For nearly a century, the unmistakable gurgle of the Moka Express has provided a soundtrack to mornings in Italian homes. Over that period, Alfonso Bialetti’s octagonal aluminium coffee pot, invented in 1933, became an icon of the country’s industrial design around the world.
As capsule machines transformed coffee consumption and chipped away at the Moka’s dominance, Bialetti borrowed heavily to search for growth beyond its signature product. But its diversification failed to deliver and it struggled to keep pace with larger competitors in an increasingly global market.
Now, both the company and the Moka are staging a comeback after being acquired by NUO, a Milan-based investment firm backed by private investors including the billionaire Pao shipping dynasty of Hong Kong and descendants of France’s Hermès family.
“We want to stay focused on the Moka and the coffee that goes with it — we are a coffee company and we want to be recognised as such, from China to the US,” says Giuseppe Morici, a veteran consumer-goods executive appointed as the group’s chair by NUO. “That requires less genius, perhaps, but much more discipline and organisation.”
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Though Bialetti is one of the 0.1 per cent of Italian companies with more than 250 employees, its ups and downs are commonplace in a country where almost 95 per cent of companies have fewer than 10, according to OECD data.
Italy’s postwar success was driven by thousands of these businesses, whose technical expertise, entrepreneurial ownership and design flair helped turn the new republic into Europe’s second-largest manufacturing economy behind Germany. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, said last month small companies were the “backbone of the nation”.
But globalisation rewards a different set of advantages: scale, access to capital, professional management and the capacity to invest continuously in new technology, products and markets. Italian companies can find it difficult to marry the specialisation that gave the country world-beating products with the scale to keep investing and innovating.
Under Morici and chief executive Egidio Cozzi, Bialetti is attempting to bring Italian-style coffee to the masses. The once-utilitarian silver Moka now comes in Barbie pink, emblazoned with motivational slogans. Other versions wear the colours of football clubs, while collaborations have stretched from Dolce & Gabbana to Netflix series Bridgerton and Stranger Things.
The marketing blitz aims to make a simple but still effective invention — which uses steam pressure to push hot water through ground coffee — desirable to a new generation. “We loved the brand and could see its potential,” says Morici.
But for all the appeal of the Moka and the global ambitions of its new owners, Bialetti remains a modest-sized business by global standards.
Italy’s unusually high concentration of small businesses weighs on productivity, which has stagnated for 25 years alongside GDP growth. Demographic pressures — the country has one of the lowest birth rates in the world — and the emigration of young, highly skilled workers who can earn more overseas threaten the viability of the country’s economic model. Italy’s public debt burden exceeds 135 per cent of GDP, one of the highest in the Eurozone.
“Every 25 years or so, Italians come up with another brilliant invention — we’ve been doing it since Leonardo da Vinci in the 1400s — and then fail to build the businesses that can take it around the world,” Morici says.
“From pizza and furniture to coffee, Italy is famous for them — but we have never really managed to own the global markets for them.”
Why Italy stayed small
“Piccolo è bello”, or “small is beautiful”, was once almost an article of faith in Italian capitalism. For decades, it worked.
Across Italy’s postwar history, family-owned manufacturers flourished by dominating narrow niches, drawing on skilled workers, local supply chains and technical expertise accumulated over generations.
They were nimble enough to respond quickly to customers and sell highly specialised products around the world without becoming large corporations.
Bialetti, founded in 1919 by Alfonso Bialetti in the north-western Italian town of Omegna, was a typical example.
Before the Moka, Italians brewed coffee in different ways. The “cuccumella”, imported from France in the 1800s, was popular but it had to be physically flipped over once the water was hot for it to filter through the ground coffee. The process was slow and generally produced a light brew.
Alfonso invented the Moka Express in 1933. After the second world war, his son, Renato, turned it into a mass-market phenomenon.
“Italy was historically an agricultural economy,” says Andrea Colli, a professor of economic history at Bocconi University. “If you look at where Italy’s industrial districts emerged in the 1900s, natural geography has had an influence: textiles around Lake Como, wool around the rivers in Piedmont, engineering in Emilia, leather goods from the Marche region’s historic shoemaking tradition.
“That local model worked extremely well, but when the global economy changed it triggered a kind of Darwinian selection,” he adds.
The companies that succeed are those that recognise the need to internationalise and achieve greater scale, Colli says. As at Bialetti, this shift often comes when founders give way to a younger generation, providing they bring different ambitions and a willingness to change how the business is run.
“Hyper-specialisation can still pay off . . . companies such as [packaging machinery manufacturer] IMA in Bologna have become world leaders in niches where Chinese competitors cannot easily displace them,” Colli says. “But the choice has become starker: you evolve and grow in your niche, or you risk disappearing.”
The OECD identifies size as an important drag on Italian productivity. Smaller businesses are less productive, invest and innovate less and struggle more to attract talent.
But Italian companies that reach medium or large scale perform as well as or better than comparable French and German businesses in productivity and exports.
The problem is that too few get there: micro and small companies still account for more than 62 per cent of Italian employment, compared with about 40 per cent in France and Germany.
Professionalising family businesses is a hurdle, according to Alfredo De Massis, a professor of entrepreneurship and family business at the IMD Business School in Lausanne.
“If you want to keep running a company by making decisions around the Sunday lunch table, it is very difficult to scale,” he says. “Growing a business requires changing the way the family is involved — opening the board to outsiders and bringing in experienced external managers.”
Financing expansion has proved another obstacle. Italian businesses have traditionally relied on family wealth and bank lending, with only 3.9 per cent using equity-market financing.
