The Wolfson Centre for Bulk Solids Handling Technology

50-years of Liebherr-Werk Ehingen

(Posted on 26/02/19)

On 22 February 1969 Hans Liebherr founded Liebherr-Werk Ehingen GmbH. Customers use the company's mobile and crawler cranes worldwide in numerous industries. The approximately 3,600 employees in the company produce around 1,800 machines every year. The current product range includes forty different crane types. Every customer, every application, every country has its own requirements of the complex machines. The cranes manufactured in Ehingen can be roughly divided into two product lines. On the one hand, there are the wheeled mobile cranes, on the other hand are the crawler cranes with lattice jibs or telescopic booms. The most powerful crawler crane towers over the famous Ulm Minster church located a stone’s throw away from Ehingen. It is 240 metres high and lifts loads up to 3,000 tonnes.

The beginnings of the Liebherr-Werk Ehingen GmbH were quite modest. The truck crane AUK 40T-60 was produced from 1969 with 87 employees. The company sold a total of 79 machines between 1969 and 1972, making the AUK 40T-60 the bestseller of the founding years. With around 2,500 deliveries, today the Liebherr telescopic mobile crane LTM 1030-2.1 is the top-selling model from Ehingen. The two-axle variant impresses with high functionality and reliability and was the world's first mobile crane with data bus transmission technology at the time of market introduction.

The success factors back then as well as today are similar at Liebherr-Werk Ehingen GmbH. In development performance, safety and efficiency are paramount to the engineers and product designers. The suggestions for innovations often come directly from the users. "Developing and intensifying customer proximity is definitely one of our strengths," says Christoph Kleiner, Managing Director Sales of Liebherr-Werk Ehingen GmbH. He also mentions the reliability of the Ehingen cranes as another strength. "Ninety percent of all cranes ever built by us are still in use after decades," he says. This is owed to the high product quality and the special standards in customer services.

The driving forces behind customer proximity and product quality, innovations and customer services are the employees, also at Liebherr in Ehingen. "Fifty years of Liebherr in Ehingen are first and foremost fifty years of the commitment, willingness to perform and loyalty of our staff," says Mario Trunzer, Managing Director Administration. "Without their dedication and their ideas we would not have been able to develop so successfully," adds Trunzer. "We would like to express our sincere thanks to the staff."