Italy's First Lady of Steel

By Gordon M. Henry.

On the surface, Cecilia Danieli seems to be an old-fashioned woman. The wife of a notary and the mother of two boys and a girl, she enjoys cooking a pot of linguine, dresses in well-tailored designer clothes and still lives in Buttrio, the small village (pop. 2,200) in northeastern Italy where she was raised. But beneath that traditional exterior, Danieli, 43, is a lady who confounds expectations. As the chief executive of Danieli of Buttrio, a leading builder of steel mills and manufacturer of steelmaking equipment, she is a high-heeled boss in a hard-hat world--and a remarkably good boss at that. While much of the global steel industry has been depressed for almost a decade, Danieli has achieved phenomenal growth, earned record profits and built a worldwide reputation for excellence in an exacting field.

The company's specialty is the construction and equipping of so-called mini steel mills. These comparatively small plants recast scrap steel and iron pellets into finished bars, rods and other products. The minimills are in great demand because they can produce steel much more cheaply than traditional plants with huge blast furnaces, which convert raw iron ore and coal into steel. Danieli has put up mills in 27 countries, including the U.S., the Soviet Union, Burma and Venezuela. In fact, the company has helped design, build or equip about half of the more than 250 minimills in the world.

Danieli's revenues surged 20% last year, to $139.2 million, and profits increased 37%, to $13.5 million. Looking ahead, the company is blessed with a backlog of orders worth $696 million. Customers appreciate Danieli's state-of- the-art technology and attention to detail. Though many steel plants are built by a team of companies, Danieli often takes charge of every phase of a project, from design to construction.

Much of the credit for Danieli's success goes to the hands-on management style of Cecilia Danieli, who is equally comfortable discussing the fine art of steelmaking with her technicians or negotiating deals with customers. Says W.J. Robertshaw, spokesman for Davy McKee, a British builder of steel mills: "We tend to respect them very much as a power in the land. Danieli is a very resourceful Italian company."

In a sense, Danieli was born to be a boss. The company was founded in 1914 by her grandfather Mario Danieli and his brother Timo, who made steel in a primitive furnace. As late as 1955, the firm had only 40 employees. It began to expand during the 1960s under Cecilia's father Luigi, who moved the company from steel production into steel-plant engineering and construction. Luigi had four daughters, but the only one interested in the firm was Cecilia, who started in 1965 as an assistant to her father. Now 72, Luigi has let Cecilia bring in a team of financial, marketing and engineering experts to help expand the business. Since she took over, revenues have more than doubled, while increased productivity has helped her reduce the number of employees by 15.5%, to 1,444.

Reticent and businesslike, Danieli refuses to talk to outsiders about how she has fared so well in a field that has been an exclusively male domain. "It's the company that's important," she insists, "not me as an individual." But around her employees, she is less stiff. Though she favors business suits for herself, she lets department heads come to work in jeans and T shirts. On Saturday mornings she often plays a game of doubles with her top managers on the company tennis courts.

For the past three years Danieli has been immersed in what she calls a "black box" research project to improve the company's technology. The goal is to boost the productivity of Danieli steelmaking equipment by up to 30% and stay ahead of competitors, which include Japan's Mitsubishi and West Germany's Krupp. The world's steelmakers are expected to spend nearly $20 billion annually over the next few years to overhaul their plants, and Italy's first lady of steel is determined that her company will win an increasing share of that business.

With reporting by Walter Galling/Rome