JAKARTA – Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding Co. is planning to open its first overseas gantry crane plant in Indonesia, betting on growing demand for cargo-handling equipment on the back of seaport development in emerging countries.
PT. MES Machinery Indonesia, a joint venture set up by Mitsui Engineering and its wholly owned subsidiary in Singapore, is located in a free trade zone on Batam Island, just south of the city-state. It is scheduled to begin producing two types of gantry cranes in January for dockside and container yard installation.
Global demand for gantry cranes has been on the rise, prompted by infrastructure development in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and Africa as well as containership renewal and enlargement trends in advanced economies, Mitsui Engineering said.
The company decided to build the overseas production base to meet increasing demand for such cranes after expanding annual production capacity of dockside cranes from 22 to 36 in 2015 at a domestic plant in Oita Prefecture, where it also turns out 80 container yard cranes a year.
MES Machinery, capitalized at 50 billion rupiah (¥418 million), is expected to export products to Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. It has an annual production capacity of four dockside cranes and 30 container yard cranes.
Mitsui Engineering projects that it could cut the total cost of manufacturing and transporting gantry cranes by 10 percent through overseas production.
It also plans to expand a plot of land for the Indonesian plant from the current 75,000 sq. meters to 123,000 sq. meters in 2020.
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