Since its establishment in 1986, Tekno Group has been one of the market leaders in Turkey as distributor for some of the world’s largest manufacturers of construction machinery. Sales and marketing of tower cranes started in the Turkish market with Simma, the Italian manufacturer. Later on, Cadillon cranes, and then BPR cranes from France were included in the Tekno sales organization (before they became part of Potain, then Manitowoc in 2002).

Tekno has been instrumental in developing the use of tower cranes in the Turkish construction industry and has been the market leader since 1989. Tekno was also the first organisations offering rental of tower cranes in Turkey in 1994, and it’s now the largest and the most comprehensive crane rental fleet in the Turkish market. Tekno Tower Crane Group also carries on the marketing, after sales and rental services of Stros personnel and material hoists. With the market leadership in the tower crane sales, the customer demand has gradually increased for construction hoists both for sales and rental applications in the last 12 years. Therefore a decision was taken to include hoists in our product range to meet the demand in the industry. The use of construction hoists is getting wider every year, especially in the rental market. Tekno’s rental fleet is composed of about 100 different types of tower cranes and 35 construction hoists. Since Tekno is the main supplier of tower cranes and construction hoists to the Turkish contractors, we work in a wide range of countries wherever the Turkish companies are involved in. In recent years Turkish contractors have become the second largest group in the world after Chinese contractors in terms of the total value of awarded tenders. Tekno sales and after sales teams are constantly working in areas of ex-Soviet Union territories, the Balkan Countries, all the Middle East and North African Countries. Recently, new countries have been included in our list, such as Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Sudan, Eritrea. The requirements of Turkish construction companies are varying from 5 to 20t for tower cranes, but the most popular model is the 8t version. For the construction hoists the most popular one is the 2t capacity model.

So far, the impact of the European economic crises in Turkey has been quite minimal. The construction industry in 2012 has shown a steady growth following the strong performance of the past 4 years. The result of the growing construction market has attracted all the main tower crane manufacturers to Turkey and has increased the competition levels drastically. The new comers have pushed the average sale price of cranes downward and we expect the trend to continue as long as the construction market carries on at its present level.

On the rental side there is a similar pressure for lower prices since number of rental cranes in the market has been growing steadily, but at the same time the rental demand is also growing on a similar level. We forecast a major increase in rental demand in the coming years, especially for the bigger capacity tower crane models. Tekno is already active in most of the large cities at the moment. It has an ambitious growth plan specifically in expending its rental fleet and to cover the remaining part of Turkey where the demand for rental cranes is just starting for all different types of construction projects.

Sinan Tureyen, Vice President, Tekno