Ivana Ciabatti’s revolutionary and female-led creature is called Italpreziosi. By 2021 it had a turnover of 6.8 billion euros, operating in the refining of raw gold as well as the sale of the raw material to industry and the production of investment bars for banks and individuals. With the top priority of ensuring ethics and well-being for employees and communities
Above all, it is a story of limits continually being exceeded by Ivana Ciabatti, the Lady of Tuscan Gold. The result of a journey that began from scratch is what she calls “human capitalism,” where the company’s profit is linked inseparably to human well-being. Ms. Ciabatti was born in a small village in Casentino, in the countryside between Florence and Arezzo. Fate seemed to be sealed, and Ivana began working in one of the district’s many goldsmith stores. At age 27, she decided to take the first of the great leaps that characterized her career and set up her own business. “In my project, I had involved a financing partner,” he tells Wealth about the startup, which was all uphill. “I was young, with few financial resources, and mostly a woman in an all-male world.”
“And so I cultivated a crazy idea: to go and buy gold directly from the mines. That meant going around the world, from the Middle East to Africa, to North and South America, to Africa, to Oceania, dealing face to face with the miners.” A revolution then and even now has led Italpreziosi to become a shareholder in the mines from which it buys raw material- a unique business model- and a turnover of 6.8 billion euros by 2021 (making it one of the world’s largest gold companies). And Ciabatti to become National President of Confindustria Federorafi and Vice President of the European Jewelry Federation (EFJ). “We skip a middleman and shorten the value chain between raw gold and production, between raw material and those who work it. So we buy the raw material directly from the mine, refine it and sell it to companies that turn it into jewelry or even in a wide variety of industries, and to banks and individuals in the form of bars.”
The value chain of the yellow metal
Refining is the company’s core business and is done with an industrial chemical process that separates gold from non-noble minerals. “All the innovative technological plants we use for this process are produced in Tuscany,” Ciabatti points out. “The machines with which we make the ingots instead are built by a startup I founded in 2019, TeraAutomation, in which a group of engineers with an average age of 35 years and in close contact with Sant’Anna in Pisa work.
But Italpreziosi is also involved in other things, overseeing the entire complex value chain of gold. And so it produces investment gold in the form of ingots with purity equal to or greater than 999 and 24 karats, ranging from 5 grams to one kilogram in weight. The company is on the list of 69 companies worldwide that are certified ‘good delivery’ by the Lbma-London Bullion Market association: the certification states that the bars, because of their purity, are exchangeable as currency.
The different souls of gold
“Gold is many things: incorruptible material from which jewelry is made, but also an indispensable element of electrical components, the material from which jewelry is made, it is central bank reserves and a haven in the investment world. Above all,” Ciabatti adds, “gold is a finite resource, which is why it is precious. But what is mined can be transformed countless times: we also recover it from industrial processing by implementing a truly circular economy.”
Ciabatti pays close attention to the element of overall sustainability. So much so that in 2021 it drew up its first Sustainability Report to remark how “environmental protection, the protection, and promotion of human rights, the respect of safe and fair labor standards, also through technological innovation, represent the founding principles of our work,” says Ciabatti. “In a global context where uncertainties related to Covid-19 and geo-political conflicts persist, we are increasingly motivated to continue proudly on our sustainable path even with new investments to create new possibilities for our company and the community. Indeed, the sustainability report is the latest piece of a commitment that has always existed. “Gold is a high-risk business on the ethical front: mining goes hand in hand with deforestation and is located where respect for workers’ rights is not necessarily the norm. We cannot ignore that.” Just as we cannot ignore that “a gold bar of ours comes to cost 50 thousand euros and is small, can be hidden and lends itself to being used for money laundering, receiving stolen goods, financing armed groups, without considering the risk of human rights violations in the mines themselves,” Ciabatti explains. “We must keep our guard up at all times: starting with responsible management of the supply chain. We adhere, for example, to the international Planetgold project, launched in eight countries, which aims to support local communities of artisanal miners in eliminating mercury from the production chain. We were also among the first in the world to talk about ethical gold and traceability; and we built a mine in Honduras where only water is used for extraction and implanted a clinic in the forest to serve miners and their families. Finally, once the gold vein is exhausted, we restore the vegetation so that our impact is close to zero.”
The environmental and social impact must be reduced
And in Italy, Italpreziosi is building a completely sustainable new plant. On the ecological front, thanks to the installation of high-efficiency photovoltaic systems, favoring cold chemical processes that do not use fossil fuels, and thanks to a wastewater recovery system to minimize water consumption.”
To minimize its environmental impact and greenhouse gas emissions, Italpreziosi employs “cold” chemical processes and has installed photovoltaic solar technologies in the upper part of its headquarters. The company has also joined the Print Relief initiative, whereby 107 trees have been replanted for the nearly 900,000 pages printed since 2020 and is working to identify eco-friendly packaging. But that’s not all: commitment is also strong on the social front. “We pay attention to staff training, a strategic lever for improving competitiveness. Compared to 2020, the hours dedicated to training have almost tripled (1012 versus 431 in 2020), involving 50 percent of employees. And we have a crèche, a zero-meter canteen, bioponic cultivation. I aim to give positive signals: I dreamed and still dream of making a profit, but with ethics, dignity, and morality.”
