It was all part of a two-pronged strategy: firstly, to show the American face of the company; and secondly, for those in the know, to give credibility to its products.
The man on the giant posters was John Lanning, an unlikely poster boy in any other field but described recently by Engineering News Record magazine as “a longtime icon in the crane business”. Mr Lanning has spent the past 40 years designing some of the US industry’s most popular cranes, first at Link-Belt and P&H and then for the past 24 years at Manitowoc.
Sany rescued him from impending retirement last year to add his input to its latest crawler cranes series. First fruit of his labour is the 8-series crawler crane family, designed specifically for US and European markets. The SC8100, 8200 and 8300 are rated at 100, 200 and 300 tonnes respectively. Aside from their technical lifting capabilities, a striking feature is the rounded cab, styled by Porsche Design Studios and dubbed ‘Ultracab’.
Sany’s stand at Conexpo was the largest and busiest of all the Chinese manufacturers. It is the Chinese manufacturer that established Western and Japanese producers regard the most highly. Privately owned by Liang Wengen, ranked by Forbes magazine as the third richest person in China, Sany has deep pockets and big ambitions on the world stage. Established in 1989, Sany Group had sales in 2010 of £5bn and profits of £1bn. It plans to double those numbers in the next two years, with 40% of revenue coming from exports.
Sany offers a practically complete range of construction equipment, as well as trucks and harbour machinery. In the last year or two it has added overseas R&D centres and manufacturing bases in the USA, Germany and India. In each country, it has adopted a localisation strategy, employing local staff. Sany America has 108 employees, more than half of whom work in R&D and nearly three-quarters were hired in the USA.
Such is the push for rapid growth, visitors to the Sany stand at Conexpo to see the 21 machines on display were as likely to be met by an HR manager inviting you to apply for a job as by a salesman trying to push kit onto you.
Blowing up John Lanning to 100ft high was Sany’s way of saying: we may be Chinese owned, but we have American engineers, and world-class ones at that. It may not have been pretty, but it had an impact.
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