Tadano reports sales drop

Decreased sales and exchange rate effects resulted in an operating income of  ¥14.2bn, down 37.0% year-on-year.

The company’s revenue from the sales of mobile cranes dropped by 22.2% year-on-year to ¥78.8bn. Mobile crane product sales accounted for 61.5% of the company’s total sales revenue.

Over the same period, mobile crane sales in Japan fell by 16.7% to ¥28.2bn, while outside Japan they declined by 24.9% to ¥50.6bn.

Tadano saw truck loader crane sales drop by 4.2% year-on-year to ¥14.1bn.

The only product category that Tadano reported an increase in sales for was aerial work platforms, which rose by 16.6% to ¥15.3bn.

Overall, Tadano witnessed a year-on-year drop in sales revenues in all its major markets.

The marginal fall in revenue generated in Japan (5.4%) compared to the rest of the world (22.4%), resulted in Japan accounting for 53.2% of the total. In the same period in 2015, sales outside Japan exceeded those of Tadano’s domestic market.

North America remained the manufacturer’s top export market, despite a 32.8% drop in sales. In this region sales revenue stood at ¥19.5bn, nearly ¥3.5bn higher than Europe where sales fell by 8.4% year-on-year.

In the rest of Asia sales were down by 15.5%, while in the Middle East by 37.1%.

In the smaller Caribbean, Central and South America market sale revenue was 86.3% higher year-on-year at ¥1.1bn..

Tadano said: “In our industry, while there were signs of a downtrend in demand for construction cranes, the Japanese market shifted toward stronger demand overall, due to earthquake recovery and reconstruction, disaster preparedness and mitigation activities, efforts to address an aging infrastructure, and private sector construction investment.

“While demand increased in Europe, it fell in North America and the Middle East due to the influence of crude oil prices, and demand in Southeast Asia fell along with slowing economic growth, leading demand outside of Japan to decline overall.”