The Dutch rental company, based in Alphen aan den Rijn between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, bought the all-terrain crane mainly to assemble and dismantle crawler cranes
Meijmat, a crane rental company headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, in the western Netherlands, has bought a Grove GMK5120L all-terrain crane. It is the first Grove in a fleet of 15, which makes this less a routine fleet addition than a supplier decision.
That matters because of the job the crane was bought for. Its primary role will be assembling and dismantling crawler cranes, the support work that determines how fast a rental company can turn around its own heavy iron, alongside general building and construction projects.
Why this class
The GMK5120L is a light five-axle machine with a 66-metre main boom. The combination Meijmat cites is the standard argument for the class: taxi configurations that keep the crane road-legal with useful counterweight already aboard, load charts strong enough to justify the trip, and setup times short enough that the crane earns rather than waits.
For a rental fleet those three factors are commercial, not technical. A crane that arrives with fewer support vehicles and rigs faster changes the price a company can quote for a short job.
What decided it
“The GMK5120L fits our requirements perfectly. It combines strong performance with flexibility and efficiency. We have been particularly impressed with the excellent support we’ve received from the Manitowoc service team in Breda and the capabilities of the Grove CONNECT telematics system,” said Willem van der Meijden, director at Meijmat.
The mention of Breda is the substantive part. For a first purchase from a new manufacturer, the distance to a service point in the same country carries more weight than the spec sheet, because the risk being taken is on support rather than on the machine.
Meijmat has activated Grove CONNECT on the crane. The telematics platform gives remote access to crane data, supports technical assistance on site and feeds service and maintenance scheduling. The company says its functionality played a part in the investment decision, which is a shift worth noting in this segment: telematics moving from an add-on to a line item that influences which crane gets bought.
The wider picture
Manitowoc, founded in 1902 and headquartered in Milwaukee, in the United States, sells cranes under the Grove, Manitowoc, National Crane, Potain and Shuttlelift brands. A first-time buyer converting inside an established fleet is the kind of sale that says more about local service coverage than about product cycles, and it is the same argument the company has been making elsewhere in Europe.
For Meijmat, the immediate effect is capacity: a crane dedicated to getting crawler cranes up and down faster, which is time that would otherwise be bought from someone else.
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