Liebherr Nenzing targets USA

Liebherr-Werk Nenzing is planning a new family of crawler cranes designed as lift cranes, with the boom market of North America as its key target.

To date, the Austrian plant has produce only one lift crane, the 250t-capacity LR 1250 launched at Bauma 98 as a 200 tonner but subsequently improved. The rest of its crawler crane output has been designed primarily for duty cycle and foundation work. The factory also produces ship, offshore and harbour mobile cranes.

Liebherr is specifically targeting North America with the new range. About 80 key customers from North America were brought over to Austria for a few days in October, put up in the luxurious Liebherr-owned five star Interalpen Hotel in the Tyrol, and given factory tours, product demonstrations and presentations. About half of the guests were potential or actual crawler crane customers. Last year Liebherr-Werk Nenzing set up Liebherr Crawler Crane Company in Houston, Texas.

Among the crawlers on show was a new 200t duty-cycle model, the HS 895. (With the last digit indicating the series number, it should technically have been called the HS 894, but that is deemed an inauspicious number by the Chinese, and using it risked jeopardising sales in Asia.). Also new was the LHM 70, a 26t capacity three-legged harbour mobile.

The importance of the North American market is highlighted by the official figures which show that about 400 lattice boom crawler cranes were delivered there in 1999, overtaking the Far East, including Japan, which took about 350. North America accounted for about 50% of the world’s deliveries of crawler cranes in 1999. In contrast, in1995 it accounted for less than 5%.