Special Issue PaintExpo.
ipcm®'s office is unusually calm and silent: our whole staff is working from home, continuing to show the utmost professionalism, dedication, passion, and social and human solidarity. Although distant and connected only through the bits of the network, our team remains united to face this unprecedented situation, which has changed our lives suddenly, but profoundly.
The industry as well is in the midst of a storm, not due to financial or economic reasons (these are side effects) but to an exogenous factor: COVID-19. It is not a structural crisis like the 2008 one, but a contingent crisis: due to the virus, the movement of people is forbidden, so that they cannot work or travel for work, and the movement of goods is limited. As a consequence, consumption is zeroed and production slows down. It is for a good cause, for the common good - but it is devastating for the real economy.
It will take liquidity injections as well as fiscal and monetary policies to get out of it, but we will make it.
Meanwhile, ipcm® will continue to recount the strength of the European industry in the world through the tool we know best: information.
The issue you are about to read was conceived as a special edition for the world's most important trade fair on coating technologies, PaintExpo 2020, which was postponed to October, 12 to 15. Indeed, it is one of the most beautiful, richest, and most stimulating numbers we have ever written. We have had to struggle to finish it and print it, but it can now offer you top-notch articles about great technological innovations, cutting-edge systems, and success stories, testifying that this industry was being highly dynamic and in full development.