I went to work on Thanksgiving Day, but spent the day on a a field trip to Shanghai. Bauma is a German-run trade show held every other year in China. It was a huge show of construction equipment manufacturers and suppliers. International brands like Volvo, Hitachi, JCB, and Kobelco were all there along with hundreds of Chinese brand machines. The extensive displays included excavators, wheel loaders, motor graders, trucks, cranes, and concrete pumpers. Inside the exhibition hall there were thousands of suppliers including all of the companies that will provide components to our new factory in Suzhou.
It was my first visit to a construction equipment trade show and I was very impressed to see the size and scope of the products displayed. One conspicuously absent brand was Caterpillar. As I understand it, Cat tends to invest in a big display each year at a competing trade show called ConExpo which is held in Las Vegas. Although, I was told that we did have a display at Bauma back in 2004 just before we introduced the K-series Motor Grader in China.
We took a bus load of Caterpillar Suzhou employees to the show - about 40 people. Our motor grader team's mission today was to visit and explore all of the competitor's motor grader displays and learn everything we could about their features, designs, and target markets. You can see my colleague, Stanley, posing with one of the local construction equipment enthusiasts. We visited and studied nine different brands of Chinese motor graders. While the Chinese manufacturers used to sell exclusively in China, it is clear that they are going global. Most are producing machines that meet North American and European emissions standards and many are already exporting throughout Asia and around the world.
It was my first visit to a construction equipment trade show and I was very impressed to see the size and scope of the products displayed. One conspicuously absent brand was Caterpillar. As I understand it, Cat tends to invest in a big display each year at a competing trade show called ConExpo which is held in Las Vegas. Although, I was told that we did have a display at Bauma back in 2004 just before we introduced the K-series Motor Grader in China.
We took a bus load of Caterpillar Suzhou employees to the show - about 40 people. Our motor grader team's mission today was to visit and explore all of the competitor's motor grader displays and learn everything we could about their features, designs, and target markets. You can see my colleague, Stanley, posing with one of the local construction equipment enthusiasts. We visited and studied nine different brands of Chinese motor graders. While the Chinese manufacturers used to sell exclusively in China, it is clear that they are going global. Most are producing machines that meet North American and European emissions standards and many are already exporting throughout Asia and around the world.
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