Mammoet president Frans van Seumeren has revealed that he has abandoned plans for an initial public offering for his company.
Van Seumeren said in September 2000 that he was aiming to take his company public in 2003. Last month at the Conexpo show in Las Vegas he revealed that he had changed his plans.
This is not the first time that Van Seumeren has turned away from taking his company public. In early 1999 he was considering an IPO for what was then Van Seumeren but delayed actions when the opportunity to acquire its rival Mammoet arose.
Mammoet, as Van Seumeren’s company is now called, has instead sought to grow through joint ventures, notably with another Dutch crane hire and trading company, Hovago. Hovago and Mammoet jointly own Holift, a crawler crane rental business that specialises in the 250t to 500t niche. Mammoet itself undertakes heavy lifting contracts above this market and crane rental below it.
Holift, whose cranes are all in Mammoet colours, placed an order with Liebherr at Conexpo for 10 units of the LR 1350/1 and two of the LR 1450/2. This takes Holift’s fleet to more than 40 cranes. Holift is also working with Holift also announced that it has formed a joint venture with Irga of Brazil, called Mammoet Irga Brazil (MIB). MIB has three Manitowoc crawlers and will get one of the new LR 1450/2s.
The LR 1450/2 is the Mammoet/Holift name for what Liebherr calls the LR 1400.
Mammoet itself spent about Euro 50m on new cranes last year (with Euro 30m of those orders going to Liebherr), and it plans to spend a similar amount this year.
Mammoet also has a heavylift joint venture, called AVS, in the USA with Maxim.
Another joint venture project of Mammoet is the ‘Jumping Jack’ jack-up barge that it is having built in association with Hovago, Van Oord and Marine Construct. This jack-up barge, which represents a Euro 25m investment by its backers, is being built to place the foundations of offshore windmills. It is fitted with the Manitowoc M1200 Ringer that Walter Wright Mammoet used to have in Singapore (and which featured on the cover of the March 1998 issue of Cranes Today). Though running some weeks late, this barge is expected to be completed and sent into the North Sea off the west coast of Denmark to start work within the next few weeks placing monopile foundations for the Horns Rev project, the world’s biggest offshore wind farm. In the meantime, Mammoet Van Oord has begun work on the project with rented equipment. Mammoet Van Oord is working as a subcontractor to Danish contractor MT Hojgaard.
The contract for transporting and lifting the turbines themselves into place is held by a new company, A2Sea, established specifically to erect offshore turbines, as described in the February issue of Cranes Today. A2Sea, contracted to wind power company Vestas, began work on 12 April.
