use of internet technologies, and the ability to manage and produce visual and multimedia communication tools; 46.3% required the ability to use mathematical and computer languages to organize and evaluate qualitative and quantitative information; instead, 42.9% were required to be able to manage innovative solutions in the context of 'enterprise 4.0', applying robotic technologies, big data analytics and internet of things to business processes. Over time, there is an increase in the share of companies looking for car mechanics and repairers with a high level of digital skills and skills necessary for the use of 4.0 technologies.

In addition, the green orientation is also strong in the sector. The analysis of the Research Department of Confartigianato Sardegna highlights a vocation to environmental sustainability of the self-repair companies that is more marked than the total economy: in 2018 eight companies in the sector with 3 employees and more out of ten (79.1%) actions carried out to reduce the environmental impact, a share that exceeds the 66.6% recorded for the total economy by 12.5 percentage points: these are 19,461 car repair companies, equal to 2.8% of total companies that have reduced their environmental impact (a value that exceeds the share that the car repair has on the total of companies with 3 employees and more, equal to 2.4%)

(Unioneonline / F)