The business was set up in February 2007. It is a 100% subsidiary of Sarens, run from Sarens’ headquarters in Belgium.

Quite a few companies are looking to deal with orders that are in excess of their own machinery park.

There are now 100 cranes in the fleet, and approximately 25 are going on cross-hire to rental companies, externally and internally, and the other 75 percent to construction companies. That ratio may change.

We don’t rent out to anyone passing by, as such. We of course care about the machines and safety, above all. If there is no prior experience with crane usage in their fleet, I will be reluctant to hire them out. The cranes are hired without any maintenance services. We have a fly-in crew that passes by to see if the cranes are being maintained according to the manufacturers’ specifications.

We have seen, from the requests that we are getting and what we are seeing in the world market that quite a few construction companies are looking toward renting in large fleets of a mixture of RTs, ATs and crawler cranes, while in the past they would only go for rented equipment with personnel.

We decided to set up a separate division because Sarens is not represented everywhere, although it has about 30 companies. I received a call yesterday from Niger. I am quite happy to send someone over there to give instructions on the cranes and educate them, but without a subsidiary or branches there, sending someone to work for 12 months in the middle of Niger is difficult.

On average requests are for 24 months.

We have 25 crawler cranes, including Hitachi KH-500, Kobelco CKE-2500s, four Liebherr 1400s, and some Sany crawlers too. Our biggest is a Demag CC-2800. Out of 75 ATs and RTs, half are RTs, mainly Grove and Terex brands. The ATs are mainly Terex and Liebherr.

We go for a mixture of cranes, because clients often put forward requests for certain models.

We generally have a young fleet. Because of the market, we are operating bare in far away countries like Niger and Angola. You can’t send knackered old cranes over there, or I will have the client jumping the gun and yelling in my ear.

The most popular destination at the moment is Oceania, but we are really worldwide. Some equipment has never touched the Belgian office.

I have one free crane, a 40t Sennebogen tele-crawler in Belgium. If you know of a good job for it, let me know.

Stefaan Vandierendonck, operations director