This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Lino Zanussi" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message) A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the talk page. (December 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this message) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Italian. (April 2013) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Italian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Italian Wikipedia article at [[:it:Lino Zanussi]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|it|Lino Zanussi}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Lino Zanussi (Pordenone, February 15, 1920 - San Sebastián, June 18, 1968) was an Italian businessman and appliance manufacturer.

Antonio Zanussi (Lino's father) was the son of a blacksmith. At the age of 26, in 1916, when the economy of Pordenone was still largely agricultural, he opened a small workshop where he began making stoves and ovens. He sold his products under the brand name "Rex". By 1920, when Lino was born, the "Workshop Antonio Zanussi" had 10 workers and launched a product that was initially created for export: the AZP (Antonio Zanussi Pordenone), the first wood-burning oven made of molded iron.

When Antonio died on November 21, 1946, the company had one hundred employees. Lino and his brother Guido took over the company. At first, they decided to produce for the domestic market. Having received an education in business by his father, Lino developed the company, making it a major European producer of appliances. By 1962, it had surpassed its German competitors to become the largest company in Europe producing gas and electric stoves, gas rings, washing machines, dishwashers and refrigerators domestically marketed under the "Rex" and "Naonis" brand names (export models were always branded "Zanussi"). In 1960, the company also began making televisions under the brand name "Seleco".^[1] The company's business model, according to Lino Zanussi, is "... To sell we need to produce a better quality with lower costs, if we don't have one of these two requirements, we lose the market .... " At the time of Zanussi's death, the company had 13,000 employees in 13 factories. Since then, other companies have been acquired which now make up the Zanussi Group.

Zanussi participated in creating the CUOA Foundation at the University of Padua. In the spring of 1963, the University gave him an honorary degree in industrial engineering. On the 21 of October 1966, President Giuseppe Saragat with the Minister of Industry Giulio Andreotti in the Zanussi factory in Porcia, said:

"When we talk of our Nation, we have to think about life in our country. Our nation's life is linked to the past and projected into the future, but is represented by people living today. And living in its noblest form is work. It is more than creating wealth: Work is the greatest creator of the moral forces on which civil society is founded "

Zanussi advocated this concept of work as a source of morality and civilization. His idea of enterprise is a severe but not paternalistic control, modern and rational, directed toward globalization of markets (with a dominant presence in the European market, with constant attention to assimilating technical and managing know-how, and with a strategy oriented towards the Eastern European countries), the company must create wealth for employees and for the local territory, developing it from a social and cultural point of view.

On 18 June 1968, a Piaggio PD.808 demonstration aircraft I-PIAI crashed in bad weather when it flew into the side of Mount Jaizkibel, near San Sebastian, Spain. All six on board, including Zanussi, were killed.^[2]