CIFA Brand Guidelines: The 1928 Milan Steel Formwork Firm Behind the Truck Mixer Pump

Steel forms before concrete machines.

CIFA’s name is its first business. It stands for Compagnia Italiana Forme Acciaio, the Italian Steel Forms Company, and the company says Carlo Ausenda founded it on 7 July 1928. Italian Wikipedia places the founding in Milan and describes Ausenda as a Milanese engineer who came into contact with the American construction machinery firm Blaw Knox while in the United States.

Accounts of that American link vary in strength. CIFA’s history says it began with a patent acquired from Blaw Knox, designing and making formwork for containing concrete pours, along with towers and antennas for Italian radio transmission. An interview with its communications head in the German business magazine Wirtschaftsforum describes the early firm as an Italian branch of the American company. Italian Wikipedia says the panel formwork was intended for large works such as tunnels and dams.

The move into machines came after the war. CIFA dates its first batching plant to 1956 and its first truck mixer to 1958, and Italian Wikipedia names that machine as the CIFA 400, fully mechanical and mounted on chassis such as the Alfa Romeo 900. Batching trains followed in 1965, and concrete pumps by the end of the 1960s; Italian Wikipedia dates truck pump production to 1969. The company says its Castiglione delle Stiviere plant, in the province of Mantua, has been running since 1972.

The Magnum, and carbon fibre.

The product CIFA is most closely tied to combines two others. In 1974 it designed and built what it calls the world’s first truck mixer pump, a mixer with its own pump and boom, which was later named Magnum, in 1987. Italian Wikipedia says the machine was patented in 1974 and credits CIFA with inventing it. The Wirtschaftsforum interview put the line at about a quarter of the business at the time.

Sprayed concrete followed: the company says it developed its first units for that work in the 1980s, and its current range includes underground shotcrete pumps with animal names such as Wombat, Rhino and Mamba. In 2015 it added the Coguaro 4, a truck mixer designed for tunnels and mines.

The other signature is carbon fibre. In 2010, CIFA says, two sections of a truck pump’s placing boom were built in carbon fibre instead of steel, under the name Carbotech, and it calls itself the first company to bring composite materials into concrete machinery. KHL described the move on 16 September 2013 as a radical departure in an industry using steel for load-bearing parts, and noted that CIFA makes its own carbon fibre components. Zoomlion then used the technique for a concrete placing boom of more than 100 metres in November 2012, with engineers from both companies working on it, KHL said; Italian Wikipedia records a 101-metre Zoomlion-CIFA boom as a Guinness World Records entry.

Electric power is the newer thread, under the name Energya. CIFA lists a hybrid truck mixer in 2013, which it describes as the first electric truck mixer powered by a lithium battery pack; the electric MK28E truck mixer pump in 2019; and the fully electric K42E truck pump in 2022.

Design and documentation.

Road and concrete machinery rarely sits still for a portrait, so its makers tend to photograph it at work. Catalogues and trade-press images return to a few scenes: a paver laying a black mat at dusk under its own lights, a line of tandem rollers working in formation behind it, a milling drum shown in close-up with its picks exposed, a screed drawn in cutaway so the parts that shape the surface can be seen. The subject is the finished road as much as the machine that lays it.

Concrete makers have their own set pieces. A truck-mounted pump is shown with its boom unfolded over a high-rise site, section by section, so that the vehicle reads as a piece of the building work. Truck mixers are lined up in brand colours, and the drum becomes a large painted surface for a maker’s colours.

Trade fairs are the other stage. bauma, now held in Munich, dates from 1949 and last opened in April 2025; CONEXPO-CON/AGG and World of Concrete both meet in Las Vegas, and INTERMAT in Paris has run under that name since 1988. Machines are launched at these shows, and a fair can date a whole generation of a range: Vögele, for one, presented its “Dash 2” pavers at Bauma 2007.

Behind that shared visual language, ownership has changed. Family firms have been bought and brought together, and several of the names in this guide now belong to larger groups, and each entry sets out who founded the brand, who owns it today, where it says its machines are made and what can be documented about how it looks.

“We build your world since 1928.”

The company passed through several owners. CIFA says its story began with the Ausenda family and evolved through different eras. KHL wrote in 2013 that it had endured several changes of ownership, including purchase by a group of its own suppliers in 1999, and Italian Wikipedia says the Magenta fund joined the shareholders in 2006.

The decisive change came in 2008. KHL reported on 26 June 2008 that Zoomlion, of Changsha, would take 60%, with Goldman Sachs, Mandarin Capital Partners and Hony Capital holding the rest. KHL later dated the acquisition to September 2008 and called it the first major overseas acquisition by a Chinese manufacturer in the construction equipment industry. On 7 January 2013 KHL reported that Zoomlion had offered to buy the remaining 40.7%, and Zoomlion’s results announcement of 28 March 2014 said that with the share transfer complete, CIFA had become its wholly owned subsidiary. CIFA now describes itself as part of Zoomlion’s Concrete Machinery Business Unit.

Italy is still central to its story. CIFA says its Senago site near Milan has housed its management, research, sales and marketing since 2002, along with production of truck pumps, stationary pumps and underground systems; KHL reported the renovated site’s official opening in September 2013. Truck mixers and truck mixer pumps come from Castiglione delle Stiviere, and concrete pipelines from Rogolo, with Vasto added after the purchase of Pamec in 2019. Tunnelbuilder reported in May 2021 that a new plant at Solferino would assemble and make Zoomlion cranes, forklifts and aerial work platforms for Europe.

The company speaks of its “Made in Italy” know-how, and the picture by range is more detailed. In the Wirtschaftsforum interview, its communications head said the Steeltech and Carbotech series were made in Italy while the Classic series was then produced in China, with its design still Italian.

Design is part of how CIFA presents itself. The same interview cites an in-house design centre and an “Italian style”; KHL mentioned a new CIFA design centre among the Senago works in 2013; and Italian Wikipedia lists Red Dot design awards in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2020. Its slogan is “We build your world since 1928.” It opened a corporate museum at Senago in 2013, part of the Museimpresa network of company museums, and a book on its history is titled CIFA: The Winning Anomaly. The mark on its website is orange, though no brand guidelines are published.

For a design guide, CIFA shows how a name that began as a description of steel forms can carry a company into truck mixers and pumps. Compare SCHWING, the German pump maker with a Chinese majority owner, and Putzmeister, another European concrete pump name. For this guide we use orange and near-black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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