I first visited China for BICES in 2007. At the time, few manufacturers seemed ready to look beyond local sales. The few Westerners I met were casting a pretty sceptical eye over the cranes on offer.
Kevin Walsh flew to Beijing for the most recent BICES, at the end of October 2011. The market he describes in this issue, has been transformed, on both the supply and demand sides.
On my visit, four years ago, I was shocked to hear sales figures for truck cranes of more than 10,000 units a year, far beyond that of any other country. In 2010, the country built 35,000 units of these cranes.
The local market for these smaller cranes may have slowed slightly at the end of 2011, Stuart Anderson reports elsewhere in this issue, but it will still be a close-run thing whether the country’s truck crane manufacturers have another record-breaking year.
When I visited BICES in 2007, the Chinese crawler was only beginning to take off. That year, Shen Yongming, secretary general of the hoist branch of the China Construction Machinery Association, presented figures showing Chinese manufacturers had sold more than 500 crawlers in 2006, up 111% on the previous year’s figure of 237 units, and predicted sales around the 700 unit mark for 2007.
This year, Stuart Anderson reports, local Chinese users look likely to buy as many as 2,000 units, just in the 50-250t range.
When I visited BICES, manufacturers were just getting to grips with building cranes in this range for strictly local and emerging market demand. Now, many Chinese manufacturers are building medium-to-large crawlers, and setting their sights on buyers around the world.
A few of the biggest Chinese manufacturers have spent the intervening years developing megacrawlers that, in stated capacity at least, rival any built in Germany or the USA. There have been some well-reported, and tragic, mis-steps on the way, but the scale of Chinese ambition is clear.
What does this mean for the global market? It is hard to think that Chinese cranebuilders will not soon dominate many market niches. In those markets they don’t dominate, they will play a bigger role. Increasingly, foreign rivals will not be able to compete solely on the basis of quality-vs-price. On both sides, firms are looking to joint ventures and investment in new overseas facilities to allow them to offer higher quality cranes at prices that appeal to increasingly cost conscious users around the world.
