M
arch saw the opening of Liebherr Africa’s first maritime hub in South Africa. Located just outside of Durban, the new service centre is set to offer complete service staff training in addition to sales and spares for all of its products in South Africa. With Africa being the second largest market for its parent Liebherr Group last year, the company has seen a threefold increase in mobile harbour crane deliveries from the 2013-2014 period, and is optimistic about meeting the on-going demands of the African market. “We’ve had a long business relationship with Transnet. They have over 60 Liebherr cranes now, including 31 ship-to-shore cranes, 13 mobile harbour cranes, and 18 rubber tyre gantry (RTG) cranes,” begins Rodenwoldt. “As a result of that good relationship, and together with the development we’ve seen here in Africa, we decided we would open up this maritime hub as an extended arm of the head offices in Europe.”
The last few years have seen a significant increase in South Africa’s infrastructure spending, with room for more growth to follow. “If you look at all the landlocked economies, they have started to thrive and develop now. That helps us, and the ports in general, to deliver the products to and from these economies,” explains
Over the last few years, we’ve seen that a lot of ports or shipping companies in the oil and gas sector are pushing for productivity and safety, so we looked to different industries to see how we could improve productivity on the skills front
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