In response to the original question, the answer can likely be found in a) the customer and b) the products selected for this contract.

St Gobain in the UK are, amongst other guises, are better known as Jewsons. Each Jewson branch (and there are hundreds of them) will each need a forklift and/or a sideloader. Each machine will only work 500 hours a year in a very light application so a 10 year deal represents no challenges whatsoever. St Gobain will hardly get excited over brand identity or features and benefits. Forklifts, to them, represent a commodity item so all emotion on choice of product brand is totally removed.

With regards to products, they have opted for Doosan and Combilift - both are amongst the cheapest in their respective field but critically, nationally acceptable as opposed to even cheaper, but totally unknown Chinese equipment.

If St Gobain can save £1000ea for 1000 forklifts and £5000 ea for each sideloader - this makes a saving of £3.5 million which, ultimately, can be converted into shareholder's dividends. That will likely be the real reason why Rushlift won this deal.

Congratulations however to Rushlift for bringing this one home as, surely this had one of the big-four written all over it when the tender was initiated. This must also represent a huge loss for Linde who oversaw Jewsons for the past 10 years too.

Questions must be raised now over the viability of the Linde sideloader product which must be nearly 30 years old now - Jewsons were effectively their only outlet for the ageing design.

Did I hear of a pending tie-up with the (yet again) newly formed SSP?