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There are handful famous brand names, when it comes to heavy equipment and other construction machinery. Such as Caterpillar, Komatsu, Hitachi etc. These are multi-billion dollar companies and massive brand names that usually anything but frequent. The popular International Construction magazine’s yellow table that is released annually ever year is now in its tenth. This magazines current issue digs into how these big companies stand up to each other in the world’s competitive heavy equipment manufacturing markets.
To understand actually how successful these companies are in the markets, we might as well take a look at the 2013 yellow table review issue. It exposed that sales of new heavy equipment went up in 2012 up to 2.6% by the world’s fifth largest manufacturing companies. The sales were reported to be the record high of US$182 billion which was much more than US$168 billion which was the previous record that was set in 2008 (before the global market place crisis happened). Nearly two thirds of this business has been seen to be done by the largest top 10 manufacturers in this field.
For instance, even though the top positions are still held by industry titans like Caterpillar or Komatsu, Chinese brands like Sany and Zoomlion still continue to grow as major players in the heavy equipment industry, with Sany binding into the top five in 2013. According to KHL “In 2003, the first year the yellow table was actually available, China’s manufacturers’ had a share of only 1.6%, which was worth just about US$841 million. But today their 16% share is worth about US$30.6 billion, which is a great improvement.
Let us have a look at the world’s current top 5 heavy equipment manufacturers as stated by the 2013 International Construction Yellow Table:
#1 Caterpillar (US): this 85 years old United States’ based organization occupies the first position by holding 21.8% of global heavy construction equipment sales revenue. It has continued to hold the first spot since the time the yellow table was first published in 2003. In the year 2012, Caterpillar reported sales revenues of US$16.445 billion in the heavy machinery market.
#2 Komatsu (Japan): this company reportedly makes the largest bulldozers in the world, namely the D575 super dozer. This Japan based company has been in business since the year 1917. It was reported that Komatsu had a net sales of ¥1.982 trillion in the year 2012 (which is approx. US$24,168 million).
#3 Hitachi (Japan): this alleged world’s third largest construction equipment manufacturer reported 6% hike in their net sales revenue of up to ¥817,143 million (approx. US$8.2 billion). This organization started out as a humble electric motor repair shop in the year 1910.
#4 Volvo (Sweden): Volvo CE is simply just a part of the massive Volvo group of industries. It is claimed to be the world’s largest manufacturer of articulated haulers and wheel loaders. In 2012, Volvo CE had reported sales revenue of SEK 63,558 million (which is approx. US$9.9 billion as per current exchange rates) by a record selling of more than seventy eight thousand machines.
#5 Sany (China): In the year 2011, this company reported sales revenues of 80.2 billion RMB. (This is approx. US$12.9 billion at current exchange rates). Sany bumped the crane giant Liebherr from its top five, into the 7th position.
