Thirty-five years ago Liebherr broke ground on its facility on the American continent in Newport News, VA. After incorporation in 1970, the construction of the Virginia facility, which includes two large production facilities and a four-story office building, was completed in 1973.
Liebherr crawler excavators were produced in Newport News from 1971 until manufacturing of these machines was consolidated to the factory in Colmar, France, during the 1980s.
Liebherr began manufacturing mining trucks at the facility in 1997 and continues to manufacture large diesel electric mining trucks in Newport News, VA, today. The location also serves as headquarters of sales and service in the United States for Liebherr’s product lines in earthmoving equipment, concrete technology and mobile-cranes.
In addition to its Newport News facility, the Liebherr Group operates U.S. locations in Saline, MI; Houston, TX; Miami, FL; Gillette, WY; and Elko, NV — dedicated sales and service facilities for Liebherr’s various product lines.
Decentrally Organized Family-Owned Group
The Liebherr Group comprises more than 100 companies in every continent of the world and employs a workforce of more than 22,000 people. In the past few years the Liebherr Group has undergone dynamic development and in 2004 achieved a total consolidated turnover of approximately $6.1 billion, according to the company.
The Liebherr Group is organized decentrally into corporate units of easily manageable size that operate autonomous. This ensures customer proximity and the ability to respond flexibly to signals from competitive global markets. Operative management of the production and sales companies in the individual product segments is in the hands of the respective divisional control companies.
The Liebherr Group’s holding company is Liebherr International AG in Bulle, Switzerland, which is entirely owned by members of the Liebherr family. The family business is already in the hands of the second generation, and is jointly managed by Isolde Liebherr and her brother Willi Liebherr.
The history of the Liebherr Group began back in 1949 in the small town of Kirchdorf an der Iller in Southern Germany. The founder of the company, Dr.-Ing. E. h. Hans Liebherr (Apr. 1, 1915 to Oct. 7, 1993) put an idea into practice, which had occupied his mind for a long time du-ring the day-to-day work of running a small construction business: to tackle the major task of rebuilding Germany after the Second World War a tower crane capable of easy assembly and transport was required.
Successful Diversification
The rapid success of this Liebherr crane created a firm foundation for the Liebherr company. From these humble beginnings an extensive crane program rapidly emerged.
In addition to tower cranes the product range also includes mobile crane, crawler crane, hydraulic excavator, dumper truck, wheel loader, crawler tractor and loader, pipe layer, concrete mixing plant and truck mixer model lines.
Liebherr also supplies extensive product families in many other sectors. For cargo handling there are ship, offshore, container and harbor mobile cranes; in plant and equipment construction, Liebherr is a supplier of machine tools, material flow technology and engineering projects; in the aircraft equipment sector Liebherr supplies landing gear, actuation and air-management systems and in the traffic technology sector equipment for rail vehicles.
In the domestic appliances sector Liebherr is a specialist in the production of refrigerators and freezers, with a program of more than 300 basic models.
Last but not least, Liebherr operates six hotels in Ireland, Austria and Germany.
For more information, visit www.liebherr.com.
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