For many years, I described the economic relationship between Italy and the United States as moving in an almost inevitable direction.
On one side were American companies, backed by substantial capital and capable of acquiring European brands, technologies, and businesses. On the other was Italy, extraordinary at producing and exporting, but far less accustomed to turning its industrial capabilities into a direct and structured presence in international markets.
That narrative is no longer enough.
In recent years, some Italian companies have begun approaching the United States differently. They are not entering the market simply to sell cables, machinery, software, or high-quality products. They are buying companies, acquiring technologies, winning major contracts, building local operations, and establishing themselves from within the world’s most important market.
The very recent stories of Prysmian, Bending Spoons, and Farid Industrie, despite operating in profoundly different sectors, illustrate this transformation better than many statistics could.
Prysmian is probably the clearest industrial example.
Its American expansion goes back years. In 2018, the acquisition of General Cable had already transformed the group’s international scale. Another decisive step came in 2024 with the purchase of Texas-based Encore Wire for approximately $4.2 billion. In 2025, Prysmian then acquired Channell Commercial, a California company specializing in connectivity infrastructure.
On August 3, 2026, Prysmian took another major step forward, announcing the acquisition of Atkore, an American group active in electrical systems, cable management, and infrastructure serving data centers and industrial buildings, in a transaction valued at approximately $3.8 billion.
We are no longer looking at an Italian company that simply exports heavily to the United States. We are looking at a global group, with Italian roots and leadership, that now considers North America an integral part of its industrial platform.
Bending Spoons is following an entirely different path, but with the same ambition.
The Milan-based company has developed an original model: identifying already established digital products and platforms, often at a delicate stage in their evolution, acquiring them, and attempting to relaunch them through technology, organization, and new monetization models.
Over the years, it has acquired American names including Evernote, Meetup, Brightcove, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite. On August 4, another piece was added with the announcement of the acquisition of Airtable, an American platform used by companies to build applications and organize workflows, valued at approximately $1.3 billion in the transaction.
What is interesting is not merely the financial scale. Evernote, Vimeo, AOL, Eventbrite, and Airtable are brands that, at different times, have become part of the history of America’s digital economy. A company founded in Milan is no longer simply trying to export a good app to the United States – it is buying pieces of the American technology ecosystem and attempting to shape their transformation.
Then there is a third case, seemingly more traditional, that perhaps illustrates the change even more clearly.
Farid Industrie is a Turin-based company specializing in waste collection equipment. In recent days, it has won a contract in New York that could be worth approximately €250 million through 2031. It is Italian technology being applied to one of the world’s most complex and visible urban systems. But the most interesting part comes next: Farid has announced its intention to establish a corporate presence in the United States, with dedicated personnel and an American operational base.
It may seem like a minor detail, but it is not.
Prysmian, Bending Spoons, and Farid represent three different ways of crossing the same frontier. Prysmian acquires industrial capacity and market share. Bending Spoons buys technology, users, and platforms. Farid wins a major contract and, starting from that foothold, builds a stable production and commercial presence.
This, in my view, is where something is changing in the very structure of Italian internationalization.
For decades, we have identified the success of Made in Italy primarily with exports. And rightly so. But exporting ultimately means reaching a market while continuing to remain outside it. The new generation of Italian companies instead seems determined to take the next step – entering physically and corporately into the markets where they intend to compete.
From this perspective, the United States represents the most interesting laboratory. It is no longer enough to ship a product from Italy to an American customer.
Companies need to produce in the United States, acquire American businesses, participate in their supply chains, win public contracts, attract local capital, hire people, build industrial relationships and, above all, accept the challenge of competing directly on the scale of the American market.
We might call this a new Italian approach to offshore investment, provided that we free the word “offshore” from the almost exclusively financial meaning we often assign to it. In this case, offshore means taking capital, expertise, and entrepreneurship beyond national borders – not to move away from Italy, but to strengthen its competitive capabilities.
Naturally, there are significant risks. Multibillion-dollar acquisitions mean financial exposure, organizational complexity, and difficult integration processes. A major international contract requires a company to guarantee production capacity and continuity for many years. Transforming from an Italian exporting company into a genuinely multinational group also profoundly changes corporate governance.
And perhaps that is precisely the point. Italy is no longer merely the country of excellent companies attractive enough to be acquired by foreign investors. It is also beginning to become a country whose companies acquire businesses abroad, conquer markets, grow in scale, and decide to compete directly on the playing field of the world’s largest economies.
For Italian Americans, this is a particularly interesting change because it alters the very nature of the economic bridge between our two countries.
Wine, fashion, machinery, food, and all the products that have made Italy familiar to Americans continue to travel across that bridge.
But today, moving in the opposite direction from the traditional narrative, Italian capital, technology, managerial expertise, and industrial ambition are crossing it as well.
And perhaps the true Made in Italy of the next decade will be precisely this – not merely something Italy produces and sells around the world, but Italy’s ability to become part of the world without losing its identity.
