September 9, 201312 yr Just found this film of the SWM factory from about 1978.........how I would have liked to take a trip around there. https://www.facebook...&type=2
September 10, 201312 yr Im curious now as to why SWM failed as a business. I had thought the advent of the mono killed them off but from the video they had quite a product range. Anybody know what happened ?
September 10, 201312 yr Im curious now as to why SWM failed as a business. I had thought the advent of the mono killed them off but from the video they had quite a product range. Anybody know what happened ? Baldilocks When I clicked on the above video link it brought up a face book page of I believe the boss of SWM. You can't have seen but underneath the video are many many questions to and from the boss and interested people wondering the same thing as you. Google chrome translates the text from Italian to English automatically. My understanding of what he says is that he chose to close the company because of trade union interference. I didn't spend ages reading what he said but I will do. You can tell immediately he is an incredibly capable man and he is still very annoyed about it. He made the move into electronics. It's interesting how the name SWM came about. It's all there. I didn't realise that SWM was such a big company. Ok they weren't huge but they make Merlin and Mecatecno with ten employees each look tiny. I wonder if the old factory still exists ? Anyone know the address I'll pop down there
September 10, 201312 yr Author The Italian government got involved with SWM. They planned a second factory elsewhere in Italy to produce road bikes to rival the Japanese who were starting to take a big slice of the Italian market. The original SWM factory was based in Milan and was producing around 7000 bikes a year. The trade unions believed that the government involvement would eventually shut the Milan end of the operation down and thinking that there would be huge job losses, instigated a series of strikes and factory sit ins which eventually crippled the firm. I think at that stage, Pietro Sironi owned the whole company, he sold it to his family who started up SVM, which never quite got to the same level.
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