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At the Future Investment Initiative Institute Summit in Rome last week, the question was asked: Where will Europe find the capital to fund its next phase of growth? The Draghi report estimates that €800 billion ($917 billion) a year is needed to reindustrialize the continent and complete the energy transition. Public finances are constrained and, while banks remain central, regulation and risk have reduced appetite for long-duration lending. Into that gap step sovereign wealth funds, private capital and new forms of partnership.
But the framing misses the point. Europe does not lack capital. What it lacks is the means to turn capital into factories, supply chains and companies that can compete. Reindustrialization is not delivered by capital flows; it is delivered by those who build.
That distinction is something the Gulf has spent the past decade refining in practice. Across Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, sovereign investment, private capital and industrial policy are increasingly aligned, with capital deployed with an industrial purpose rather than a purely financial one: to build, to scale and to sustain the real economy.
The model rests on an older foundation: the family enterprise. Across the Gulf Cooperation Council, family-owned firms remain central to manufacturing, consumer markets and the food systems that national strategies such as Vision 2030 work to deepen. These are the sectors in which we have spent decades building businesses and the families behind them behave much as Europe’s industrial families do.
Gulf investors often take a long-term, multigenerational perspective, prioritizing industrial capability and strategic resilience. That is the approach we take at Investindustrial, combining long-term capital with disciplined allocation and active industrial value creation, rooted in partnerships with family-owned businesses across Europe. Investindustrial today manages €19 billion of raised capital and focuses on scaling mid-market industrial companies internationally. With a strong presence across Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia, we partner with entrepreneurs and management teams to build global leaders.
That mindset is not foreign to Europe, which is shaped by its own traditions of family ownership and patient capital. Yet, for too long, the two regions have engaged through capital flows rather than through the harder work of building together. What has been missing is execution: bankable projects, regulatory clarity and the capability to deliver at scale. This is where the debate must shift, from assets to companies.
Much of Europe’s competitiveness challenge sits in its mid-market industrial base — particularly family-owned manufacturers with strong capability but limited scale and capital. They are under-scaled platforms and reindustrialization will depend as much on scaling them as on financing anything new.
That is a task capital cannot perform on its own and it is the work we have focused on for more than three decades. At Investindustrial, we have partnered with 60 European families, scaling the companies they built across value chains and borders, and approximately 90 percent have chosen to reinvest with us. Across the wider portfolio, that work has meant more than 250 add-on acquisitions, turning capable national businesses into international ones.
Gulf investors often take a long-term, multigenerational perspective, prioritizing industrial capability and strategic resilience.
Andrea C. Bonomi
A global buy-and-build strategy, though it originates in private equity, is at its most useful an industrial one: it allows fragmented sectors to consolidate, integrate and compete globally faster than organic growth permits. Done well, the investor is not allocating capital but building capacity, professionalizing and expanding businesses. That is the difference reindustrialization turns on.
It is also where the alignment with the Gulf becomes more than rhetorical. Sovereign capital brings scale and patience; experienced industrial investors bring execution. Structured well, the combination achieves what neither manages alone.
The question for Europe is not whether to accept global capital but on what terms. Passive partnerships will disappoint. Those built on shared ownership and a genuine commitment to building will not.
We have begun to act on that conviction beyond Europe: over the past year our portfolio companies have invested some €500 million across the Middle East and Asia and now operate 25 manufacturing facilities there. Through partnerships in Saudi Arabia, including a collaboration with the investment arm of the Saudi Industrial Development Fund, Investindustrial-backed platforms support the growth of local industrial businesses.
This approach is already taking shape in platforms such as Windoria, a leading global private-label food group, whose acquisition of a Saudi manufacturer — the first majority investment in the Kingdom by a European private equity-backed company — demonstrates how industrial expertise, combined with strong local partnerships, can unlock meaningful expansion.
As these businesses scale, their supply chains naturally become more international. The opportunity, therefore, is not just to participate in global supply chains but to shape them — anchoring strong industrial platforms in key regions such as the Gulf and scaling them globally. This is the real prize. Europe does not need more capital; it needs capital that builds — owns rather than trades, integrates supply chains rather than arbitrages them and measures success by what is still operating long after the check has cleared. Reindustrialization will not be settled by the volume of capital deployed but by the discipline behind it. The opportunity is not to attract capital. It is to build the next generation of industrial companies and to build them together.
The firms that will matter most in this era are those that combine long-term capital, industrial capability and cross-border partnerships — not as a strategy but as a discipline. In a more fragmented and competitive global landscape, this disciplined, partnership-led model will be critical not only to driving growth but to ensuring resilience, relevance and leadership on the world stage.
- Andrea C. Bonomi is Chairman of the Industrial Advisory Board at Investindustrial, a European mid-market private equity firm with approximately €19 billion in raised capital and a team of over 250, across eight offices in eight countries.