Welcome to PMV Middle East’s inaugural PMV Power List — this magazine’s first tribute to not just the plant, machinery and vehicles that frequent the region, or the companies that develop and distribute them, but also to the people who make the segment go round.
As a Who’s Who for the segment in the GCC, this list puts a face to the name of many of the most important players in the region.
Inclusion in the list takes into account a range of factors, such as the global and regional significance of manufacturers, the local reach and level of support provided by distributors, and most notably the activity and achievements of companies in both categories over the last 12 months.
Ordered alphabetically, the companies included on this year’s power list are as follows:
- Al-Qahtani Vehicle and Machinery
- Abdul Latif Jameel Machinery
- Arabian Agencies Company (ARACO)
- Atlas Copco
- Bion Industrial
- Case Construction Equipment
- Caterpillar
- Daimler Trucks
- Doosan Infracore Equipment Co.
- Al-Futtaim Auto & Machinery Company (FAMCO)
- Ford Trucks
- Galadari Trucks & Heavy Equipment
- General Navigation And Commerce Company (GENAVCO)
- Gorica Industries
- Hitachi Construction Machinery
- Himoinsa
- International Equipment & Contracting
- International Heavy Equipment
- Iveco
- Jaidah Heavy Equipment
- JCB
- Jubaili Bros
- LiuGong Dressta Machinery
- MAN Truck & Bus
- Manitowoc Crane Group
- Renault Trucks
- Sandvik
- Swaidan Trading
- Terex
- United Motors & Heavy Equipment
- Volvo Construction Equipment
- Volvo Trucks
- Wolffkran
- Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo
- Zahid Tractor & Heavy Machinery
Al-Qahtani Vehicles and Machinery
Sheikh Tariq Abdel Hadi Al-Qahtani, Group Chairman
As one of Saudi Arabia’s most established industrial supply groups, the Abdel Hadi Abdullah Al-Qahtani group of companies was established in Dammam in the 1940s, and has been a major supplier of industrial goods and services to many of Saudi Arabia’s core sectors ever since. In the early 60s, for example, it supplied the Vallourec industrial piping widely used by oil and gas companies like Saudi Aramco.
The heavy equipment arm of the group, Al-Qahtani Vehicle and Machinery Co., was established in 2006 and is currently responsible for the distribution of a number of key equipment brands in Saudi Arabia, including: Liugong earthmoving and material handling equipment; Terex cranes and Genie aerial work platforms; Fuwa crawler cranes; Chenglong tractor heads and dump trucks; IBTech breakers; DaiFeng pipeline construction equipment; Boge stationary air compressors; Atmos portable air compressors; and Zowell material handling equipment.
In 2013, Al-Qahtani Vehicle & Machinery Co. was named the best LiuGong dealer in the Middle East, and, with its warehouses containing $13m of equipment spare parts, also picked up first prize in the fields of servicing, parts, sales growth, finance performance and branding.
The current group chairman, Sheikh Tariq Al-Qahtani, has headed the business since 1992, when he took over from his father after acquiring a bachelor’s degree in foreign trade and overseeing the group from a number of managerial positions across different Al-Qahtani companies.
Abdul Latif Jameel Machinery
Arif Chishti, Managing Director
Abdul Latif Jameel Machinery was established in 2013 after its parent company secured the distribution rights for Komatsu equipment in Saudi Arabia. While Komatsu as a brand has been in the Kingdom for 45 years, in 2012 the Japanese brand began to look for a new partner to better serve its customers and business interests, and Abdul Latif Jameel emerged as a candidate, owing to its familiarity with Japanese brands and values —from its longstanding distribution of Toyota— and its broadly transferrable experience in automotive aftersales.
The choice was quickly, and the newly formed Abdul Latif Jameel Machinery embarked upon a rapid expansion of its aftersales facilities to maintain the Kingdom’s population of roughly 5,500 Komatsu units, as well as to lay the groundwork for equipment rental services.
In just 24 months, Abdul Latif Jameel Machinery established five aftersales facilities: in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Madinah and Abha — a move that Chishti notes was “extremely aggressive” by Saudi standards — and this March, a second 17,000m2 Jeddah facility was inaugurated in, while an even larger, 26,000m2 facility is scheduled to open in Riyadh in Q3 2016.
