COMPANY PROFILE
Trends in the Lifting Market from Emil Berning, Managing Director of Konecranes and Demag (Pty) Ltd 1. Tell us a little about yourself and your professional background After qualifying with a BSc Mech Eng degree, I started my career as a Design Engineer in the Automotive sector specialising in heavy vehicle transmissions and drive trains. This experience led to a Development Manager role leading a project team in off road specialised military vehicle platforms. Prior to joining Konecranes and Demag in 2018, I spent 17 years in senior roles in varied hydraulic and automation businesses involved in virtually all industries and geographical areas throughout Africa. I am currently Managing Director of Konecranes and Demag (Pty) Ltd, the South African legal entity and Business Area head for New Equipment and Service 2. How has your business been impacted by the current crisis and how are you navigating it to remain competitive in the market? Fortunately we have loyal clients and a strong order book in our Equipment business that once lockdown was lifted we were able to ramp up to fairly quickly. In our Service business, while we did see a dip during the level 5 and 4 lockdown period due to lower customer activity this has bounced back quickly as they ramp up again. Konecranes, being a Finnish company combined with the Demag acquisition in 2017 has been the forefront of technology in particular with our digitalisation approach which allows the management of customer assets; connecting data, machines and people to deliver a digitally-enabled customer experience in real time. We further offer remote monitoring solutions that continuously gather condition, usage and operating data and issues safety alerts. This allows customers especially during
the Covid-19 pandemic to limit the number of people required on site while ensure their lifting equipment is running safely and optimally. 3. What are the biggest challenges facing the lifting sector today? In South Africa, the current pandemic will continue to cause disruptions for many business for months to come. The economic outlook and recovery over the next few years is going to challenge many companies in our sector to maintain a high level of service and value add to the end customers. Those companies with strong international backing, high code of ethics support by cashflow and ability to scale their technology for customer benefits should survive and come out stronger from this crisis. On the product side and in a particular quality we see over recent years, an increase in the amount of lifting equipment being manufactured in far Eastern countries and imported into South Africa. Many of these products claim to have mechanism groupings based on the EN (European Norm) standard which all European sourced lifting equipment has to conform by. Buyers of this equipment should challenge their suppliers and ask to see the EN certification which the equipment claims has met the standard. Buyers can then make an informed decision on the quality of lifting equipment they are investing in. 4. What are the trends in the sector that you are seeing? What do you attribute it to? We have seen an increased focus on safety and productivity over the past few years and this should continue to the remain the highest priority for all users of lifting
Emil Berning, Managing Director of Konecranes and Demag (Pty) Ltd equipment. Coupled with this, customers are expecting transparency, speed and real-time feedback in the service with a higher emphasis on planned maintenance and oversight inspections to improve up time versus a reactive breakdown approach. A consultative approach together with their lifting suppliers can help guide customers in their decision making and we encourage users to take a holistic view of asset management and predictive maintenance especially the advance in digital tools and consider a real time feedback cycle of “data, insights, actions�. As this cycle repeats over time, maintenance predictions be-come faster and more precise. Price sensitivity during pre and post Covid-19 lockdown with the local economic situation has been extremely challenging. Pricing becomes a key factor in these trying times however buyers need to consider that the short term gain on the lowest price may be greatly negated by the impact on the reliability of the lifting equipment purchased and the potential consequential loss of production over the lifespan of equipment. With the financial constraints many
