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World leaders: the Hoist Top 50
Welcome to Hoist's list of the top 50 most important people working in the hoist industry. These people have shaped the course of the global business over their (sometimes long) careers, and hold the keys to its future. This list is the result of nominations from contacts and readers around the world, and in-house research. The winners are in alphabetical order.
Click on entries in the list below to read the entry for people with surnames starting with the letter A through K. Click here to read the rest of the list in a new window. You can click on a logo to open its web site in a new window.
Derrick Bailes
chief executive, LEEA
Derrick Bailes' career in the industry began with a student apprenticeship with Herbert Morris Ltd. After graduating in mechanical production engineering in 1971, he spent the next few years in various roles at Morris. He joined the UK based Lifting Equipment Engineers Association (LEEA) in 1978.
Under his leadership, the LEEA has grown in influence, contributing to raising standards of safety and professionalism within the lifting industry. He has represented the membership on numerous standards and legislative bodies and is currently chairman of the CEN and ISO technical committees dealing with slings and lifting accessories. Over the past 25 years, the LEEA has published several benchmark publications, and developed widely recognised training courses and qualifications for testers and examiners of lifting equipment. It has recently opened a dedicated training centre, and its membership continues to grow - internationally as well as within the UK.
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Dr Joachim Biewald
Electrical engineer Joachim Biewald was one of the guys who brought computers into hoists. Over his decade of experience at Demag Cranes and Components, first as head of product development, he promoted the use of microprocessors and electronics for manual and automated motion control. Biewald now heads up the effort to maintain the international electrical machine safety standard IEC 60204-32 when not working as head of the special cranes order processing department. In his spare time, Biewald also acts as head of European trade association FEM's electric overhead travelling cranes group.
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Wally Blount
entertainment hoist division manager, Columbus McKinnon
Wally Blount has had a major impact on the field of entertainment hoists. He was instrumental in using a grass roots campaign to train riggers in the entertainment market on the features and benefits of the black, inverted CM Lodestar. He has also held numerous other positions with the corporation.
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 Jan Boettcher
managing director, Kuehnezug Foerdertechnik
In 2002 Jan Bttcher took over the reigns of the company from his father Manfred. It was more than 40 years since the 24-year old Manfred Boettcher bought the machine tool company Fritz Kuehne in August 1959. In 1960 he took on German distribution rights for Norwegian Munck cranes and soon the company was producing its own cranes, under the name Kuehnezug. Inspired by the car industry, it pioneered closed-construction gear boxes with Rollcompact drive with spring-operated DC disc brakes.
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Werner Buehne
founder, Abus Kransysteme
Werner Buehne set up Abus Kransysteme in 1963 and built it into one of the world's leading manufacturers of hoists and standard overhead cranes and hoists, producing approximately 6,000 cranes a year and 14,000 hoists. Buehnes success, based on a profound work ethic, effectively revolutionised the whole European market.
Now managed by 51-year-old Lothar Buehne, Abus continues to be a company that is distinctly shy of publicity or involvement in industry associations and activities. Although the Buehne family chooses to follow their own path, the route has certainly proved successful for the Gummersbach, Germany-based firm.
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Juergen Dlugi
SWF Krantechnik managing director
SWF has seen its turnover rise from Euro 17m in 2003 to Euro 27.4m, a startling rise for a distribution company in a mature sector. SWF no longer produces its own hoists, instead putting its own branding on hoists and crane kits supplied by parent company KCI Konecranes. Leading the successful reinvention of the company is Jrgen Dlugi, who stepped up from sales and marketing director to managing director in 2004. We deliberately reclaimed our core competence as a supplier for crane constructors, Dlugi has said. A feature of Dlugi's leadership is the enthusiasm and team spirit of his youthful team.
Dlugi himself gives the credit for the new energy within SWF to his young marketing and communications manager, David Rennert.
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Libero Donati
Libero Donati turned his family's business, Donati Sollevamenti, a small Italian electric chain hoist manufacturer, into a large international player through an advanced serial manufacturing process. He joined Donati in the 1960s, and led the company's expansion and development in the 1970s and 1980s, introducing jib cranes and wire rope hoist production.
The company was one of the first to push serialised manufacture of chain hoists, and kept overheads low by outsourcing sub-components. Donati also saw a limited future in the Italian domestic export and grew the amount of export to one-third total sales revenue. In 1992 Donati sold the business to Demag, and set up consultancy Phoenix Engineering for the hoist industry.
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Juha Erikkila
managing director, Erikkila Nostotekniikkaa
You might expect that the Finnish national committee of FEM (Fdration Europenne de la Manutention) would be chaired by a senior executive of Finland's very own global giant, KCI Konecranes. But no - that privilege belongs to Juha Erikkil, who heads a small but innovative family business with just 18 employees in Finland and a further 24 in Estonia. The firm began as a trading company founded by his grandfather in 1912. It started to focus on importing lifting equipment in 1976 and soon began to produce its own light crane systems. Since that time the company has secured important patents for its ergonomic handling devices, including the Robsystem (1989) and the Ergolator (1995).
Erikkila said he came up with a recent safety improvement to his light crane system in a dream. "You cannot invent by inventing," he said. "You invent by experience."
