A NEWLY established private equity fund has bought Manitowoc Boom Trucks from The Manitowoc Company. The sale price has not been disclosed.
The purchaser is Quantum Heavy Equipment, a subsidiary of Quantum Value Partners, led by Ken Ghazey. He said Quantum planned to buy ‘adjacent businesses’ to develop the fund.
Manitowoc was required by the US Department of Justice last year, as a condition of approval for its acquisition of Grove, to sell either its own boom truck division or Grove’s National Crane subsidiary.
As part of the transaction, all of Manitowoc Boom Trucks’ assets and liabilities were transferred to Quantum Heavy Equipment, which, as required under the consent decree with the Department of Justice, has the right to use the ‘Manitowoc Boom Trucks’ brand name for three years. Excluded from the sale is the model S282, launched at Conexpo 2002, which features a Potain self-erecting tower crane mounted on a commercial truck. This model was originally part of the the boom truck range, but was moved from Manitowoc Boom Truck’s operation in Texas to the Grove plant in Pennsylvania ahead of the sale.
One of Ken Ghazey’s partners is David Langevin, who was financial director of Terex until 1998 and was more recently a managing director in the corporate finance department of GKM Value Partners, the company behind Atlas Construction, the entity that was used to acquire German loader crane and excavator manufacturer Atlas Weyhausen in July 2001. GKM brought in Terex to advise on the restructuring of Atlas. By the end of 2001 Terex had taken ownership.
Given that the Department of Justice would not let the boom truck operations of Manitowoc and National join together, it seems unlikely that Terex – number two behind National in this market – will be allowed to emerge as the eventual owner of Manitowoc Boom Trucks unless the market situation changes significantly.
