Tadano has announced changes to its management teams in Europe in particular its operations in Germany - Tadano Demag in Zweibrücken and Tadano Faun in Lauf.
The company has appointed Noriaki Yashiro as chief executive of the two businesses and will take up the new role at the start of next month. He takes over from Kenichi Sawada who has been in the role for just over two years, and now returns to Japan. Yashiro joined the company more than four and half years ago from Sumitomo, and has been executive managing officer for most of that time. He has spent most of his 37 year career in the Automotive Industry, the vast majority of it with Sumitomo working all over the world from Algeria to Jordan the USA and Bolivia. He is currently based in Japan.
Noriaki Yashiro
Other changes, intended to support future growth and integration include:
- The appointment of Dean Barley, chief executive of Tadano Americas, to oversee European sales, customer support, marketing and quality control, in addition to his current duties in the Americas. Barley joined Tadano from Terex Cranes when it acquired Demag in 2019 and was appointed chief executive - North America in early 2023. Earlier this year responsibility for the Manitex business in the Americas was added to his duties.
Dean Barley
- Tadano's chief technology officer Hiroyuki Goda will lead research and development for mobile crane engineering in Europe, with the brief to ensure that innovation remains anchored in the German sites. He has been with Tadano since 1992 and helped with the joint venture the company established withEscorts in India in 2018.
Hiroyuki Goda
-Stefan Matthaei Has been appointed to oversee production, logistics and purchasing for Tadano operations in both Zweibrücken and Lauf. He joins the company after three years with US specialist consulting group Alvarez & Marsal where he was a senior director.
He began his career in 1990 as a management trainee with BMW, moving into consulting in 1994 with Bain & Co where he remained for nine years before joining PWC where he was made partner, folloed by Arthur D. Little and then his own business Pier & Co, working as a consulting MD with companies needing help, many of them in the Automotive industry, moving to A&M in late 2022.
Stefan Matthaei
Tadano group chief executive Toshiaki Ujiie said: “These additions bring the right experience to drive growth in Europe. We are making significant investments in both our locations in Germany to support our customers. Customer needs are at the heart of these leadership additions, and the goal is to strengthen confidence of our European customers in Tadano.”
New investments
The move follows previous announcements of additional investment in the two German facilities in a bid to become more competitive. These have included:
- Acquiring more land in order to add further capacity, building a new repair workshop, upgraded production lines and logistics flows at its plant in Dinglerstrasse, Zweibrücken.
The new repair shop in Zweibrücken
- Building a new European spare parts centre in Lauf which is due to go into operation in mid 2026, as well as expanding production and storage capacity, along with new boom assembly lines.
The new telescopic boom assembly line in Lauf
Vertikal Comment
This looks like a very good set of changes, certainly in terms of the European leadership and the extension of Dean Barley’s responsibilities to Europe, something we noted was needed while at Bauma earlier this year. In fact, last month when commenting on the latest results we said: “As we have mentioned in the past there are major differences in its management style in Europe compared to North America. If it can fix this disparity the future is very bright indeed.”
It would, of course, be preposterous to think that these changes had anything at all to do with our words. What is more likely and encouraging is that the company’s most senior managers saw and sensed the same things that we observed and acted on those observations. The other changes are more likely to be related to chief executive Toshiaki Ujiie’s stated aim of bringing German and Japanese production and design detailing to the same consistent levels of quality and reliability.
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