Today, the company sells and services Manitou, Foton-Loxa, Teksan Generators and Toyota Industrial Equipment. Some 75% of its workforce is in product support, and Chishti affirms that Abdul Latif Jameel Machinery has gained the confidence of Komatsu’s customers.
In two recent deals, Abdul Latif Jameel supplied Komatsu 1,250 excavators for a gold mining project near Riyadh, and received a 109-excavator order from the Binjarallah Group for a housing project near Abha.
Arabian Agencies Company (ARACO)
Hussain Ibrahim Alfardan, Chairman, Alfardan Group
Arabian Agencies Company (ARACO) is the Qatar dealer for Volvo Construction Equipment, Scania Trucks and Buses, Powerscreen crushing and screening equipment, Astec asphalting equipment, Trencor trenching equipment, SDLG and C&OH hydraulic breakers, and the heavy equipment division of the Alfardan Group.
The family-owned Qatari conglomerate operates across a range of fields, but its origins lie with the establishment of firms including: Alfardan Jewellery in 1954; Alfardan Exchange in 1971; and, Alfardan Properties in 1993.
Arabian Agencies Co. (ARACO) was established in 1996 alongside Alfardan’s automotive operations, which distributes luxury car brands such as Rolls-Royce, BMW, MINI, Land Rover, Jaguar, Ferrari, and Maserati.
ARACO asserts that as the distributor of Volvo CE equipment it has reduced operating costs and increased profitability on every project worked, and that it has quickly gained the trust of its clients in the local market.
As the official distributor of the Scania brand, ARACO has also steadily grown the presence of the brand’s construction, utilities and transport applications in the Qatari market.
Araco’s philosophy is to strive for continuous development and impeccable customer support through its 46,000m2 facility and workforce of highly-trained technicians and service personnel available 24 hours a day.
Today’s chairman, Hussain Ibrahim Alfardan, is the son of the founder of the Alfardan Group, Ibrahim Alfardan.
Atlas Copco
Thierry Leder, General Manager – MENA
Atlas Copco is a major supplier to the construction industry, and the Construction Technique division is a leading manufacturer of road construction equipment, portable plant, tools and attachments, with over 5,500 employees and annual revenues of over $1.8bn.
Atlas Copco opened its first office in the UAE in 2005, and over the last 11 years has continued to invest and grow in the region. Today, Atlas Copco Construction Technique has its Middle East headquarters in Dubai, with five sales and service locations across the UAE, and operations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Egypt and Bahrain.
This year has seen a record 20 new products launched so far, such as the revolutionary RTEX handheld breaker with the capacity of a 30kg-plus breaker while being 25% lighter and using 50% less compressed air.
Atlas Copco has also launched 10 8-Series air compressors, which incorporate technology that has made them up to 150kg lighter than comparable models, and requiring 12% less fuel. All of the models fall below 750kg, and the largest can still be towed by a normal passenger car.
Two notable new products in Atlas Copco’s road construction equipment line are the new MF2500CM feeder and the CC1250 roller. The MF2500 feeder is currently the only 2.55 meter wide feeder in its class — making it easy and compact to transport, and capable of emptying a 27t truck load in just 35 seconds.
One indicator of how much Atlas Copco values innovation is the fact that over 50% of its total sales come from products launched in the last three years.
Thierry Leder joined the Atlas Copco Group in 1992, and has held positions in Switzerland, France and Brazil. In February 2006, he was appointed to Atlas Copco’s Industrial Air Division, before being appointed GM for in Romania in 2007 and for South East Europe in 2009. He moved to his current division in 2001 and his current role in 2016.
Bion Industrial
Noas Al Rawi, CEO, Bion Group
Bursting onto the construction equipment scene in June 2015, Bion Industrial is the manufacturing arm of the Bion Group.
The group is headed by founder and CEO, Noas Al Rawi, an Iraqi-born entrepreneur who established Tarwada Cargo Transport eight years ago, and who has been working on logistics solutions ever since.
Last year, however, Al Rawi, moved into manufacturing, with Bion Industrial’s launch of three tipper trailers incorporating SSAB’s wear-resistant Hardox steel and sporting a half-pipe design that was arrived at over the course of three years of conceptual design work and 18 months of engineering.
“It started with Hardox,” notedAl Rawi. “It was only through the different generations we were able to explore how to use the properties of the Hardox and design trailers according to those properties.”
