Trendlines: Cranes at their peak

The global market for all-terrain, rough-terrain, lattice boom crawler and truck cranes has more than halved in the last five years. This has been entirely due to the collapse of the Chinese market.

Global sales hit an unprecedented high in 2020 and 2021 due to the stimulus spending by Chinese provincial governments in response to the pandemic. Since then, the Chinese market declined as that money dried up, plus the Chinese real estate sector has collapsed, leading to a sharp downturn in construction activity.

Source: Off-Highway Research

Looking at the world excluding China paints a completely different picture, with sales rising 125% between 2020 and 2024. Markets were abnormally low in 2020, when the pandemic first struck, and they took a long time to return to natural levels due to the mobile crane industry being particularly badly affected by supply chain difficulties and logistics bottlenecks.

By 2024, sales had returned to, if not exceeded, natural levels. This not only reflected an improvement in developed markets, but also a surge in many emerging markets, where sales have soared due to the availability of relatively cheap cranes from China. This phenomenon has been driven by the large Chinese OEMs, which have become much more aggressive in export markets due to the weak conditions at home.

Emerging market dominance

One of the interesting impacts of this is that while developed markets in Europe, Japan and North America are still dominated by the traditional crane makers – the Chinese OEMs are finding it very difficult to break in – these household names of the industry have been squeezed out of emerging economies, where 90% of the cranes sold last year were those of Chinese brands.

Sany’s 4,000-tonne capacity all-terrain crane. (Photo: Sany)

This has been achieved by Chinese OEMs offering cranes at prices that are not only lower than those of the international OEMs, but also often lower than those of used cranes being sold out of fleets in Europe, North America and Japan. This has been a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is not yet clear how this shift in price dynamics will impact the traditional disposal routes for used cranes.

Global market outlook

As far as the outlook for the markets is concerned, the Chinese market is expected to improve in the second half of the 2020s, having hit a low point in 2023. In contrast, most other markets reached a peak in 2024, and are expected to see a modest decline for the next few years before picking up towards the end of the decade.

Having seen a dip in earthmoving equipment sales around the world in the last two to three years, it seems inevitable that mobile cranes will follow. The rationale is that compact and earthmoving machines tend to feel any downturn first because they are the first machines on site in any construction project, their main use being site preparation.

In contrast, cranes tend to come onto site later when building starts and structures start to be erected. This means there tends to be about a one-year lag in the mobile crane cycle compared to general equipment markets.

For more information about Off-Highway Research’s new 250-page report on the global mobile crane industry, please contact [email protected].