Baldwins INDUSTRIAL Services chairman Richard Baldwin has said that he wants to buy the crane hire business of Hewden Stuart.
On 29 November Hewden Stuart’s directors accepted a bid of £322m ($450m) from Caterpillar distributor Finning International for the entire company. Baldwin is hoping that the new owners will not want to keep the crane division. He said he would be “very interested if the new owners decide to sell”.
Baldwins had a bid for Initial GWS rejected this year, and it would appear that Hewden is the next target. It is understood that Ainscough Group is in the final stages of negotiating the purchase of Initial GWS’s mobile crane assets.
The takeover of Hewden Stuart by Finning is expected to be completed by January 2001. Finning president Doug Whitehead said that any decision to sell or keep the crane fleet rested with Hewden’s new chief executive, Paul Jarvis, who joined the company just this month.
