Birth of Demag
Demag was found in 1910 in Duisburg through the union of three companies: Marki Engineering Co., Duisberger Mechanical Engineering AG and the Benrather Engine Works Gmbh. Some of these firms had histories of crane building of more than one hundred years ago. The company became a prominent player in crane building when they have designed at that time, the world’s largest floating crane for Harland & Wolff in Belfast, which are needed for the building of the gigantic passenger liners – RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic.
Then starting from 1925, Demag started manufacturing excavators, locomotives and railroad cars. During the second world war, they have participated in building the armoured fighting vehicles (Bergepanther) in the Berlin Staaken plant.
Demag did not stop building excavators and in 1954, they developed their first hydraulic excavators. Subsequently, Demag expanded into different sectors like construction machines, vehicles cranes, conveying engineering (workshop crane and control devices), steel mill technology (complete metallurgical plants, particularly continuous casting installations), compressor and compressed air engineering. One of the notable achievements is at one point in time, they become a world leader in the manufacture of injection moulding machines.
Demag Breaks into Two
In 1973, Demag was taken over by the Mannesmann group, a German Industrial conglomerate, whom themselves are against a hostile take-over by British’s Vodafone in 1999.
Demag holding was subsequently sold to Siemens who divested this activity to US private equity investor Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) in 2002. Demag Cranes & Components and Gottwald Port Technology, formerly part of Mannesmann Dematic, are among seven businesses sold to KKR for a total of 1.69 billion euros.
In the same year in May, Siemens entered into an agreement with Terex Corporation to sell Demag Mobile Cranes for 150 million US dollars, almost 50 to 80 million below book value. The company was restructured to recreate as Terex Cranes, an US $800 million worldwide business to be headed again by Fil Filipov.
The deal followed many months of industry speculation and just weeks before the deal was closed, Manitowoc announced that they are buying Grove while many Demag employees thought that Manitowoc would buy up Demag as well after being put up for sale by its parent company, Siemens.
The acquisition involved three production facilities, two in Zweibrücken, Germany and one in Pecs, Hungary, with more than 460,000 m2 of production capacity.
Demag Back Together Again
In Aug 2011, Terex again has purchased the other “Demag”, Demag Crane AG which main business products are in industrial cranes and hoists, port technology and services. The takeover deal is worth a price tag of US $1.4 billion. Demag Cranes AG was subsequently renamed as Terex Material Handling & Port Solutions in June 2013.
Demag Lost in Transition
Under the flag of Terex, the brands gone through some transformation, with Demag being one of them. Brands like Terex Demag, Terex Comedil, Terex American was created and eventually consolidated under the brand “Terex”. However, in April 2016, under the new leadership team of group CEO John Garrison and Terex Cranes president Ken Lousberg, they have decided to revert the name back to the plain old Demag for all its mobile and crawler cranes made in Germany, which is the original Demag business.
Mobile cranes made in France (formerly PPM) and the USA (formerly P&H) and the crawler cranes supplied to Terex by IHI of Japan remains under Terex branding.
Demag Cranes AG sold to Konecranes
Finland’s Konecranes and Terex was in the process of forming a merger with an announcement made in August 2015, Terex walked away from the merger after receiving an all-cash, a $31-per-share offer from China’s Zoomlion.
However, before dropping talks with Konecranes, Terex agreed to sell its Material Handling and Port Solutions Business (formerly Demag Cranes AG) for 1.1 billion euros (US$ 1.3 billion) which were concluded in May 2016. Zoomlion renounced its offer to Terex once the MHPS business was no longer part of the deal.
Tadano Buys Demag Mobile Cranes
On 22 Feb 2019, Terex announced that they have confirmed the sales of Demag Mobile Cranes to Tadano at a price of approximately US$ 215 million.
