Kobelco used crane business moves away from Japan
8 December 2008A trading business for used mobile cranes set up by Japanese crane manufacturer Kobelco is moving away from exporting Japanese cranes, according to global sales and marketing manager Yukinori Okagaki.
Kobelco Cranes Trading Co was set up in April 2008. "We realised that the market of secondhand crawler cranes is much bigger than the new replacement market," Okagaki said in an interview at Bauma China, "because brand new crawler cranes at the moment over several hundred tonnes have a lifetime of more than 20 years or 30 years, and in Asia they are sold and resold."
The business hived off used crane sales from Kobelco's long-established excavator trading business Kobelco Construction International Trading, where Okagaki personally worked for two years. "A crane is a different kind of construction machinery than an excavator. It is different to sell, the customers are different, the distribution is different."
Since April, the company has sold 300 units: 100 crawler cranes and 200 wheeled mobile cranes, of any brand, primarily exporting out of Japan.
But the company has realised that the Japanese supply of used cranes is limited. "In terms of the secondhand market, we like to buy and sell a 10-year-old crane. But 10 years ago, there was a long and heavy recession, and there were few sales, so there is little availability of this sort of crane. We cannot import any used crane into Japan.
"Now we are planning to set up a new category of secondhand business, where we trade from one third country to another third country. We buy in China and sell in Singapore, or buy in China and sell to China.
"We have already started studying this. it is difficult for us to buy the crane secondhand; we don't know the condition. We sell only as-is, there is no warrranty.
Okagaki said that the company's solution to this problem is to draw on the resources of Kobelco Cranes' branch staff. "We have local companies in Shanghai, Houston, Holland, UK and Dubai. We are planning to buy used cranes through them, and dispatch a sales engineer to inspect. Now we are training engineers in how to assess secondhand cranes."
"We have only sold one unit so far [in this way]: a secondhand truck crane from Taiwan, sold to Dubai."
He also said that the credit crunch has hurt the used trading business in Japan. "There is really a down trend now," he said, adding that banks are reluctant to finance secondhand crane sales.
