Officine SMAC sees good prospects for 2022

Demand is picking up rapidly in Italy and the rest of Europe in both the brick and ceramic tile sectors.

A leading player in the field of ceramic tile and brick glazing and decoration machinery for more than 50 years, Officine SMAC of Fiorano Modenese sees good growth prospects for 2022 and expects last year’s positive trend to continue. Although travel restrictions have delayed full-scale resumption of business activities in the Far East, China and India, as of the second half of 2021 the company has been seeing healthy growth in demand in Italy, which accounts for 30-35% of its sales, as well as in the rest of Europe.

“We are seeing a lot of activity in the brick and roof tile sector, with numerous large groups making investments aimed at increasing the value of their products,” says owner Fulvio Masini. “At the same time, the ceramic tile industry is also showing great dynamism.”

SMAC’s offering for the ceramic tile sector now includes a complete range of machinery, equipment and accessories for traditional glazing and digital decoration lines, solutions that increasingly meet Industry 4.0 criteria and are suitable for any product size, from special pieces through to extra-large slabs.

“All ceramic tile producers are in search of solutions for automating the glazing line, which is a very delicate stage of the process due to the risk of defects caused by manual operations,” explains Masini. “In this department too we have managed to achieve a good level of automation compared to a few years ago. Moreover, while traditional decoration systems were able to mask certain glazing defects, the current diffusion of inkjet decoration has made the preceding phase even more important due to the need for perfect glazing, especially in the case of large sizes and slabs.”

Today the most popular solutions in SMAC’s range include automatic glaze density, viscosity and nozzle flow rate control systems, ink agitators and the well-known Kryo 2.0 coolers, as well as airless glaze, engobe and crystalline application systems (soon to be available as drop-on-demand systems), dry powder and grit applications, engobers and accessories for preparing and feeding glazes.

SMAC operates in international markets through a network of agents and distributors. In particular, it has been present in the German market since June 2021 through Büro Medau, a firm headed by Jan Medau who is carrying on the work of his father Heinrich Medau, SMAC’s longstanding agent since 1988 who died a year ago.