With the steel, Bion’s tipper trailers are three-to-four times tougher than standard steel tippers, while their lighter build and concave design allows an average of three additional cubic metres of material to be loaded compared with the industry standard for their weight classes.
In November, Al Rawi launched a further three tipper trailer models, a cement bulker semi-trailer and a demolition tipper, and in 2016 will be opening an expanded 46,500m2 manufacturing facility that will increase Bion’s production capacity from 25 to 125 trailers a month.
Recently, Bion also incorporated SSAB Strenx steel into the chassis design of some products to provide even greater structural strength. Strenx can reducing the weight of steel structures by up to 40%.
Noas Al Rawi, CEO of Bion Group, comments: “Quality sits at the heart of our organisation. We manufacture our truck bodies and equipment to stringent standards, and with our quality we have set a new benchmark in the tipper trailer industry in the region.”
Case Construction Equpiment
Franco Invernizzi, Senior Business Director for the Middle East, CNH Industrial
Case Construction Equipment believes that now is the time for customer customisation and a bold rethink of equipment marketing strategy in the Middle East, according Franco Invernizzi.
Case’s approach in the region involves a pincer manoeuvre of entry-level product to for small and first-time operators and a shift from product- to application-oriented solutions for larger players.
On the product side, the chief examples is the Case 570ST backhoe, a model that has been s optimised for emerging markets and carefully re-engineered for simplicity, with fewer elements and less electronic circuitry.
Invernizzi, noted: “The Case 570ST represents more value for money in these markets. A key part of this is serviceability — the machine can be repaired and fixed easily by the operator.
“The engine is also an FPT engine, which has two advantages: First, we know the engine better than anybody else, and secondly, we put the same engine in different machines, so in wheel loaders, graders and dozers.”
He added: “Now, the most important thing for everybody is customisation to match the customer’s needs and to talk about applications, not cost, not price. The really big change is that now it comes from the customer.”
Case Construction Equipment has a regional sales and aftersales team of 15 people in Dubai Airport Free Zone. There is also a Case spare parts warehouse in Jebel Ali, and CNH Industrial has partnered with Emirates Money in the UAE, QNB in Qatar and Saudi Fransi in Saudi, to offer flexible financing.
Caterpillar SARL
David Crabb, District Manager – Middle East
Caterpillar dealers have been established in the Middle East for over 60 years, catering to diverse customers across many segments, including construction, infrastructure, quarries, mining, temporary power and marine.
This manufacturer has been working to support its network in the region more directly since 2013, when it invested in and opened a parts distribution facility opened in 2013, and more recently, in 2016, with the opening of a regional training centre, built at a cost of $7m and set to host 50 and 60 training courses a year.
While the manufacturer already ran a comprehensive training programme from the Caterpillar Demonstration and Learning Centre in Malaga, Spain, which opened in 1971 and covers 106ha, the new training centre in Dubai will make many of Cat’s technical courses more accessible to its regional dealers and customers.
Caterpillar‘s regional training centre in Dubai will primarily supplement Malaga by offering technical training on the machines and their power systems, as well as sales training, for Cat’s partners in the Middle East and Africa.
Cat has simultaneously established an oil and fluid analysis lab for ‘scheduled oil sampling’ (SOS) — allowing Caterpillar’s distributors to expedite the analysis of oil samples from Cat equipment in the region to reduce downtime.
Both sites are located near Caterpillar’s Middle East parts distribution centre and marketing office in the Jebel Ali Free Zone, Dubai.
In terms of its product, Caterpillar most recently launched its Cat L-Series medium wheel loaders, the 950L and 962L, which are more powerful and fuel-efficient than their predecessors, with drive-train and hydraulic-system refinement, Z-bar linkage and optional automatic traction control and Cat Connect telematics.
Caterpillar claims that the series has delivered unmatched reliability, durability and high uptime through the use of heavy-duty Cat-designed ACERT engines, transmissions and axles, which reduce the risk of premature wear.
The fuel-efficient C7.1 ACERT engine has a maximum gross power rating of 195kW and operating weights of 18t and 19t for the 950L and 964L, respectively.
These updated and refined Cat ACERT engines represent an increase in engine power of 22% in the 950L and 8% in the 962L compared to H-series — so a big boost in performance and response.
Various powertrain features, also make both models not only more powerful, but 10% more fuel efficient versus the H-Series.
PMV Power List 2016 — Part two: D-H
