In a prepared statement to open the XCMG stand, Wang Min, chairman and CEO said: “2008 has been a tough year when many players slashed their profits when the market turned down for construction machinery, after the world financial crisis. However, it is a turning point for XCMG. As a result of the performance improvement campaign, a product line harmonisation, and strong internal cost control, XCMG has outperformed all its competitors. For the first 10 months of 2008, XCMG has booked revenue of CNY 35.2bn ($5.15bn), paid total taxes of CNY 2.61bn ($382m) to the state and realised sales of $740m. For all the three items, we have seen more than 46% year on year growth, compared with last year.”
In a similar stand ceremony, Zhan Chun Xin, Zoomlion CEO and chairman, said: “Although the financial crisis has had some effect on construction machinery, I still think that the peak will return after the downturn.”
At an evening customer dinner, Yoshihiro Tanno, CEO of Japanese crawler crane firm Kobelco said:
“The demand for cranes was excellent for these past several years, and production and shipment numbers expanded on a global scale, however the big change of the business circumstances in these days influences us gradually. I don’t feel the decrease of the customers’ needs, but I suppose that some of them want to wait and see how the future is going on in this unstable situation.”
Yong Ming Shen, secretary-general of the China Construction Machinery Association engineering crane bureau, told Cranes Today that sales of Chinese mobile cranes fell 13.2% and crawler cranes by 28% in the June to October trading period, compared with the same period last year. But she said that massive increases in the first two quarters of 2008 still meant that the January-October mobile crane sales had increased 18.8%, and crawler crane sales 93%, compared with the same period last year.
In an interview before Bauma China, she told Cranes Today, “Maybe the numbers are down, but business is still up for big-capacity cranes: mobile cranes above 100t capacity, crawlers above 200t capacity. Chinese policy on road, railway, airport and petrol is that its investment won’t decrease, and that is good for cranes. But the global economic crisis is having a big influence on the building segment; commercial and residential construction, and also steel mills and metals production. We are not so sad about the situation; we are optimistic. We think that the speed of increase of market growth may be slowed, which is very normal. We can’t be always increasing by 30-40%. We will see growth of perhaps 10% in 2009.”
