Shortly before completing this issue, I was at a business lunch at a charming English public house, in a leafy suburb of London. One of many interesting conversational nuggets we chewed over was India, from where my lunch partner had recently returned.
It’s a geography ripe for discussion. How many businesses out there are not tapping into Indian resources or influenced in some other way? According to The Economist, three out of every 10 of the world’s new workers will be Indian. The country aims to build 20km of roads a day.
They’re hungry for lifting equipment too. Kobelco says it anticipates Indian crawler crane demand, for example, to more than triple over five years.
Editorially, we’ll be closely monitoring developments in the Indian marketplace, as we will all the other existing and prospective crane hubs of the world. But this recession is challenging us as information providers beyond the normal duties of trade publishing.
The crane industry is not set for a fast and widespread return to boom times. Very few, if any, economists or industry experts are predicting anything other than a slow incline in prospects, even if we’re close to unanimous agreement that the market has bottomed out.
It’d be unreasonable to expect miracles. As it was put to me over the same lunch, the industry has taken a battering, as if starved of oxygen. Sure, he said, you can survive on little oxygen for a while, but not for ever, and it makes you weaker.
I’m not suggesting for a minute that Cranes Today is providing any life support for the industry, but we can breath life into it as those who survived begin to flex their tired muscles.
Knowing the market is going to be key to the industry’s recovery: our data and information can help, we hope. Take p25 of this issue, for example, where we’ve taken a snapshot of the six axle all terrain market. Our recently introduced project maps are another way you can keep your fingers on the pulse of activity in different markets and geographies.
You’ll remember that last month I referred to our search for the latest edition to our editorial team, so I’ll take this opportunity to introduce our new reporter, Alice Attwood, who recently graduated from the UK’s Brighton University with a degree in Media & Communications. I trust you will make Alice feel as welcome as you made me when I took my first cranes assignment five and a bit years ago.
