Manufacturing plants of Manitowoc, Grove and National in the USA and Germany have taken cost cutting measures to ride out the downturn in the market.
‘The worldwide market for our products continues to soften and we are now entering the period of the year in which our order intake historically has dropped off because of reduced construction activity in the winter months,’ Grove general manager John Wheeler told Grove employees in a memo last month. Grove had already planned a series of temporary production shutdowns in November, December and January to balance production with customer demand. A further week’s shutdown in October has been added. Wheeler said that further cost cutting measures were needed was required. Some 95 sales, engineering and general administrative jobs are to be cut at Shady Grove and similar action has been taken at National Crane and in Europe at Deutsche Grove.
Manitowoc Cranes has also had temporary shutdowns and laid off about 90 of its 440 hourly factory workers in August, though expected to take these employees back as soon as conditions improved.
