IN FOCUS / LINK BELT
LINK-BELT CRANES DOWN UNDER Manufactured to cope with rugged and remote conditions, Link-Belt Cranes are ideally suited for the Australian market. However, the strength of the US dollar is proving to be still a challenge. Cranes and Lifting explains. DURING LAST YEAR’S CICA Conference and Exhibition, Cranes and Lifting magazine discussed various topics with two of the global leaders from Link-Belt Cranes; Roy Burger managerinternational sales and Bill Stramer, senior vice president marketing sales and customer support.
According to Burger, Link-Belt Cranes have been well received locally and excel in the varied and rugged conditions. “Link-Belt Cranes have been operating in Australia for about 10 years now. We started out by bringing in truck cranes, rough terrain and telescopic crawler cranes. They’ve been purchased by various
Link-Belt’s new 90t rough terrain the 100|RT comes with the longest, full-power boom available in its tonnage class. www.cranesandlifting.com.au
customers in different areas of the country and all seem to be working well. The Link-Belt truck crane is probably one of the better ones on the market and the telescopic crawlers and the larger rough terrain cranes seem to fit the Australian conditions very well,” he said. “From a global perspective, we’ve certainly noticed a slow down with the global economy in the last 18 months and with our products being US dollarbased, our competitive position based on currency has deteriorated. This has made our task a little more difficult outside of North America. As far as the Australian market is concerned, we’ve seen New South Wales come back nicely in the past five years, and it’s still very active, but the US currency has been an issue. “Telecrawlers have been a competitive product for us, and we can see plenty of opportunity in Australia with the resources sector coming back strongly. There’s a major pipeline of infrastructure projects across most of the states, so there’s plenty of opportunity for the placement of cranes. But we have to be realistic about the currency and it is going to continue to be a challenge. We can only try to make the most of opportunities as they come up,” Burger said. According to Stramer, Link-Belt has plenty of new products relevant to the local market; there just hasn’t been the opportunity to bring them in to Australia. “At this year’s bauma, we introduced a few new products but, again, we haven’t had an opportunity to bring any of the newly introduced products to the Australian market due to the currency situation. But I think we’ve positioned ourselves well with a 150t all-terrain (175|AT) and a 230t telescopic crawler (TCC-2500), along with improvements on our larger rough terrains, which now March 2020 CAL / 69
