Giovanni Fassi: 'We're not ready to cry just yet"

Joking that, “We're not ready to cry just yet,” Fassi noted that the outlook for the industry this year was gloomy: “The crane industry is in a declining phase. 2008 has been a quiet year. Luckily, we have a pretty good order backlog. We expect 2009 to see a pretty strong decrease of the European market. Our product is a typically European product: 75% of the cranes are sold in the European market.

“We expect sales down 35% in 2009. We still have markets, in Eastern Europe, where sales are good, but others, such as Spain, are dead. Italy, France and Germany are not going so badly: we expect a decrease of 10-20% in these markets. It's hard to know, we can't really budget for next year. What has happened is unexpected for everyone.

“There are markets that are not bad—South America , the Middle East—but we are talking about countries that are a lot smaller than Europe. South East Asia, countries like Singapore and Taiwan, are still good. Australia is following Europe and the USA.

“The market will change. Some companies will be reduced pretty much. We've already seen these changes when we've gone through phases like this, with some companies running close to bankruptcy. It's often hard for them to get back.”

The company, Fassi said, will concentrate on development, over further increases in production capacity: “We haven't cut any staff yet, but if the decrease is as expected, 25-35%, we will have to do that. We won't cut new product launches, and will continue to invest in new products: we will be launching a new electronic system next year, in line with new EU norms. Now is the time, when the market is down, to offer new products, new developments.

“Fassi is a good, strong, company. The plan is to invest in new products, new cranes. In the last year, we've made no new investments in production capacity. We'd already made automatised a lot of the production.

“What we're presenting at SAIE is the new F30CY City crane. It's a small crane, designed for narrow streets and historic centres. We've also introduced the JDP (jib dual power) device. This adjusts the jib capacity according to the position of the main boom extensions. It's aimed at the larger cranes, with a capacity over 90tm. At some points, it increases the load chart by 30%.

“We're introducing a new Scanreco remote control. We are the only loader company with fully digital CanBUS controls, and that means we can't buy standard remote controls, we have to buy custom systems. It took us many years to achieve this with Scanreco; for a long time we only had HBC remote controls.

“We're also concentrating on environmental and fuel issues: hydraulic oil, and diesel for the engine. The target has been to reduce the weight of the crane. We believe our cranes weigh less, by capacity, than our competitors. We want to control the truck engine more and more by CanBUS. We want to combine our system, and the truck engine, to get better performance, to reduce fuel consumption.

“We've co-operated with [Swedish steel manufacturer] SSAB. We're investing with them in research, and are testing the new SSAB 1300 steel at the moment. This would be used on the jib, outriggers and for reinforcement. We're currently using the 700-1100 steels. As well as SSAB, we're working with [Finnish component manufacturer] Ruukki. The target is to be light, light, light.”