The company said that sales in the crane sector had been driven primarily by continued growth in the Americas region, and demand in emerging markets, but was muted by continuing weakness in Europe, cranes saw a 7.8% improvement on last year to $547.4m from $507.9m in 2012. Operating earnings in the lifting section of the business were up $9.9m on last year. Manitowoc said that higher sales volume and operational efficiencies had resulted in a higher operating margin of 5.7% compared with 4.2% last year.
At the end of March backlog for cranes totalled $776m, an increase of $20 million from year-end 2012. The business said that a 16% reduction in Q1 2013 orders of $569 million had been anticipated given the timing of the Bauma trade show.
Speaking at the quarterly conference call, Manitowoc’s chairman and chief executive officer, Glen Tellock said: "We continue to see growth in North America as crane customers are beginning to renew their fleets due to increased project activity and improving rental rates. Not surprisingly, demand in Western Europe remained weak. During the quarter, we saw strengthening demand across a variety of our product categories in cranes, which included crawler cranes in the Americas, complemented by large rough terrain cranes and all-terrain cranes on a global basis. Most of these product lines continue to be driven by strength in the energy and infrastructure markets. Our crane activity improved in select emerging markets, such as India and the CIS region, but this product line continues to experience ongoing softness in Europe.
"We remain committed to improving our footprint in manufacturing efficiencies globally. A testament to this is development of a shared services platform in France to serve our tower crane manufacturing and support operations in multiple locations, which we will start to see a benefit in the third quarter of 2013 with the full project completed over the next 12 months.
"In addition, we have also accelerated our lean initiatives across all of our European operations to boost our manufacturing efficiency helping us drive near-term profitability, as well as increase in manufacturing throughout."
For the full-year 2013 Manitowoc said that it expects crane revenue to experience high single digit percentage growth, with operating margins registering a high single digit percentage.