Italiaonline, the first Italian internet company, today officially inaugurated the new Digital Factory, a centre of excellence in digital production based in Turin. The ceremony was attended by the President of the Piedmont Region Sergio Chiamparino, the Deputy Mayor in charge of Trade and Labour of the City of Turin Alberto Sacco and the CEO of Italiaonline Roberto Giacchi.
The new structure, in line with Italiaonline’s strategy, will encourage the digitization of small and medium enterprises, the main engine of growth in the country. Of the 3.7 million Italian SMEs, one third do not yet have any online presence and only 12% promote their activities through online advertising. It is precisely to respond to this need that the Digital Factory was born. SMEs will be supported through a 360° approach, from the creation of an online presence, through the development of websites and e-commerce, to the management of digital communications campaigns.
The “new factory”, at the same time, will create new qualified jobs, with unique skills and avant-garde in the Italian landscape, with the aim of reaching a workforce of about 70 people in the two-year period 2020/2021. To date, there are already 41 talents in the Digital Factory: of these, thanks to the collaboration between Italiaonline and the Piedmont Region, 28 have had the opportunity to participate in specialist training courses to acquire the necessary digital skills. Italiaonline will thus be able to internalize, bringing back to Italy and in particular to Piedmont, skills and activities currently carried out abroad by leading multinationals in the sector.
“We are the digital home of Italians and companies operating in our country, every day more than one in two users passes through our portals: with these assumptions, we could only be the ones to realize an ambitious and innovative project like the first real Italian Digital Factory,” said Roberto Giacchi, CEO of Italiaonline. “We want to attract digital talents to an important territory such as Piedmont, to help Turin return to being an Italian technological pole, collaborating with institutions and local authorities, to whom we would like to extend our heartfelt thanks for the path taken so far. Through this centre of excellence, only in 2019, we expect to internalize and bring back to Italy the management of about 200 thousand online presences and the development of 12 thousand websites, with important growth prospects also in the following two years. The Digital Factory represents a strategic and significant step for the growth of the company and the SMEs that we will be able to bring online, supporting them in the development of their business”.