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Fabio Fiorino
president, R&M Materials Handling
With his work experience of North, Central and South America, Fabio Fiorino has some of the broadest experience of the full extent of the Americas of anyone in the crane industry. As North America considers extending the Free Trade zone, Fiorino will remain at the forefront of the industry.
Born in Argentina, Fiorino's family moved to Montreal when he was nine. After obtaining an engineering degree at McGill, he worked in the atomic energy industry, went back to McGill for an MBA, and then moved to Burlington, Ontario, where he first joined Crane Pro Services in marketing.
Three years later, he was appointed to a project to analyse the Central and South American market for opportunities.
When that finished up, he moved to the USA, to become president of R&M Material Handling.
Since then, he has been made president of controls manufacturer Drivecon and development director of KCI's standard lifting equipment business.
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Lars Fredriksson
Lars Fredriksson has been described as "the most enthusiastic man in lifting". He has been with Gunnebo for many years but his foremost claim to fame is inventing Gunnebo's GrabiQ system for crane rigging. Introduced in 2000, the GrabiQ system has the twin virtues of being simpler and safer than previous lifting tackle. A four-leg sling with a shortening function, which previously required up to 15 separate components, can be handled by GrabiQ with just three. "There are hundreds of clever inventors all over the world who have presented smart solutions for our industry," says Jan Sandberg, manager of Gunnebo Industrier in Gemla and project manager for GrabIQ. "But I reckon that Lars Fredriksson is in a class of his own when it comes to finding optimal solutions which are also commercially successful."
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Ace Ghanemi
founder, Ace World Companies
Texan Ace Ghanemi founded one of the USA's largest independent hoist manufacturers.
Ace's specialty has become heavy-duty hoists and cranes. With the company's recent Terminator and Eliminator hoist ranges, the company has standardised production to lower costs for built-up hoists that would need to be custom-designed.
Ghanemi, a professional engineer, started work in 1975 at material handling manufacturer Bowlin Engineering Co. He gained experience in all of the company's different operations - first in manufacture as an engineer, then product design and customer service as product manager, and then quality control, management and purchasing as plant manager. The broad experience set him up well for managing his own firm, which he set up in 1987.
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Joe Gibbs
sales & marketing manager, Acco Chain & Lifting
One of the highlights of Joe Gibbs' career came in the early 1990s, when he was still working under mentor Bob Reisinger. Gibbs would work with that professional engineer and long-standing member of US ASME B30 standards committee, now retired, for a total of 24 years. Together, they re-worked the old Work-Rated hoist line from the 1970s and finished with the Speedway line. Reisinger was responsible for the engineering, and Gibbs helped make sure the design fit the market needs. The project also spanned a transition in Gibbs's career into his current role, sales and marketing manager. "When I took over in 1996, the market was not great, but we have done well," he says, due to the Speedway wire rope hoist.
Reisinger also encouraged his participation in the MHIA committees - he was the president of the Monorail Manufacturers' Association in 2004-2005.
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Vicente Guerra
managing director, Industrias Electromecanicas GH
There are not many crane company founders left. But Vicente Guerra, managing director of Spanish crane builder and hoist manufacturer GH, still works for the company he founded with three brothers in 1952. In the early years, motivated by a lack of cash, the company made anything that there was market demand for - washing machines, radios, agricultural machinery and forklifts, among others. "We could have tried planes, but we never did," he said recently. "If you have nothing, you have to think. If you have everything, you don't think," he said. That drive and intelligence has carried the company from selling to the Basque region to now an international business selling 2,000 cranes per year. Underlying this is a respect for the customer and the culture, whoever and wherever they may be. "Europeans people and manufacturers think that we are above other parts of the world. Europeans might think that Chinese don't know how to do things, but they have the biggest crane market in the world. Europeans should be more respectful of other countries," he said.
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Jean-Maxime Guhur
managing director, Verlinde
Over his 15-year tenure, Guhur has developed the Vernouillet factory into one of the most important hoist manufacturing sites in Europe. Since 2001, Guhur has also been director of KCI Light Lifting Equipment (chain hoists).
In 1858, Lon Verlinde supplied the French navy with what he called a 'wormscrew hoist'; the factory began making electric hoists and winches in 1918. Its current output capacity is 40,000 electric chain hoists, 25,000 lever hoists and chain blocks and 3,000 electric wire rope hoists per year.
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Stig Gustavson
chairman, KCI Konecranes
In June 2005 Stig Gustavson turned 60 and retired from his position as president and CEO of KCI Konecranes and moved 'upstairs' to become chairman of the board. In the 11 years since leading the management buyout of Kone Corporation's crane interests, he has grown turnover fivefold to close to a billion euros and firmly established the company as a global powerhouse. This has been achieved by cost reduction through outsourcing and moving production to low cost countries (including China), targeting and encouraging the growth market of maintenance services - KCI now has a quarter of a million lifting units under service contracts worldwide - as well as through more than 40 acquisitions.
Gustavson is a recent past chairman of FEM and the Federation of Finnish Metal Engineering and Electronic Industries.
