Zanussi grew by acquisition on debt — the appliance leader ended with a Swedish signature

Zanussi of Pordenone was Italy's appliance empire — in 1982 the country's 21st-largest industrial company, with 862.2 billion lire of revenue, 13,930 employees and 50 plants in Italy and Spain. From 1968 the family had entrusted the company to Lamberto Mazza, its financial consultant since 1960, and under him it pursued crescita esterna — growth from outside. In 1969–70 it absorbed Aspera Est, Castor, SOLE, Triplex and Zoppas; in 1980 it took 75 percent of its Spanish affiliate Ibelsa. The growth was bought with debt.

The bill arrived in 1982: a loss of 130.2 billion lire — at the very top of the expansion. In June 1983 Mediobanca's Consortium entered the capital, removed Mazza and installed Umberto Cuttica as president; a year was enough — Cuttica resigned in April 1984 and was replaced by Gianfranco Zoppas, the founder's son-in-law, who had one winter to find a buyer.

On 14 December 1984 — Il Gazzettino remembers it as a freezing, grey day — Electrolux took 49 percent of Zanussi, in a package worth 209 billion lire including the recapitalization. The 1,000 billion lire of bank debt, 345 billion of it foreign, was papered over with bank guarantees. The signature, the local paper wrote forty years on, was what saved Zanussi from the abyss of bankruptcy. Electrolux went to 90 percent in 1986 and to 100 percent in November 1994.

The story is still told in the Nordest as the fabbrica dei manager — the factory of managers — and in a 2010 oral history built on thirty-six unpublished interviews. Under Electrolux the business recovered and for a time led the world in white goods; then the group's head moved to Brussels and the non-core activities were sold off. What grew in Pordenone survived as a brand.