Wagenborg, Nedlift’s parent company, has roots going back 150 years, to 1862; some of the member companies of Nedlift go back even further, to 1845. The current Wagenborg business was founded by tjalk (Dutch barge) skipper Egbert Wagenborg in 1898. Today, cousins Rob Wagenborg and Egbert Vuursteen run the business together.
The business began by shipping wood and salt to Denmark. Over the next 100 years, it developed into an international shipping business. By the end of the 20th century, its family owners were looking to diversify into land transport.
Ton Klijn, managing director of Nedlift Wagenborg, explains, "Wagenborg first bought the Reining transport company in Kolham in the mid-1980s, involved in general transport.
"Next, they bought bought the Kramer company in Schoonebeek. Kramer had transport and cranes for oil and gas in the north of Holland. It was a family business, with no succession. They then had the chance to buy a second transport company, Lommerts, which was also very old. Lommerts became available because the holding company that owned it went bankrupt; the exceptional transport side was bought out of it by Rob Wagenborg. So now he had two transport companies, Lommerts and Kramer, operating completely independent.
"At the end of the 1990s, the Van Wezel group came up for sale. It had originally been sold into Mammoet, and then Mammoet has sold it back to Henk van Wezel. He then sold it to the Plegt-Vos group. They bought De Groot, and, in Dordrecht, Team Heavy Lift. Rob was offered the Van Wezel group; the geography makes sense, as it was spread over the north of the Netherlands. Rob decided to merge everything together, and named it Nedlift, in 1999."
The new company gave Wagenborg lifting and transport coverage across the Netherlands, but the legacy of being formed from seven different companies was a challenge. Klijn says: "If you put together six, seven, old cultures and tell everyone, ‘We now love each other and we have to work together’, it doesn’t work."
Klijn was given the task of making Nedlift work as one business. He says, "The market was beginning to pick up, but the company itself was not in a very good state. We turned it around in four years, with only a few people leaving, maybe only ten. None left from the floor, all from management. Now, we have less chiefs, and more Indians. Makes things easier.
"With it turned around, we had a managment meeting. I remember I said, ‘Look guys, now we have everything under control; either we go play golf, leave at three every afternoon, or we go to Mr Wagenborg, to ask for more money to do the next trick’. Everyone there said, ‘No, no, we want to go on.’ We needed more money than the company could generate on its own, so we went to the supervisory board with a plan to invest in heavy crawlers and SPMTs; we thought we needed to go into a level higher.
"At that time, the company was limited to 500t telescopic cranes and 12 lines of conventional platform trailers, with a skidding and jacking limit of 250t. In 2004, if we had a 200t transfomer, the whole company was upside down for three weeks. Now, we can do five a week. We have 80 lines of SPMTs, and our biggest crawler is an LR1750. Along with four big crawlers we have a few Sennebogen 5500s, all acquired in the last few years.
"Then we decided to invest in jacking and skidding capacity, up to 2,000t, which we now have. The good thing about not having equipment is that if you invest, straight away you can invest in state-ofthe-art equipment. So we bought a jacking system, we bought climbing jacks, we bought them with height leveling, we bought them with pressure equalisation, computer controls, everything you want. If you do invest in that gear, that last bit is not so important anymore.
"We also have weighing gear up to 1,000t capacity. So we’re quite well geared for most jobs.
"We’re using it for oil and gas, for power and for civil. One of the big markets traditionally in the northern part of Holland and Germany was for shipbuilding, but that is going down."
The move to being able to handle heavier work couldn’t have come at a better time. Klijn says: "In 2003, sixty-to-seventy per cent of our work was normal residential construction. Now, that’s down to about 30%; the rest is industrial work, oil and gas, petrochemical, chemical, power plants. In terms of capacity, not for the biggest crawlers but for telescopics, its all over the board.
"We’ve reduced our crane fleet a little bit in terms of types and ages, we changed some investment decisions at the last moment. We discarded certain tower cranes from Liebherr, and went for telescopic cranes instead. We saw the market tilting and said, ‘Let’s get out of this.’ I am glad we did, otherwise we would have got a lot of tower cranes we didn’t know what to do with.
‘If we hadn’t changed the exposure of the company from the outset, we would have had a real problem. A number of crane companies in Holland are having very difficult times, because they are too much reliant on construction work and construction of housing. The volume for housing in Holland is at about a third of the normal rate. If we are complaining, the contractors are crying.
"We still operate 120 normal road going trucks. We need to replace 20-25 a year. Now is the time to buy a truck, you’ll get a good price: the truck and trailer fabricators are crying out for work. We all have the same problem though. You have all of this gear, all of these people. Whether you work or not, costs are going straight on. At previous conferences, the Asians and the Americans were not half as pessimistic as we are in Europe. Only Europe is the problem; and the problem for us, is we are in Europe."
