03.12.2006

Pon bails out of Cramo

Pon Holdings, the Dutch based holding company, has sold its entire 28.4 percent shareholding in Cramo Plc the new name for Rakentajain Konevuokraamo Oyj.

Pon had controlled Cramo with Caterpillar before it was merged with RK, at the point of the merger Pon purchased the Cat shares and became the largest single shareholder in the RK group.

Pon also owns Dutch rental company Gunco, which it had merged with Cramo and then bought back. It also owns HDW the Genie and Grove distributor in Holland along with a number of Caterpillar distributorships in Holland and Scandinavia.

See Cramo and RK to merge
We have no comment on why Pon has decided to exit Cramo.

Vertikal Comment

Pon (and Cat) bought into Cramo at the time when the pressure was on to expand the CAT Rental Store programme in Europe.

Distributors such as Pon in Holland and Sweden and Finning in the UK, finding the challenge of starting new rental operations from scratch - competing with its customers - was simply not practical.

In order to satisfy the demands of Caterpillar they, along with Zeppelin in Germany, took the more practical, acquistion route to getting into rental.

Pon and Cat began to rebrand Cramo as "Cramo-Cat Rental Store" While Finning wisely stayed with the Hewden name.

Now that Pon and Cat are out of the equation as far as Cramo is concerned, it is hard to imagine that the Cat Rental Store brand will continue. Particularly now that the Cramo name spans a much wider geographic area.