Smith - seeing some improvement

The US materials handling operation of Barloworld Ltd reports a gentle upward trend in the North American forklift market.

"We started seeing some improvement in our market towards the end of the first quarter, and it seems to be continuing so far during the second quarter," says Alwyn Smith, president of Barloworld Handling LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina. "As our business is capital equipment-oriented, it lags in an upturn and requires an improvement in the capacity utilisation of the manufacturing and distribution base before it will improve substantially. We are now starting to see the expected improvement in our rental fleet utilisation and service and parts segments of our business."

The limited liability company is the exclusive dealer for Hyster forklifts in eight states of the US south-east region and, effective 1 March, also became a distributor of the forklift line from V Mariotti SpA.

Smith notes that the Barloworld US business "has a concentration of customers in the building supplies' industries. The well documented woes of the residential building industry in the United States have, therefore, had a relatively harsh impact on us."

Smith says that despite the downturn, "we have continued to invest in our business, particularly in technology (e.g. our customer-relationship-management system from SAP AG) and in our people through the companywide roll out of a Performance Management process and up-skilling our sales force and sales processes. We believe that we are well placed to participate fully in the market recovery.

"In comparison with the over-the-highway transport or trucking outsource market, the material handling industry is yet to get going as far as the trend towards outsourcing of non-core activities are concerned," he suggests. The businesses that position themselves to participate in what we believe will be a high-growth market for outsourced materials handling solutions should do well in the next five to 10 years."