Successive Italian governments have offered tax breaks to encourage smaller companies’ listings in Milan and have backed funds to channel institutional investment into smaller listed businesses.
But politicians have acknowledged that more financing options alone cannot overcome the constraints of small scale. “Small is beautiful, but only up to a point,” Giancarlo Giorgetti, now finance minister, said in 2021. In comments that caused a furore, he argued that limited scale made it harder for companies to invest in research, absorb new technologies and expand internationally. He encouraged more mergers and consolidation.
Confartigianato Imprese, the national trade association for small businesses, said in a riposte to Giorgetti that companies were constrained by high taxes, bureaucracy and inadequate infrastructure, rather than by their own size. Small firms’ flexibility, entrepreneurship and export strength underpinned Italy’s manufacturing success, it added.
De Massis argues that the model has become harder to defend. “‘Small is beautiful’ is becoming an increasingly difficult shield to hide behind as the world becomes more global,” he says.
The faultline in Italian capitalism becomes more politically charged when consolidation or expansion requires foreign capital. Sales of prominent businesses such as Gucci, San Pellegrino and Alessi have fuelled the narrative that the country’s industrial “jewels” are being picked off by foreign multinationals and private equity groups.
“The companies that have survived within Italy’s industrial districts almost invariably have operations abroad and external managers,” says Bocconi’s Colli.
“The old model of the founder who came out of technical school and ran everything himself no longer works.”
The limits of an icon
Expansion, diversification and consolidation do not guarantee success either, as Bialetti discovered.
Its founding family sold the business to coffee-machine maker Faema in 1986. Seven years later, it was sold for a second time, passing into the hands of the Ranzoni industrial family, who merged Bialetti with their Rondine cookware business and eventually floated the combined entity on the Milan stock exchange.
As capsule systems captured a growing share of the at-home coffee market, Bialetti expanded into cookware, kitchen appliances and capsules, acquired cookware factories in Turkey and Romania and rolled out a network of shops.
But the lower-margin businesses failed to generate the returns needed and never matched the reach of the Moka. By the end of 2024 it was making losses and carrying €115mn of net debt, equivalent to a full year’s sales.
Under its previous owners, Bialetti began shedding assets and closing underperforming stores in 2019, as chief executive Cozzi steered the business away from low-margin cookware.
The part of its factory that once housed its cookware production has been converted into a coffee-roasting facility, with Bialetti-branded coffee now sold through its stores and increasingly in supermarkets.
NUO acquired it in 2025 and is now making another attempt to turn an Italian industrial icon into the large international business it never became.
“When NUO arrived the business was healthy both industrially and commercially, thanks to the restructuring and refocusing on the Moka and coffee led by the chief executive,” says Morici. “The problem was the debt.”
With its borrowings refinanced, Bialetti’s revenues last year rose 11 per cent to €166mn, with more than 60 per cent still coming from Mokas. It sold close to 4.5mn of the stovetop pots, 2.5mn of them abroad. It employs just under 1,000 people.
Morici, a former chief marketing officer at food multinational Barilla, rejects the idea that an old product is automatically a tired one. “Cornflakes were nothing new, but the Americans turned them into a global breakfast staple over the past three decades through persistence and marketing,” he says.
“As Italians, we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that our traditional products have exhausted their potential.”
Bialetti is also pushing the Moka more aggressively abroad, where sales are growing, while restricting its capsule coffee machines to Italy, where the brand is already established.
NUO has put Bialetti on a stronger financial footing and brought international networks and marketing knowhow. But Morici argues that access to capital is rarely the fundamental constraint for Italian manufacturers, since private wealth and a banking system attuned to the needs of family businesses have long provided funding.
“Governance is the real issue. European companies that built strong professional management structures while remaining family-controlled have succeeded,” he says.
“Family capitalism itself is not the problem.”
Family affairs
Bialetti’s first succession showed how family ownership could propel rather than constrain growth.
In a co-authored book about the family’s industrial legacy published last year, Celestina Bialetti, the founder’s youngest daughter, captures how her brother turned their father’s invention into a mass-market business: “Alfonso wanted people to drink coffee; Renato wanted to sell Moka pots.”
Other European manufacturers have managed to keep business within the family across generations. Twenty years before Bialetti was founded, Germany’s Miele began with 11 employees making cream separators, later adding wooden butter churns before turning to washing machines and other domestic equipment.
Miele remains under the control of the descendants of its two founding families but has expanded into high-quality home appliances and international markets. It generates more than €5bn in annual sales and employs more than 20,000 people.
Italy, too, has produced family businesses that successfully navigated generational transitions while achieving global scale, from food multinationals Ferrero and Barilla to building-materials manufacturer Mapei and steel-processing group Marcegaglia.
The transition has proved harder for other celebrated family names. Design group Alessi and fashion houses such as Missoni and Tod’s turned to outside capital and expertise as they approached or navigated generational change.
Family-controlled companies still account for about two-thirds of Italian businesses with more than €20mn in annual revenues, and most of them are still run entirely by family members, according to the AIDAF-Bocconi Observatory, a research group monitoring family businesses. Their leaders are also ageing and tend to hand over the baton late, at an average age of 75.
According to De Massis and Colli, the challenge is not to abandon the industrial model that produced the Moka but to build companies capable of carrying such inventions further. For founding families determined to retain control, that means empowering and trusting professional managers to actually run the business.
“Every country has its own particular genius,” Morici says. “To expect the same people to be both great inventors and great managers may be asking too much.”
Link To FT.com: https://www.ft.com/content/1eee5ed8-48dd-4c2e-9eba-a407d98b6a38
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