Hiap Tong Crane and Transport

20 October 2011


Hiap Tong Corporation started trading in 1978, selling motor vehicles, before specialising in crane rental and heavy transport ten years later. From there the family-owned business has moved on from focusing solely on the saturated Singapore construction equipment market to set up locations in China, India and Malaysia. Kevin Walsh interviewed Patrick Ng, executive director of operations and sales, Hiap Tong

Hiap Tong Crane and Transport belongs to the Ong family. On the board, Ong Teck Meng serves as the current chairman, who is also the founder of Hiap Tong.

I am Ong Teck Meng’s cousin, and serve alongside him on the board along with his son Alvin Ong, who takes care of finance, and his brother Sunny Ong. My role is executive director in charge of operations and sales. Sunny is also an executive director at Hiap Tong, he takes care of the maintenance department.

We have around 250 staff. Roughly 160 of these are operators and drivers, plus we have approximately 180 maintenance staff.

Our main office is in Singapore, but we also have one joint-venture company, Hiap Tong Anda Heavylift, in Inner Mongolia, China. We have also set up rep offices in Malaysia and India, so in total there are four locations.

Singapore is a bit too saturated with equipment, so in terms of revenue it is not so great at the moment. Some rental rates have dropped by 50% or 70%, so it’s affecting everyone. So we are looking for overseas projects at the moment.

We mainly operate locally, specialising in plant maintenance for oil refineries, plus mainly installation work on vessels in shipyards. We have some work in China, Inner Mongolia, where we have a 500t Liebherr performing erection and maintenance operations for the wind farms there, they are quite busy there, but most of our major works are in Singapore.

In India and Malaysia, our other two markets, we are still exploring. Our offices there are only very young. We’ve been In India almost a year, and Malaysia is only a few months on, so there's not so much activity there as there is at some of our other locations at the moment.

The China joint venture office has been open for a year plus, so since around 2010. We are also looking for more jobs for the 1,200t Liebherr LTM 11200 on wind farms there, but lately we are also looking at the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, as I think work in these regions is booming.

Currently we have 110 cranes, the bulk of which are 200–400 tonners, as the 200–250t range is quite popular with customers in India. We offer almost a complete range from to 200t to 1200t.

For big tonnage, we have the 1200t LTM 11200 mobile crane, that's the largest in our fleet. Next would be 800t LTM 1800, and we have a 700t AC 700 SSL Demag.

In the 500t range we have two Liebherr LTM1500 units with 84m booms. Smaller than that, we have an AC1300 400t Demag, and we are also buying the latest 300t Manitowoc Grove GMK 6300 within the next month.

Our 200 tonners are mostly Liebherr cranes as well as a Grove GMK 6220, a GMK 5220 and a Demag AC 250, but our smallest cranes are 15t rough terrains. We have quite a mixture of rough terrain brands. Representing Japan we have Tadano, Kato and Kobelco and then for the Europe, Terex Demag and Liebherr.