John Piccolo (Photo by Rodger Lamb)

John Piccolo understands the market niche for big forklifts and, over 10 years through dealers, has marketed about 4,000 big Yale trucks with a value of about USD250 million.

NACCO Industries Inc's materials handling group (NMHG) designs, engineers and sells lines of forklifts under the Yale and Hyster brands.

"Yale took on the NMHG big truck brand marketed by Hyster," Piccolo says. "For Yale, it opened up end markets in wood, concrete pipe and stevedoring industries." Piccolo is Yale big truck sales manager and a member of the National Precast Concrete Association's education committee.

"John moved us from nowhere to a big competitor in big trucks," Lou Micheletto, national warehouse products manager of Greenville-based Yale, reports in an interview at ProMat 2009.

NMHG manufactures forklifts in nine countries. The factories include Berea, Kentucky and Nijmegen, the Netherlands facilities that make the big trucks that Piccolo markets.

Across forklift Classes 4 and 5, "sales have been surprisingly evenly split three ways between cushion 135/155, pneumatic 135/155 and the larger GP170-360 pneumatic models", Piccolo notes.

"The sales gradually increased each year for the first five years (through 2003) and then leveled near Yale's overall share with some models spiking to very high share levels within the past five years," Piccolo says. "Yale's strong historical presence in some industry segments, such as manufacturing related to metals, created the spikes."

At ProMat 2009, Yale introduced three models, expanding the lifting capacity of its Veracitor big truck GP135-155VX series of Class 5 pneumatic forklifts. Standard equipment includes a 110-horsepower Cummins QSB 3.3 turbocharged diesel engine, a Techtronix 332 transmission and oil-cooled wet disc brakes.

Piccolo received a bachelor of science degree in industrial marketing from Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has industry experience with both a dealership and a factory-direct role for Allis-Chalmers and held other positions with TCM and the Baker segment of Linde. He joined Yale Materials Handling Corp in October 1990 as product manager for Class 1, 4 and 5 forklifts and took his present position in 1998.