Marine cranes are now completely separated from Palfinger's truck crane department and are manufactured to marine specification at a new purpose built Palfinger factory in Slovenia.

ECS Marine ceased trading earlier this year, with managing director Robb Gilbert taking what has proven to be a brief sabbatical from the industry while Stuart Gilligan had already started his own company.

ECS had been in friendly competition with Palfinger/ CranePower for many years.

CranePower managing director Heinz Kissel saw opportunity for the worldwide marketing of his cranes through the sudden availability of his old adversaries.

Although CranePower is already well represented by Outreach in the UK, Kissel arranged a meeting of all parties to explore areas of mutual interest and opportunity. It was determined that ECS would represent CranePower by establishing agencies in countries around the world where there was insufficient market presence.

These include France, Belgium, Bangladesh and the Middle East. ECS have also reached verbal agreement in Pakistan with the NEAZ Trading Corporation in a distribution deal due to be confirmed later this month. The old ECS team of Robb Gilbert, Stuart Gilligan and Linda Craddock are back in business.

Gilbert and Gilligan were on the CranePower stand at SMM where they established a major link in their network of distributors, signing an agency agreement giving the Dubai based AQUA Group exclusive rights to distribute CranePower throughout the entire Middle East. Dr Peyman Ghaffari and his director of business development Sahar Saghafi had been in discussions with Heinz Kissel for over a year and made the long term commitment to CranePower after also consulting with other manufacturers. AQUA engineers will now attend courses at the CranePower factory as AQUA establishes itself as a completely independent operation providing both sales and technical support in their region.

Technical data on all CranePower cranes will be available on the new ECS website from the end of this month:

www. europeancraneservices. com