Company history

Tadano has three beginnings, and none of them is wrong. The company dates its founding to 29 August 1919, the day Tadano Masuo left Takamatsu for Asahikawa in Hokkaido to set up as a welder — welding then being frontier technology, and its sparks, by the company’s own telling, the thing that drew him. He came home after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. In July 1945 an air raid burned eight-tenths of Takamatsu, and in 1946 Masuo and two of his sons began repairing machinery in a shack on the ruins; his son Tadano Hiroshi would later call that the founding. The registered company — Tadano Ironworks, capital ¥500,000, four employees, a workshop of some eighty square metres — followed in August 1948. Which date counts is a choice about where the firm places its own starting point, not a discrepancy of fact.

What made it a manufacturer came from a customer, not a plan. The shop lived on repairs and subcontract work, developed a railway track-maintenance machine for Japanese National Railways in 1950, and then took an order from a haulage company to mount a loading crane on the bed of a used truck. The haulier adopted it across its branches nationwide and, as Hiroshi put it, the machines “sold as fast as we could build them.” Mechanization of loading had found a small Shikoku ironworks first. In 1954 Tadano began developing hydraulic industrial machinery, and in September 1955 released the OC-2, a two-tonne hydraulic truck crane — the first in Japan, worked out from hints in a construction-machinery magazine. Orders came from across the country on that one point of novelty, and cranes became the main product. The head-office plant moved to Shinden-cho, Takamatsu in 1959 and has stayed the centre of the company ever since; the first export followed in 1960, four OC-5A units to Indonesia.

Hydraulics mattered not because cranes were new — wire-and-winch machines already existed — but because hydraulic power transmits force precisely with few controls, so a crane could sit on a small vehicle and be worked by an ordinary driver. Selling, however, outran building: late deliveries and defects piled up as the workforce passed one hundred and then two hundred, and around the tenth year the company stalled. Hiroshi blamed neither the market nor the technology but himself — he had enlarged an organization without an answer to what he was managing for. The answer came from a newly translated Drucker, The Practice of Management: profit cannot be the purpose of a business, only a measure of its worth. What he then rebuilt was not the product but the personnel system — shop-floor pay moved from daily to monthly, overtime was abolished by folding the premium into fixed pay, and the time clocks were thrown out. Lateness, which had run at about 2%, stopped. By around 1967 Tadano was operating the first full five-day week in Shikoku. The 1961 corporate motto — Creation, Contribution, Cooperation — and the September 1962 listing on the Osaka exchange both belong to this same stretch.

The TM-2H cargo crane of 1962 became the prototype for cranes mounted on truck beds — Tadano’s second product family — and the sales network spread with it: Osaka in 1958, then Nagoya, Sendai, Sapporo, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, the Kanto region and Hokuriku by 1979, each office the ancestor of a branch that still exists. A crane is a machine whose parts and repairs run for decades after the sale, so putting people in the provinces was itself part of the product. The company reached the Tokyo exchange’s Second Section in March 1971 and was promoted to the First Sections of both Tokyo and Osaka the following January.

The decisive machine was the TR-150 of 1970, a fifteen-tonne rough-terrain crane, again the first in Japan: a self-propelled crane driven and operated from a single cab, able to work on ungraded ground and inside factory yards where a large truck crane cannot go. Japanese sites are cramped and Japanese roads uneven, and those constraints bred a machine type of the country’s own — the line that would, half a century later, drive Tadano’s earnings in North America. Two years afterwards came the AML overload prevention device, also Japan’s first, which computes the tipping limit from load and working radius and stops a dangerous movement. From then on safety equipment sat beside performance in every Tadano catalogue. Building the safety device in-house, though, also brought the liability home: the largest recall in the company’s history would arrive on the descendants of this device.

Production went to two poles — Atsugi in Kanagawa in 1971, Shido in Kagawa in 1980, and in 1988 a plant at Sakura in Chiba that replaced Atsugi, keeping manufacturing close to metropolitan demand while the core stayed in Kagawa. In January 1983 the AT-136TE and AT-140TE aerial work platforms — live-line trucks for power-utility work — opened a third product family; the technology of carrying, extending and supporting a working arm on a vehicle is shared with cranes, but lifting people rather than loads demands a different grade of safety, and the widened range loosened the company’s dependence on construction investment alone. Abroad, Tadano moved carefully: a Dutch subsidiary in 1973, a Beijing office in 1984 — places to sell and to service, not to build. In July 1989 the name changed from Tadano Ironworks to Tadano Ltd., and consolidated sales passed $724.7M (¥100bn) for the first time — forty years from ¥500,000 of capital and four employees. Dropping “ironworks” came just before the customers stopped being only Japanese contractors.

In May 1990 Tadano set up Faun GmbH in Germany and bought the crane and vehicle divisions of Faun AG. The target was the all-terrain crane — a large machine that runs fast on public roads and still crosses rough ground, a product shaped by European road regulations and European sites, and not reachable by extending a domestic line of rough-terrain and truck-mounted cranes. Buying the maker was faster than closing the gap alone. Tadano Faun GmbH followed in 1991, a Dutch sales company in 1992, and Tadano America in Texas in 1993. Spending on technology continued in parallel: a Singapore base in 1996, a new research institute in Takamatsu in 1997 (today the Tadano Innovation Center), and in 1998 the AR-5500M, a 550-tonne all-terrain crane, then the largest in Japan. Every one of those outlays anticipated demand several years out. Underneath them, domestic construction investment was contracting.

