In Rimini, the book by Leonella Gori and Alessandro Sannini became much more than a book presentation: it turned into a sharp diagnostic of Italy’s aerospace industry, its primes, clusters and specialised SMEs. At the centre was a deceptively simple question: who actually finances growth when outstanding technology has to become industrial scale?
Some book presentations explain a book. Others reach the point where the book is set aside because its argument becomes more important than the object itself. That is what happened at BEX – Beyond Exploration Expo in Rimini on 24 September. The panel title was already an industrial thesis: Volare Alto: without capital there is no orbit. Forty-five minutes brought together finance, major industry, clusters and entrepreneurship: a stress test of Italy’s ability to turn an exceptional technological legacy into stronger and larger companies.
The starting point was Volare Alto. Sostenere la crescita dell’industria aerospaziale in Italia, written by Leonella Gori, Lecturer in Corporate Finance at SDA Bocconi, and Alessandro Sannini, private-equity investor, adviser and university lecturer. In Rimini, however, the book’s central argument moved from the page to the industrial arena: Italy does not suffer from a shortage of aerospace talent. It suffers from the difficulty of converting talent into scale. Scale, in turn, requires capital, governance, consolidation, stronger management and international market access.
A remarkably complete picture of the Italian supply chain
The panel worked because the table represented almost the entire industrial chain. Walter Cugno, one of the most experienced figures in Italian human spaceflight and exploration, brought the depth of major programmes and more than four decades of industrial heritage, from Aeritalia and Alenia to Thales Alenia Space. Maurizio De Mitri, President of the Piedmont Aerospace Cluster and a former Leonardo executive, represented industrial territories where primes coexist with dense networks of specialised suppliers. Marino Moro, CEO of Novaeka, supplied the entrepreneur’s perspective: the SME that must invest ahead of revenue, obtain qualifications, recruit scarce skills and win international contracts.
Gori and Sannini added the question that space debates still too often leave in the background: the financial architecture of growth. The discussion was held together by Chiara Rossi of Startmag.it, whose moderation was fast, exact and notably free of ceremonial padding. Her questions kept the conversation from retreating into the familiar language of “Italian excellence” — accurate, but insufficient — and pushed it towards harder issues: who funds expansion, governs consolidation and retains the value created by the supply chain.
The resulting picture was unusually clear. Italy has industrial primes capable of competing on the largest European and global programmes. It has clusters where know-how accumulated over decades is concentrated. It has a dense constellation of SMEs active in precision manufacturing, electronics, software, advanced materials, testing, propulsion infrastructure, ground systems and services. This is a strategic value chain, not a collection of isolated subcontractors. Yet its strength makes the weakness more obvious: too many firms remain small in relation to the technological ambition they are asked to sustain.
The missing market: private equity for industrial space
This was the most distinctive part of the Rimini debate. An industrial space company does not scale like a software start-up. Before revenue arrives, there may be years of R&D, component and process qualification, specialised facilities, working capital, engineering talent, insurance, export capability and commercial presence abroad. Bank lending is essential but cannot replace equity when industrial risk is still high. Venture capital is critical at the beginning of the journey, but it is not always structured to support established companies moving from €20 million to €100 million of revenues. Public funding can enable programmes and technologies, but it cannot become the only hidden shareholder of industrial expansion.
Between those instruments lies a genuine private-equity and growth-capital market gap in the Italian aerospace sector. Not the caricature of private equity based on cost cutting and short holding periods, but patient industrial capital: investors able to strengthen governance and management, finance production capacity, acquire complementary businesses, create national platforms with European add-ons and support internationalisation. When an SME has technology, customers and intellectual capital but lacks the balance sheet required for the next step, its constraint is no longer technological. It is financial and ownership-related.
The paradox is clear. Governments and Europe fund research, missions and innovation; primes demand more capacity and resilience. Yet when a company must commit genuine equity to scale, specialised capital remains scarce. A supplier may therefore remain a supplier despite having the technology to become an industrial partner, or be acquired just as it reaches strategic size.
Bromo: European scale, but under which industrial conditions?
From there, the discussion naturally reached the first questions surrounding Project Bromo, the proposed consolidation of the space activities of Airbus, Leonardo and Thales. The tone in Rimini was not anti-European. Quite the opposite: greater European scale is a strategic necessity if the continent wants to compete with the United States and China. But scale is not, by itself, a guarantee of balanced industrial outcomes. Governance, workshare, decision-making centres, procurement, intellectual property, capital expenditure, sites and end-to-end capabilities all matter.
For Italy the question is particularly sensitive. What happens to national prime capabilities and responsibilities currently embedded in Italian sites? How does the relationship between large groups and SMEs change when purchasing is concentrated in a much larger entity? A European champion can strengthen suppliers by giving them access to larger programmes, but it can also increase buyer power and narrow alternative routes to market. That is not an argument against consolidation. It is an argument for designing the consolidation properly before its consequences become irreversible.
Public concerns raised by other European players about competition and supply-chain effects show that these are not provincial anxieties. Bromo should be judged not only by the size of the new company, but by the industrial architecture it leaves behind. A European champion succeeds when it strengthens its ecosystem; it becomes problematic if value and decisions are concentrated without reinforcing the industrial base.
From a book to an industrial agenda
At BEX, Volare Alto did what a serious book about industry should do: it stopped being an endpoint and became a tool for asking better questions. The panel’s strength was to place the prime and the SME, academia and the cluster, finance and the factory inside the same frame. Italy’s space economy has already proved that it can design, build, integrate and operate complex systems. The next test is whether it can finance its own ambition.
Stable public programmes are indispensable. So are banks capable of understanding long industrial cycles. Venture capital is needed to create new entrants. But another layer must be built with far greater depth: specialised private equity, growth capital, consolidation and patient capital for companies that are already alive, already technological and already embedded in the supply chain, but still too small to lead it.
Rimini left a clear message: Italy does not have to choose between primes and SMEs, public and private capital, national interest and Europe. It must connect them better. In space, technical excellence is the entry ticket, not the guarantee of staying power. Before launch come capital, governance and the ability to become large. Without capital, there is no orbit.
