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Small Profit, Big Turnover. Founded in 1888 to exploit the old copper mines around the ancient spa of Montecatini, the company perked along modestly until 1910, when hard-driving Guido Donegani, a young mining engineer, moved into the presidency and set out to build a self-contained empire. He began mining the area's neglected iron pyrite deposits (for sulphuric acid), then built a plant to process the pyrite wastes, and extracted 600,000 tons of pig iron yearly—a boon for iron-poor Italy. He made blasting powder for his own mines and turned Catini into Italy's No. 1 explosives manufacturer. Long before industry as a whole appreciated the need for research, he surrounded himself with scientists, and Catini's white-coated Giacomo Fauser developed the world-famous nitrogen fixation process that made it a leader in producing nitrates and fertilizers. When bills for fertilizer bags got too high Donegani imported jute from India, made Catini Italy's biggest jute processor; when power shortages hampered production, he built his own dams and power stations. With tycoon-fitting foresight. Engineer Donegani made Catini the largest producer of power for private use in all of Europe.
He believed, American-style, in small profits and big turnovers. Said he: "I prefer to make one lira cutting costs rather than five by raising prices." But where Donegani's business acumen triumphed, his political instincts failed. A Fascist member of Parliament as early as 1921 and onetime president of the National Fascist Federation of Industries, Donegani was arrested by the Allies in 1945. He died two years later, a broken man.
Rebirth. With the end of World War II, Catini seemed shattered. Out of 40 fertilizer factories, 30 were damaged or destroyed, others looted by the Nazis. Machines, supplies, power, credit were short or nonexistent. The only surplus was labor; Catini was saddled with 47,000 workers who by law could not be laid off. Carlo Faina, who headed Catini's Rome office, started out to rebuild the company. A cheery aristocrat who differs from Donegani in every respect except drive, he is the scion of a line that once ruled a large slice of Italy (said a medieval couplet: "From Roma to Perugia, it's all Faina"). After World War I. in which he got three decorations and was seriously wounded, he was hired through an ad by Donegani as his assistant.
With Donegani jailed, Faina got the company back into production in the occupied south, rebuilt the ruined factories. He plowed nearly $250 million back into the business in ten years, bought 2,000 forklift trucks, mechanized production with thousands of new machines. He abandoned Donegani's one-man rule for a U.S.-style line-and-staff system, authorized plant managers to run the works on the spot, set up executive committees in Milan to supervise the major decisions and divisions. On the technical side he held a lighter rein, giving considerable scope to Engineer Perio Giustiniani. a fellow Tuscan who has served with Faina as co-president since 1949.