The bill arrived at the end of the decade. Shukan Toyo Keizai reported in October 1998 that Tadano’s core cranes were struggling badly and emergency cost cuts had begun; by April 1999 it reported the first loss since listing, with 119 employees taking an expanded early-retirement scheme and ¥1bn of costs removed. Public and private investment shrank together, and a crane is a long-lived good: when work dries up, contractors make do with what they own and rental firms stop ordering new machines first. Losses came three times — for the years to March 1999, 2000 and 2002 — with staff reductions each time. In April 2000 the company dissolved thirteen truck-mounted-crane sales subsidiaries in a single stroke, replacing regional sales companies with the parent and its dealers; subsidiaries close to the site are a strength in a boom and pure fixed cost in a slump. Two decades later President Tadano Koichi would name this retrenchment the first of “three things we must never forget,” alongside the 2004 recall and four fatal workplace accidents; since then the company has written 人材 — human resources — as 人財, human assets.

The second of those three came in 2004, when a Tadano rough-terrain crane was involved in a fatal accident on a national road in Okayama; a malfunction of the safety device was among the causes, and in December the company filed a recall of 15,278 machines across eight types and sixteen models — its largest ever. The direct cost, about $1.4M (¥150m), barely moved the accounts; what changed was the framing. Tadano took from it the recognition that “we are permitted to run construction machinery on public roads,” pushed CSR from 2005 and adopted a CSR Charter in 2006. A rental company’s crane may be operated by anyone, anywhere, and the person killed need not be a customer at all. Then, in 2008, Tadano defined its business domain as LE — lifting equipment: mobile machines that lift, hoist and work at height, and nothing else. Rather than riding out downturns by diversifying, it chose to be first in the world in one field — which also meant denying itself any refuge in the next downturn. The same year brought a new Chiba plant and, in December, the purchase of Spandeck Inc. (now Tadano Mantis) as a foothold in crawler cranes.

World demand for construction cranes halved between 2009 and 2010, and Tadano booked what was then its largest loss. Demand recovered from 2011 — consolidated sales rose from ¥181.7bn for the year to March 2014 to ¥209.4bn two years later, with operating profit peaking at ¥31.0bn — before falling oil prices cut energy-plant work in North America and the Middle East and pulled sales back to ¥179.6bn. President Tadano Koichi did not respond by reopening the portfolio. He held the company inside LE and kept its long-run targets: number one in the world, 80% of sales overseas, an operating margin above 20% in normal times. The mid-term plan’s governing phrase was “a strong company,” defined as one that earns in good years and bad and never stops developing people; management repeatedly separated what it could not move (markets, exchange rates) from what it could, and put its effort into the latter. Global share rose from 14% in 2007 to 26% in 2016, taken not on price but on what Koichi called a four-part package — product, quality, service including parts, and residual value — which hang together because a crane lasts about thirty years and lives a second life abroad.

Three investments landed in the same year. In February 2019 Tadano announced the purchase of the Demag crane business from Terex of the United States, closing on 31 July: eight share acquisitions and eleven business transfers, adding all-terrain cranes up to 1,200 tonnes and crawler cranes of 400 to 3,200 tonnes from a maker with nearly two centuries behind it. The same year the Kozai plant opened in Takamatsu — some 200,000 square metres and over ¥20bn — and the company marked its centenary, with an Indian joint venture set up months earlier. Koichi described the three as the “ingredients” for ¥300bn of sales, with the cooking still ahead. The effects and the burden showed immediately: consolidated sales rose ¥39.5bn to ¥227.9bn, but the European segment lost ¥6.4bn on sales of ¥32.1bn, consolidated operating profit fell from ¥15.8bn to ¥13.9bn, European segment assets swelled from ¥36.6bn to ¥90.6bn, and headcount went from 3,405 to 5,084. What had been bought was range and people, and both arrived first as fixed cost.

Then COVID stalled global demand and the European rebuild slipped. In October 2020 Tadano filed for restructuring under German law — available only because the business was not insolvent and had a credible plan — completing it in March 2021 and merging the old Faun and Demag subsidiaries into one company each in France and the UK. The year to March 2021 showed sales of ¥186.0bn, an operating loss of ¥4.2bn and a net loss of $121.7M (¥13bn). In April 2021 Ujiie Toshiaki became president and CEO — the first from outside the founding family. A Marubeni man who had joined Tadano only in 2019, he opened by quoting Koichi’s line that innovation comes from the young, the fools and the outsiders, noting that he comfortably met two of the three conditions and that his usefulness as an outsider had an expiry date. The new management unified Faun, Demag and Tadano under a single brand in October 2021, moved the fiscal year-end from March to December in 2022 to end the mismatch with overseas subsidiaries, and liquidated the Chinese manufacturing joint venture in March 2023 after years of price competition. North America carried the numbers — Texan oil and gas work lifting rough-terrain sales — and the year to December 2025 set a record at $2.3B (¥349bn), with three further acquisitions completed in 2024–25. Europe still lost money: surplus headcount and pension obligations inherited with Demag, the difficulty of cutting staff, supply chains broken by pandemic and war. Faun, bought in 1990, and Demag, bought in 2019, had once been rivals inside Germany. A German plant was closed and sold in June 2025, and in October two of the four board directors were posted to Germany. Being among the largest crane makers on earth is the consequence of the choice made in 1955 — and it is also a position with nowhere to put the shock when demand moves all one way.