Essex Crane Rental, owner of the world’s biggest fleet of crawler cranes for hire, has abandoned its long-held policy of buying only Manitowoc product and decided to add Liebherrs to its fleet of 423 Manitowoc crawlers.
Essex announced on 7 July that it had signed a deal to buy ‘an undisclosed quantity of the model HS 855 SX’ from Liebherr-Nenzing Crane Company, the US operations of Liebherr-Werk Nenzing of Austria. The duty-cycle HS 855 is rated at 90 metric tonne by Liebherr and 115 US ton by Essex.
Under former owner Vince Morano, Essex grew into the world’s largest provider of Manitowoc lattice boom crawler cranes and attachments. Morano retired in May 2000 and sold to venture capitalists Kirtland Capital Partners.
When Kirtland recruited Ron Schad as president and CEO of Essex, Manitowoc could take comfort that Essex’s ‘only Manitowoc’ policy would remain intact. Schad, after all, was general manager of Manitowoc Cranes at the time and had been instrumental in bringing Manitowoc back from the brink with a new line of hydraulic cranes in the 1990s. There was no greater fan of Manitowoc machines than Schad.
However, Schad was never blind to the benefits of other brands and Manitowoc has failed to secure his absolute loyalty.
Schad said that his decision to add these Liebherrs to his fleet of crawler cranes was ‘relatively easy after a thorough market and technical examination of the available product choices was completed’.
