Ainscough continues to ring the changes
3 August 2009Ainscough Crane Hire is combining its national sales effort under the leadership of George Kesterton, previously sales director with responsibility for the northern region.
Steve Wathen, previously heavy cranes general manager, has been promoted to the new position of commercial director, heavy cranes.
Kesterton and Wathen will absorb the responsibilities of Grant Mitchell, sales director for the southern region and heavy cranes, who has left the company to pursue other interests.
These promotions are the latest change at Ainscough, after numerous announcements in recent months. This includes a substantial change to its crane fleet, with the purchase of 20 Liebherr LTM 1150-6.1 mobile cranes and six heavy lift crawler cranes, and the announcement that John Lowton has replaced Bryan Cronie as SHE-Q director. Cronie has left to take up a position with Al Jaber in Singapore. Other internal promotions were also announced at the same time as Lowton’s appointment.
Ainscough is traditionally a mobile crane hire firm operating in the UK, so the move into heavy crawlers was particularly big news. It has purchased two 500t CC 2500s, two 600t CC 2800s and a 1,250t CC 6800 from Terex, as well as a 600t LR 1600/2 from Liebherr. The main work for the cranes will be generated by developments in the wind, nuclear and other power markets in the coming years.
Neil Partridge, managing director of Ainscough, said at the time that the addition of the cranes to its fleet also paves the way for it to offer cranes to an international customer base. This, he said, is due to the fact that high-capacity crawlers are widely used in one-off developments around the world, creating the potential for Ainscough to hire the cranes to companies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, or lease them with an operator crew to carry out work.
“We think there is somewhat of a hole in the supply side of the market for crawler cranes of this size,” Partridge said.
"There will be a lot of demand in the energy sector, particularly wind and nuclear, in the coming years, but also traditional energy markets. We feel confident there will be plenty of demand and think there’s enough business to go around.
“Unlike general mobile cranes, where there is an oversupply not only in this country but around the world, there is an undersupply of these types of crawler cranes.”
