Great attendance at the Grand Opening of the SCM branch in Ljubljana by companies, stakeholders and professional schools from the Balkan region. The Slovenian branch aims to be a benchmark for the entire supply chain with a range of state-of-the-art technologies, software and digital services.
SCM Adria was officially inaugurated from 24 to 28 September in Trzin (Ljubljana), the new commercial branch of Scm Group, leading multinational in technologies and services for secondary wood processing. The launch of this new subsidiary is aimed at providing a direct, punctual and highly specialised sales and service support to woodworking businesses in Slovenia and Serbia. The SCM team will also work in sync with dealers in Croatia and Bosnia and will be a benchmark for the entire Balkans area.
The official ceremony with ribbon cutting placed on 26 September in the presence of local dignitaries, including Giuseppe Cavagna, the Italian Ambassador to Slovenia, Giacomo Ricciotti, the Director of Italian Trade Agency (ICE) and Peter Ložar, the Mayor of Trzin.
The event welcomed hundreds of visitors: businesses, professionals and stakeholders from all over the Balkan region as well as from other neighbouring European countries, proof that the headquarters has a strategic geographical position.
On 24 and 25 September, the Grand opening was preceded by two days set aside for wood/furniture training centers, in line with SCM’s wishes not only to provide direct, punctual commercial and technical support to customers and dealer partners, but also to help bring the new generations closer to the profession by providing machinery, software and digital services for highly qualified and constantly updated training.
The Headquarters is the perfect location for networking and testing new innovation and digital transformation trends: more than 1600 square metres with two Technology Centers, one dedicated to artisan joinery work and the other to bespoke industrial production and design with a varied range of solutions to machine the panel and solid wood; more than thirty machines are on display overall and are all connected; a Digital Corner where one can discover the numerous digital services offered by SCM’s Maestro connect IoT platform, including the new proactive and predictive technical advisory assistance service, Control Room which makes the most of advanced AI technology and the many years of experience clocked up by the SCM service team to prevent any malfunctioning or machine downtimes in advance.
The headquarters also has a Training Room to host software courses, including SCM’s new MES to control the factory’s IT flow.
The partnership with local clients, leaders in the market, who provided flooring, furniture and furnishing accessories entirely manufactured with SCM solutions has also been important.
The branch’s team has been working since January 2024 and includes technicians and sales engineers highly qualified in application fields of secondary wood processing and SCM will continue to invest throughout 2025, adding new professional resources to support clients and partner dealers.
As Pietro Gheller, Director of SCM Wood Division pointed out, “The concept and structure behind the new Slovenian branch perfectly reflects the group’s vision: to develop a long-standing, continuous and shared relationship with the client, and to support the needs not only throughout the machine’s entire life cycle but for the entire duration of their entrepreneurial activity. This can be achieved not only thanks to technology – which still lies at the core of SCM’s experience – but by offering an ecosystem of software, services and skills with a very high added value”.
SCM’s Commercial Director, Gabriele Patti, added: “SCM continues to invest to guarantee a capillary and direct presence on the most strategic markets at international level. Slovenia and Serbia, the countries served directly by SCM’s branch, most definitely falls into this category as well as the entire Balkans area. The figures recorded by SCM in recent years show a growth situation in the woodworking sector, with companies proving to be increasingly more advanced from a technological point of view both in furniture and timber construction”.
“With the opening of SCM Adria, Slovenian and Serbian companies in the sector can benefit from an all-round commercial and technical partnership – explains Lorenzo Trolese, SCM’s Country Manager for the Balkans area. When outfitting the headquarters and choosing the team, we aimed to concentrate on servicification and digitalisation: we can observe a healthy and growing interest in our digital services from companies in the Balkans and we are sure that the group’s latest investments in these areas can guarantee a genuine positive shift in quality”.
Ambassador Giuseppe Cavagna emphasized that “SCM’s investment is significant in the wood machining sector, which is crucial to Slovenia’s economic landscape. Over the past few years, Italy has established itself as the leading supplier of the Country in this field. Italian investments in Slovenia have been steadily increasing, now totaling €1.7 billion, which represents an 8.3% share of the overall foreign investment in Slovenia. “We aim to grow further, and investments like those made by SCM are definitely pointing in the right direction”.
Balkans Focus: trend and scenarios
In the two-year period 2012-2023 in the Balkans, SCM recorded an average annual growth of 30%, in line with the growth indicated in general by Italian machinery manufacturers to machine wood (source: Intracen).
SCM’s forecast for this year is to maintain a substantial hold on its turnover and for 2025, increase into double figures thanks, mainly, to projects created for Key Account clients.
Slovenia and Serbia are the markets with the largest growth margins with a total value for woodworking machinery manufacturers of around 50 million euro and in the case of SCM they cover one third of the turnover in the Balkan region.
