Great Yarmouth Port Authority in the UK has been forced to sell its Liebherr LHM 250 mobile harbour crane that it bought in 1997 after failing to attract sufficient traffic.
The crane cost £1.4m ($1.96m) originally and had been bought in the hope of attracting larger scale cargo ships to the port.
Port manager Alex Woods said that out of the four years the crane had been on site, only one year had been profitable for it. ‘It was simply a case of the expenditure for the crane not justifying the income we were getting,’ he said.
Woods added that the crane had started to be used for much smaller lifts, that would normally have been carried out by the port’s three NCK cranes, just to ‘keep it busy.’ The crane has been sold to a port in Guatemala for £1m ($1.4m). Woods said that with the money saved on the hire purchase agreement on the crane, the port had been able to buy two warehouses and a new forklift.
