HISTORY

In 1899 a 15 year old workman, Giuseppe Marini, purchased the necessary equipment for manufacturing his own bicycle and started off his career as a constructor and entrepreneur.

In 1909, the firm was awarded a gold medal at the United Trade Fair in Florence. A year later, another gold medal was awarded at the Fair of Modern Industry in Paris.

In the meantime, Giuseppe Marini had begun to fit 122.5 cc two-stroke single-cylinder engines to his bicycles, which operated on a mixture of petrol and homemade oil (later he used 175 cc water-cooled and then air-cooled engines).

Giuseppe Marini became passionate about the whole idea of transforming his engines for use on an industrial level and decided to apply them to road maintenance machinery. The company registered many new patents and by the end of the decade possessed as many as 32. The first machine was a bitumen sprayer, which operated using air pressure.

Around 1936-37, Giuseppe Marini designed and built a plant for producing emulsion by mixing hot bitumen and water.
Marini made also a machine for producing mastic asphalt, consisting of a cart on wheels which carried a heater for bitumen and a U-shaped furnace, insulated with asbestos, which had a rotating shaft on the inside with arms and paddles to scrape the furnace walls. When the paddles turned they mixed the bitumen with rock asphalt, forming a product called mastic asphalt. Marini at that time was also building a small drum mixer, with rotating arms on the inside, and a burner for drying the aggregates.

In today’s terms Marini might seem to be a small enterprise, but at the time it was considered a highly respectable size. In 1927, the number of companies in the mechanical sector in the area of Ravenna was 1,014, with a total of 2,281 employees.

The Marini family suffered a grave loss. During the night of 5th May 1945, several men came to take Giuseppe Marini away from his home. The founder of the Marini factory in Alfonsine was never again to see his family.
The disappearance of the owner and figurehead of Marini was a hard blow for the company.

Official registration of the Marini Mechanical Workshop took place on 16th September 1948: the official document reads that “the company’s aim was to manufacture and repair road building machinery and engines in general”.
In this period, Marini – which already had 80 workers – began to sell through depots it had acquired in Bari, Foggia, Naples and Rome. With the same intent in mind, in 1950 Marini joined a partnership called ‘Roads in the South’, which in 1954 became CICSA, a relationship which continued until 1978.

Marini supplied the first 120 tph asphalt plants to SCCA. When these plants were seen to work well, the door was opened to the company from Romagna and strong relations were forged.

After the demonstration of the reliability of its machinery on the motorway project in Italy, Marini also began to gain territory on the foreign markets. Its traditional eastern European markets were joined by markets in the Mediterranean (e.g. Egypt) and Western Europe (France 1961, Switzerland 1963 and then Germany). In 1966 there was even a commission in China.

In 1973 the company became “Officina Meccanica Marini di Marino e Roberto Marini and Co. Sas”. The following year it became a public limited company called “Officina Meccanica Marini SpA” which, in 1979, was shortened to “Marini SpA”.

July 1988: when Fayat realized Marini was up for the bidding, they immediately visited the works and sent a team of experts to carry out a week-long audit. As soon as they received the results, the Fayat family began stringent talks with the Marini family.
This was how the Fayat Group officially became the 80% shareholder in September, injecting ten billion lire of fresh capital into the company. Within a year, the remaining shares passed into Fayat hands and the Marini family continued to keep only a small, symbolic quota.
Pietro Marini was reconfirmed as General Manager and the young Jean-Claude Fayat as Managing Director, involved full-time in Marini management. Roberto Marini was appointed Honorary President of the company, a role that he kept for several months until his retirement in the Spring of 1989.

A significant event took place in January 2000, when Marini obtained the prestigious quality certification ISO 9001, meaning that now its entire production process, from the design stage to the last detail of construction, is documented and certified to the very highest of quality standards.
The 350-strong workforce consists of 200 shop-floor workers and 150 office workers, technicians and managers.The plants Marini produces are ‘continuous mix’ and ‘batch type’, the latter having the biggest market. At the beginning of the nineties, Marini designed, patented and built the EMCC (continuous counter-flow type), an environmentally-friendly plant which keeps polluting emissions to a minimum.
As far as the road building sector goes, the production of rollers has now been abandoned. All other ranges have been redesigned and renewed, for instance the track-mounted and tyre-mounted finishers; also scarifiers have come back onto the production line.

At the beginning of the 2000s, an important overall strategic reorganization of production procedures was carried out in Alfonsine with the creation of two distinct operational divisions: They had put together a ‘Plant and a Road Equipment Division’ to efficiently coordinate all the companies in the Group that manufacture products which fall into these categories.

The acquisition of Bomag led to a gradual integration of the Marini and Bomag Road Equipment Divisions, until October 2006 when the machines built in Alfonsine began to bear the Bomag name and became part of the Bomag distribution network (with the consequent incorporation of the North American and British branches).
Great changes have taken place in the asphalt plant sector too.
In April 2003 production underwent changes in China, when Marini purchased the whole packet of shares of the joint venture with a Chinese partner, together with new land, hangars and equipment. This was the creation of MFL, Marini Fayat Langfang.

In the plant sector, one of the great recent innovations has been a new family of plants, the ‘Top Tower’ models, which were introduced for the first time in Paris at Intermat 2006. At the same Fair in 2003, Marini proudly received the Silver Medal for a new innovation, the self-propelled cold recycling plant MCR250

As regards sales, the company has an increasing focus on internationalisation, which has led to the set up of Fayat Polska in Poland in July 2007, Fayat India in November 2007 and Fayat Middle East in Dubai in June 2008. These organisations carry the Fayat name, but their operations are managed and controlled by Marini.