With a 3.1% stake, he also remains the largest individual shareholder in Konecranes.
Gustavson has made the 250m Finnish Marks (Euro 42m) that was invested in the buyout from former parent company Kone Oy look like a very good deal for the investors.
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Tsutomu Hashimoto
R&D division general manager, Kito
Tsutomu Hashimoto, aged 58, has been general manager of Kito's development and technology division since 1991. He joined the company in 1986, and from 1990 to 1996 he made major contributions to launch the operations of Kito Inc. in the USA as general manager. Back in Japan, he served as manager of technical control, then general manager of quality assurance while playing a key role in international relations, particularly with Europe and the USA. Beyond Kito, he is a member of the Japan Society of Industrial Machinery Manufacturers, is secretary of the Japan National Committee for ISO/TC111, and also is deputy of Japanese Fibre Sling Manufacturers' Association.
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Walter Heinrich
crane technology inspector, Inspecta
Walter Heinrich is one of the few people who has contributed to the safety of industrial and construction cranes from every angle: as crane designer, standards developer and as safety inspector. His breadth of experience has given him an equally broad perspective on cranes and hoists.
Walter Heinrich started his 40-year long career as a special crane designer. He worked for more than 12 years at Sweden's Hvilans Mek Verkstad, today owned by KCI Konecranes. In about 1970 he began work on his life's work, crane inspection, for many years for the Det Norske Veritas organisation, and its new owner, the Finnish firm Inspecta.
He has worked on the CEN standard committee on slewing jib cranes, and has developed technical standards on building deck cranes for the Swedish Navy, and repairing high-tensile steels of mobile cranes. Heinrich has also served as chairman of the testing and certification trade body CEOC for three years.
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Dietrich Hoffmann
founder, Hoffmann Foerdertechnik
In January 1948, at the young age of 21, Dietrich Hoffmann set up a company in central Germany producing agricultural machinery. By 1953 he had launched his first electric chain hoist.
Under the communist government of East Germany the company became the property of the state, but Hoffman was one of the first businessmen to buy back his company from state after reunification with West Germany. Now aged 80, he remains an exceptionally gifted engineer, say colleagues and competitors alike.
These days the company is primarily represented by dynamic managing director Matthias Huehn, who has developed the Liftket brand of electric chain hoists into an increasingly global player within the industry.
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Longlin Huang
general manager, Jiangyin Kito Crane Co
With its market of 100,000 hoists and 30,000 cranes, China is attractive for any crane vendor. But there are huge disparities between the high-volume, low-price domestic market and higher-priced international marketplace.
Spanning that divide is Longlin Huang. An employee of the Jiangyin Machinery Factory since 1979, he worked his way up to factory manager in 1988.
In 1995, he helped set up a joint venture with Japanese manufacturer Kito that was an 80/20 split - mostly owned by Kito, but 20% by Huang and a few other top managers. As the Chinese economy continues to boom, this factory has become more and more important to the domestic market - it makes 20,000 Kaicheng-brand hoists a year.
A month ago, Kito announced plans to increase its presence in Jiangyin and increase the volume and the quality of hoist production. Huang will become the company's top man in China.
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Kimmo Hytonen
founder, Innocrane
Kimmo Hytonen established Innocrane in 1992, fresh out of university, where he had undertaken scientific research into the dynamic control of mechanical systems and obtained various patents for algorithms that proved key to reducing and preventing load sway. Over the next 10 years Innocrane sold more than 500 licenses for its ICRAS a control system, which prevents load sway by optimising acceleration and deceleration. In 2002, KCI Konecranes bought a license to use the ICRAS algorithm in its own anti-sway systems - a significant vote of confidence for the Innocrane product - and paving the way for it to become a standard product on all industrial cranes. In the same year Street Crane also came on board with the technology and became exclusive UK supplier of the ICRAS system.
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Mike James
vice president, distribution, Morris Material Handling Inc
Over his 37 years at Morris, Michael James has worked on themost important issues of the industrial crane industry. Early on, he specialised in electronics engineering, earning a degree in 1975 - six years after he started work at Morris. He was instrumental in the development of the P&H Smartorque variable frequency drive crane controls, and holds two patents. But his roles were not only technical. In the 1990s, he went back to business school to receive certificates from Duke University. He established the Phoenix division, a remanufacturing operation, and numerous sales and marketing programs. He also started a distribution and service business.
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Harald Joos
CEO, Demag Cranes & Components
Although a relative newcomer to the crane industry (he signed up in December 2003) Harald Joos is still in the driver's seat as the CEO of Demag Cranes and Components.
Already in his tenure he has made major structural changes to the company. "My role is to be the change manager, and the manager who leads the company in a new direction has to bring trust and confidence in the total organisation," he told Hoist in 2004. Then, he said that the company needed to extend into the entry-level segment from its dominance in the high end, and to cut costs.
Things seem to be going his way. In the current positive crane environment, the company's performance has improved - its 2004/2005 financial year results Euro 660m sales - were up 6% compared with the previous year, with 300 fewer employees.
Now that majority share owners US venture capital firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is likely to launch the company on the stock market, Joos becomes all the more important to the company's success as the Demag figurehead.
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