I went to Europe and on my flight over sat next to a head of a big engineering firm in Switzerland and was hired by them by the time I landed. I worked for three years for this company in Switzerland. Then we went to a company in Sweden that manufactured cranes. After spending about a year working with that company in Sweden, I determined that I can make cranes, too. After my three years with the engineering firm, I moved back to the US and I represented the company in Sweden selling their specialized cranes to the US Navy. They had given me an exclusive distribution contract for that. From there, we first started with torpedo weapons retrieval and then met with the people in Crystal City for the Navy and later at the Pentagon for handling other specialized equipment from armaments, bombs, personnel in ships or small boats, ROVs, AUVs.
It expanded from there and basically started selling to all the friendly navies in the world. The Israeli Navy contacted us because they had heard we handled this type of equipment and on their SA’AR 5 Corvettes we put three very large knuckle booms on and later put four cranes on Egyptian missile cruisers. Basically, everyone that was handling expensive or dangerous equipment would contact us because we were the only ones that specialized in that and that’s the only thing that we did.
Our specialty is the knuckle boom cranes, telescoping knuckle boom cranes that are much more versatile. They are best for handling loads on a ship because you have less pendulum action between the boom and the hook of the crane because the distance is not as far. The smaller knuckle boom cranes are perfect for research vessels where they have tight deck space because they have so much equipment on board. They’re used for deploying the ROVs, AUVs, and other objects that they’re dropping over the side. On our units that are specialized for deep sea drilling, we have access baskets that work in the moonpool where, once again, there’s very little space to place them. Our cranes are compact and fit in a very small place, but they reach far and they pick up a lot and they’re personnel rated and explosion proof rated.
NOAA, on their research vessels, it’s crazy because they go from very small to very large. We have been specified on many of their ships over the years. Same with the Army Corps of Engineers. The Army Corps of Engineers is marine design center in Philadelphia. They’re very particular about the equipment they put on their dredges and their push boats and towboats and things like that. I would say the majority of the cranes that they have, they’re in our area, meaning knuckle booms are from DMW Marine Group.
Where we’re different is we do concentrate on quality. Not always does our price reflect what the customer wants to pay. However, our quality does. We show them the equipment they’re replacing that lasted maybe five years, that ours will last 20 years if they maintain. The other thing is there’s no one else in the business that just specializes in our type of marine cranes.
Our quality is the highest. Our delivery is within the parameters of most. The biggest difference is many companies say they’re available 24/7. We are. We have technicians around the world ready to go on site wherever they’re needed. On our website, it notes that we’re available after hours and on weekends on call. If you call us on a Sunday morning at 4 a.m., we answer the phone. We have to do that because we do business all over the world. We get calls from Singapore, India, Bahrain, Egypt, and the United States. We answer the call and we provide the service.
We’ve done business in almost every port and shipyard in the United States. Done a lot of business with Hyundai in Ulsan, South Korea, the largest shipyard in the world, and DSME in Geoje Island, South Korea. We’ve also done business in Singapore, Tahiti, New Zealand, western Australia.
In the US, the major boat builders are on the Gulf Coast. We’ve been doing business down there since the early ‘80s. They’ve gone through a lot of bumps where business is booming and then it’s nonexistent, but we’ve continued with our work down there. There’s a number of new ports arising because of offshore wind. The offshore wind service vessels and true transfer vessels could also use our equipment. They’re located in the Boston area, New Jersey near Cape May, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston. Then around the Gulf Coast, our main areas are Alabama Shipyard area in Alabama, Gulfport, Mississippi, Houma, Louisiana, New Orleans, Houston, Texas, Corpus Christi, and then on the west coast, San Diego, Port of Los Angeles, which is also Long Beach, San Francisco, Oakland area, Portland, and Seattle.
A telescoping crane is like your arm stuck out straight with a rope hanging down from it. If you want to pick something up close, you have to reach up like this and drop the line way down, or if you want to reach far out and pick it up, you’re reaching out like this. That long line going down to the hook and the load, when you’re on a ship and it’s moving, the pendulum action is like this and so you’ve got 10,000 pounds swinging like this. It’s not too safe. Well, with a knuckle boom, you can literally reach down to the deck within a few inches of the unit you’re picking up, and pick it up and move it, whether it’s onboard or overboard into the water. You can lower it almost to the water level and then use the winch to lower it down. Your pendulum action is like this versus swinging freely.
Parts is a big part of our business because we have so many cranes out there that have been working for the past 30, 40 years. We’re able to ship parts, standard parts, within 24 hours anywhere in the world. It takes typically two or three days to get there.
We’ve been growing every year for the past 30 years. I think our business will be determined by the number of vessels that are now produced that are autonomous. We don’t have any robotic or AI implementation on our cranes and so we don’t believe many cranes will be on these autonomous vehicles. However, we know that everything seems to get heavier in this business and that the crane size that we sell on average grows every year. The future is in the bigger knuckle boom cranes. I see stiff booms and telescoping booms falling by the wayside because they’re not as practical for use for picking things up. Europe’s been on a knuckle boom craze since the ‘50s and it didn’t pick up in the United States on trucks for, golly, 30 years. Now if you look at the trucks with cranes on them, the majority are knuckle booms versus telescoping cranes. I see the same thing happening with ships.
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