Cagliari, the new warehouse of the Grendi Group at the canal port

On the island, Grendi counts on the terminals of Olbia (ten thousand square meters serving Northern Sardinia) and Cagliari (80 thousand square meters dedicated to ro-ro traffic and 145 thousand meters for the space of the Mito international terminal which handled 57,670 Teu last year with a record 92% increase over the previous year). There is no shortage of obstacles. Costanza Musso , CEO of Grendi and president of a women's shipping organization, says: «We have been active in the port of Olbia since March 2021 and since then we have been working without connecting electricity, only with a current generator. Two years of waiting is a bit too much».

Among the group's objectives is decarbonisation , a critical point because every day more than four hundred trucks transport goods from one end of the island to the other. Hence the project which envisages the transformation of vehicles from normal thermo-combustion to electric and there are already ten vans destined for distribution with this energy system. But the basic idea is to bring the unloading of goods closer to the final point of distribution; for this reason, the storage of goods in Olbia was chosen, with an important effect in reducing the kilometers traveled on the 131; in this way we calculate a decrease in the transit of goods by road equal to one million two hundred thousand kilometres, one hundred thousand a month.

Finally, the possible collaborations: there is an increasingly close relationship between Grendi and Corsica Ferries, a company active only in passenger transport. «For the Civitavecchia-Cagliari connection we proposed ourselves for passenger and freight traffic together with Corsica Ferries », recalls Antonio Musso, «then things went differently , now they are present in Sardinia but would like to do something more. We are examining some possibilities looking at possible synergies . There are no shareholding projects, we want to understand if there can be joint actions for the transport of goods in Corsica».

Meanwhile, Grendi has exercised the purchase option on the vessel Rosa dei Venti , resold to Corsica Ferries; the handover will take place in May, at the end of the five-year lease.

Grendi is a family business now in its sixth generation which however focuses on managerial development. For this reason , a holding company was created with the task of directing and coordinating the group's strategy and providing services to the subsidiary companies; the new manager is Riccardo Stabellini with previous experience in the logistics sector at Barilla, Number One, Italtrans.

Of the nine members of the holding's board of directors, independent directors account for one third and the same share concerns the female component.
Alfredo Franchini