Focus SME Aggregation | A Growth Strategy for Italy’s Mid-Market.
In the Italian technology mid-market, industrial excellence alone is no longer sufficient to remain competitive. Pressure from international players, the structural increase in R&D costs, and the consolidation of value chains require a strategic reflection on scale.
How can companies grow without diluting their entrepreneurial identity? How can they strengthen skills, patents, and innovation capacity without giving up control? Aggregation among peers can be an effective answer, but only when it stems from an industrial logic rather than a defensive reaction.
The editorial project Focus SME Aggregation | Growth strategy for the Italian mid-market was created to analyse these paths and provide entrepreneurs with a concrete framework for understanding the main forms of aggregation.
In this contribution, Lorenzo Bacciardi, CEO of Bacciardi Partners, examines aggregation among complementary technology SMEs as a lever to concentrate R&D, build integrated industrial platforms, and create competitive players while preserving governance, expertise, and entrepreneurial vision.
Aggregating to avoid marginalisation in the technology mid-market
Fragmentation in the Italian technology mid-market—B2B software, medical devices, industrial automation, high-tech components—is a structural issue.
Dozens of highly specialised SMEs, with revenues between €10 and €40 million and R&D investments ranging from 3% to 8% of revenues, compete in isolation against large international groups and hyperscalers.
As we observe daily when working with technology entrepreneurs, quality is not the issue. Scale is. And without scale, defending competitive positioning becomes increasingly difficult.
Aggregation among peers—aimed at combining skills, technologies, patents, and customer portfolios—is emerging as one of the few effective strategies to build solid players while maintaining entrepreneurial and family control.
The real risk: isolated and vulnerable excellence
Italy is home to hundreds of high-quality technology SMEs: vertical management software, medical devices, industrial sensors, components for electric automotive.
They are often niche leaders, but too small to compete at scale.
These companies struggle to sustain annual R&D investments above €2–3 million, face barriers to accessing major OEMs and system integrators, and lose technical talent attracted by multinational groups.
Peer aggregation as an industrial—not financial—lever
Two or three complementary technology SMEs operating within the same value chain, with synergistic technologies or different geographic footprints, can aggregate under a common holding structure.
The objective is not to “sell,” but to build a platform.
The concentration of R&D capabilities, the unification of laboratories and testing centres, and the sharing of patents and IP allow the new group to position itself as a single technology partner for major industrial clients.
The leap is measurable: combined revenues between €50 and €100 million, R&D budgets between €5 and €10 million, stronger talent attraction, and—above all—valuation multiples increasing from 6–8x EBITDA to 10–15x EBITDA for integrated technology platforms.
As Lorenzo Bacciardi points out, “when aggregation originates among industrial peers, value does not come from financial leverage, but from the intelligent combination of capabilities.”
Want to learn more?
If you invest consistently in R&D, operate in niches subject to international consolidation, and struggle on your own to reach large clients and foreign markets, the question is not whether to aggregate, but with whom.
Our role is to support entrepreneurs in identifying the right industrial partners and structuring peer-to-peer aggregation transactions that are sustainable from an industrial, financial, and governance perspective.
An initial discussion often makes it possible to determine whether the conditions to create value exist—before the market does it for you.