MacGregor moves to Denmark

Marine crane manufacturer MacGregor Group has revealed plans for a restructuring that will simplify the organisation's structure to increase its efficiency, the company claimed. Central to the reorganisation is moving the head office from Ornskooldsvik in Sweden to Copenhagen in Denmark.

"Service is the primary area of future growth for MacGregor," said the group's president and CEO, Hans Pettersson. "And improved service includes concentrating on getting even closer to our customers: the Group's headquarters will have completed a move to Copenhagen on 1 July, nearer the vital European shipowner and shipmanager community; and the future Dry Cargo division that we're establishing will be run from Shanghai, at the heart of the world's shipbuilding centre, which of course is Asia." After his appointment in August 2002, Hans Pettersson initiated a review of every aspect of MacGregor's activities. "For more than 60 years we've consistently come up with revolutionary cargo handling solutions that have become the standard. We have a truly global presence, both in terms of manufacturing and our service network. More than 13,000 ships use MacGregor products. Why weren't we more profitable?" he said.

MacGregor has a light capital structure as it outsources a lot of design and all production tasks, which gives the group manoeuvrability generate cash flow under most market conditions. Since June 1998, when the Swedish private equity fund Industri Kapital acquired the majority of shares in the MacGregor Group from Incentive, MacGregor's strategy has been to combine service business development with product development. However, although revenues continued to grow, even in difficult market conditions, operating profit did not keep up.

Pettersson said that productivity was the main culprit. "The organisation of the group was too complex. We should have taken better advantage of the synergies available from our highly skilled resources. And we've identified that working more efficiently should produce an overall cost reduction of at least €8 million".

One step in the new plan has been to form a new Service division to pull together all the group's customer-oriented responsibilities: newbuilding sales, after sales and new products. Pettersson is managing this division himself. "The net benefit of the Service division to our customers will be improved efficiency," Pettersson said. This will be achieved by economies of scale in, for example, logistics and spare parts handling, and a single spare parts unit will now handle spares for all of the Group's divisions.

Another new division, the Dry Cargo division, will combine the activities of the Hatch Cover and Cranes divisions. "For shipowners and shipyards who want both products, this creates a common MacGregor 'face' to deal with, and our focus on ship types will be increased," Pettersson said.

"However this cannot be achieved overnight - most likely it will happen over the next couple of years or so. More immediately, the Hatch Cover division's general manager [Markku Mattila] will move from Europe to Shanghai before the end of 2003." Markku Mattila also becomes president of MacGregor's Asian operations. He will manage the integration of MacGregor-Kayaba and MacGregor's activities in Asia.

MacGregor has already has a presence in China, including a design team in Shanghai; a crane production partnership with Luzhou in Nanjing; a joint venture with the rubber company Haida for hatch cover seals; a partnership with NCSC in Nantong for production of hatch covers for Korea; and a partnership with Dalian Shidao in Dalian producing securing products. MacGregor has increased its ownership of MacGregor-Kayaba in Japan during 2003, where synergies with the Chinese and Korean operations will be utilised under the new management, the company said.