CSR: Kito Crosby’s responsible business

While a lot of what Kito Crosby does could be said to be rooted in what is usually described as corporate social responsibility (CSR), the company says that these actions are more just an extension of what has always been part of basic business strategy and DNA of both Kito Corporation and The Crosby Group, which late last year merged to form Kito Crosby.

The Harvard Business School defines CSR as being the idea that a business has a responsibility to support the society that exists around it, including environmental, ethical, philanthropic and economic responsibilities.

But while Kito Crosby hasn’t explicitly aimed to achieve CSR, Robert Desel, its US-based chief executive officer, describes it as something that has come naturally because it is just the right thing to do.

“It is just the way that we have always lived,” he says. “When you are in the business of making products that people rely upon for their safety, the broad idea of responsibility is something that we carry to work every single day.”

On a general level Kito Crosby describes itself as a vertically integrated supplier of safe and efficient lifting and securement equipment with about 4,000 employees worldwide.

Desel says that there are basically three legs to Kito Crosby’s business strategy.

First of all, the company is committed to manufacturing excellence, which he said is vital to producing safe and efficient equipment. As part of that, he noted that more than 90% of the products that carry the company’s brand names are produced by Kito Crosby itself. In addition, through its distribution network, including value-added fabricators, crane builders and industrial distributors, Kito Crosby ensures that its products are available when and where its end use customers need them and the company provides knowledge and support to both its workers and end use customers through its training programme, which it provides free of charge.

“At some level the training that we provide could be considered CSR,” Desel says, explaining that this training isn’t sales related, but rather geared toward teaching the fundamentals of safe rigging, lifting and securement with the goal of keeping people safe at their job sites. “The products we make are all about keeping people safe,” he says.

While it hasn’t been an explicit goal, Kito Crosby is involved in three major projects that fit under the CSR umbrella from a philanthropic and economic responsibility point of view: its partnership with Bridges to Prosperity (B2P), its Lifting for the Troops campaign supporting the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation, and its work supporting Japan’s paralympic ski team. Later this year the company is hoping to announce a fourth, yet undetermined project that will intersect with its values and products.

“These things aren’t just a flash in the pan,” Desel declares. “They are embedded in how we think about the world and how we believe our products should be used.”

Desel says the origin of Crosby’s relationship with B2P was based upon the company’s realisation that the not-forprofit non-government organisation (NGO) that builds bridges in remote areas to allow those communities to safely access drinking water, schools, preventative healthcare, emergency healthcare, financial centres and economic opportunities was already using some of Crosby’s products, including its wire rope clips.

Since its establishment, B2P has built about 500 suspension bridges in 21 countries including 52 in Rwanda and Uganda in 2023 with the goal to create a world where poverty caused by rural isolation no longer exists.

“Because we realised that B2P is doing really good work, we told them that we wanted to supply all the lifting and securement hardware they needed to build their bridges, including clips, turnbuckles, snatch blocks, special trolleys and clamp online tension meters (Colts),” Desel said, as well as to provide them with all of the training that they need.

In fact, in 2022 and 2023 Kito Crosby sent two separate teams of workers to Rwanda and Uganda from many of its sites – including from Japan, Canada, Italy, Sweden and Brazil – to assist B2P in building one of its bridges. Desel says that in addition to the benefit that brought to B2P, it was also beneficial to Crosby to have those team members go back to their home sites and communicate the impact that the company’s products have elsewhere in the world. Also, late last year Kito Crosby announced an extension of its B2P partnership.

A MILITARY LIFT

Another one of Kito Crosby’s major undertakings is its Lifting for the Troops campaign to support the Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation, a group that provides college scholarships and educational services to military children who have lost a parent in the line of duty, supplementing the benefits provided by the US government.

Since 2002 Children of Fallen Patriots has provided more than $70m in assistance to nearly 3,000 children, including almost 1,400 debt-free graduates.

“The idea of supporting the military is woven into our DNA,” Desel says, noting that almost everything that Kito Crosby produces, particularly its shackles and snatch blocks, are used by militaries in the US and around the world for vehicle and asset recovery applications. He also noted that Lockheed Martin and many other defence contractors around the world use Kito Crosby’s products, including their lifting joints and provides training free of charge to both the military and defense contractors. In addition, last year from 1 September through 31 October Kito Crosby donated $500 for every Crosby, Harrington, Acco and Peerless training event and all the proceeds from Crosby’s User’s Guide for Lifting online training course over that period to this cause.

Desel says that recently Kito Crosby’s Lifting for the Troops campaign, as well as efforts by its channel partners, raised close to $200,000, which is enough to cover about 64 semesters of higher education.

DISABILITY WORK

Through its Gold Partner agreement with the Japan Para-Ski Federation, since December 2015 Kito has been supporting disabled athletes who have been competing globally, and that is continuing through Kito Crosby’s sponsorship of the 2024 Toyota FIS Para Alpine Skiing World Cup in Sapporo, Japan. Desel notes that this is particularly a good fit with his company’s Japanese businesses, where over 7% of its workforce are workers with disabilities.

Some of Kito Crosby’s CSR efforts are also centred around environmental responsibility and the company’s desire to provide its workers with safe job sites – both of which tend to blend together.

One example of the moves that it has made toward greater environmental responsibility has been its desire to, whenever possible, use electric induction methods to heat the steel it uses before forging it, even though the equipment needed to do so tends to be more expensive than gas-fired furnaces, Desel admits. “But it is better for the environment, better for our workers and, given that it results in more even heating, we can produce a higher quality product.”

He says that another way that Kito Crosby practices environmental responsibility is in the power sources it uses. For example, many of its plants located in the Nordic region use hydroelectric power.

Desel adds that some other things that Kito Crosby does could be seen as being CSR related, including providing a fair and open workplace and making economic contributions to a host of organisations.

“We are citizens of the communities where we operate our business,” he says, adding, that the company’s concerns, including about the safety of its team members, isn’t just a slogan. “We don’t look at CSR as a separate thing from our business itself,” he said. “All of these things are all woven together and is an integral part of what we are.”

And while Kito Crosby hasn’t been doing these kinds of things explicitly to get any benefits in the traditional sense of the word, Desel says: “Given that these programmes are so connected to our values, it reinforces that our values aren’t just things that we put on a piece of paper, but rather that we are putting our money where our mouth is.”

And he adds that while he never thought of doing these things as a means to give Kito Crosby a competitive advantage, its customers have been supportive of what they have been doing.

That isn’t to say that its competitors aren’t also doing what they can in one way or another, Desel says: “We are in an industry where we have to be focused on the wellbeing of people. That generally creates an environment where there is a lot of focus on CSR. That is inherent in what we and others in our industry do.”

In general, Desel says that Kito Crosby plans to continue to do what it can to make lifting and securement safer, building upon the strategies that it already has in place, and possibly making additional investment and from time to time bringing other companies into its fold. “We are very excited about the opportunities that we have to bring our products to more people.