12.04.2016

Manitowoc split towers and mobiles

Manitowoc Cranes has split its business into two distinct divisions of Tower cranes and Mobiles/Crawlers.

The Mobile Cranes business – which includes Grove and Manitowoc Crawlers will be managed by a new hire Aaron Ravenscroft who joins the company from the Wier Group, where he managed the materials division for North America. He joined Wier in early 2003 from Robbins and Myers, prior to which he worked at Gardner Denver, both in North America and in Europe where he was vice president - Industrial Products group Europe. Before that he worked with air brake specialist Wabtec in a variety of roles. He joined Manitowoc last month.
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Aaron Ravenscroft

The Potain tower crane business will be managed by executive vice president Larry Weyers, who was president of the crane business from January 2015 until just prior to its split into a stand alone public company at the start of the year. Weyers joined Manitowoc in 1998 and was heavily involved in merging Potain with Manitowoc in 2001 and introducing Potain cranes to North America.
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Larry Weyers

The separation is intended to all each to focus more clearly on the two disparate market sectors and to simplify and rationalise the production facilities. While the two businesses will operate as separately as possible. Some functions will remain combined if they are more efficient to be so.

Vertikal Comment

The move to separate the two businesses immediately sparked off a few rumours at Bauma yesterday, that Manitowoc was planning to sell off the tower crane business- as you might imagine. Just as the announcement by Terex to put the Demag name back on traditional Demag mobile crane products also generated the odd rumour or two that it was part of a plan to sell it off. After checking out both rumour, they appear to be totally groundless and more related to observers putting two and two together to get five. Typical bug show rumours you might say.

Both moves have some solid rationale to them and could be strong catalysts for further improvement. It will be interesting to see them moth develop and progress.