British crawler crane manufacturer NCK is back in administration, four years after it was last rescued. The collapse comes on the back of NCK’s most successful year under its current ownership, producing three 90t machines and at least two 65 tonners.
Administrative receiver Bob Young of insolvency practitioner Poppleton & Appleby said that while he was talking to one possible buyer of the business he was “not hopeful of selling it as a going concern”.
NCK traces its roots back to 1869 when it began life as Ransomes & Rapier, producing steam cranes and railway equipment.
Newton Chambers Koehring, which made cranes under licence from Koehring of the USA (now part of Terex) bought Ransomes & Rapier in 1959.
NCK later fell into the hands of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, (as part of a wider deal – Maxwell wasn’t really interested in cranes and at this time NCK became inactive). In the 1990s a company called Cliffe Holdings had a go at making money out of NCK but by 1997, shortly after launching the 65t hydraulic Nova model, staffing levels had fallen to 38, down from 1,200 in 1982.
It was an engineering company called Staffordshire Public Works (SPW) that bought NCK from the administrative receivers in 1997. SPW also produced traffic lights and filtration equipment.
Although it is the whole of SPW that has been placed in administration, Bob Young said he was confident of trading the other companies in the group through to recovery and handing them back to the directors, when NCK had been sold or closed. “To some extent it is the losses that NCK has made that have dragged the whole group down. It has been losing money,” said Young.
NCK appears to have become too burdensome for NCK just at the time it was appearing to get back into the game. NCK launched a new model last year, the 90t Astra, and exhibited it at SED 2000. Three Astra units were produced and delivered last year, one for Weldex and two for Initial GWS. Since the takeover of GWS’s crawler fleet by Weldex, all three are now owned by Weldex. Weldex also has six Novas in its fleet, delivered between 1995 and 2000.
The last machine built by NCK was a Nova, delivered in January this year.
According to Young, NCK has orders on its books and has a crane that is part built, so there may be someone out there who is interested, even if it just for the spare parts business. “I am not looking to trade NCK through to recovery though,” he said.
The UK’s other crawler crane manufacturer, RB, went into administration last year. In December it was rescued by Langley Holdings, a diverse engineering group. Young said that Langley had not expressed any interest in rescuing NCK as well.
