BUSINESS UPDATE E
Kito Crosby’s CEO provides insight into the deal that brought two lifting brands together. f Robert Desel, CEO of Kito Crosby.
arlier this year, The Crosby Group and Kito Corporation announced the completion of the deal that saw the US and Japanese lifting businesses become a combined entity under the name Kito Crosby. Speaking after the completion of the deal, the new organisation’s CEO, Robert Desel, who before had been CEO of The Crosby Group, said: “I am thrilled to announce we have completed the business combination of The Crosby Group and Kito Corporation to form Kito Crosby, a global provider of comprehensive lifting solutions. “Together, our highly complementary product portfolios and mutual commitments to safety, reliability and innovation will create exceptional value for our customers and other stakeholders. I am honoured to be leading this organisation and its 4,000 team members around the world to bring together two amazing businesses with rich traditions and histories.”
Yoshio Kito, Kito Crosby’s chairman, who
previously had been president and CEO at Kito, added: “This combination represents significant value creation for our customers, employees, shareholders and communities. We are excited to continue growing as a combined business and to develop incremental opportunities for our existing and new customers across the world with expanded product offerings and solutions, while maintaining the same support and commitment they have come to expect.”
Desel says that aside from some organisational alignments, the months since the formation of Kito Crosby have been spent engaging in listening and learning.
“Both leadership teams are spending time
– before we make any changes big or otherwise – really learning each other's business,” he explains. “That’s very, very important because Crosby does some things well, and Kito does many things well, but we come from different traditions: a lifting hardware (hooks and chains etc.) tradition and a hoist and crane tradition, and also from different origins. It’s important that we take time – the deal closed on 1 February, so we’re barely six months in at this point [at the time of the interview] – to listen to the customer, visit the teams. “I like to spend as much time as I can at what I call the sharp end of the stick, which is either where we make products or where products gets used and consumed, which is at our distributors and our end users.
“Even before the combination with Kito I tried to spend as much time as possible at our manufacturing sites, with our channel customers or our end users. Kito obviously has… some sites in places [where Crosby has] not had a presence in, and that's taken me on the road even more than normal. “I spend most of my time now, when I’ve been in Asia, at the sites that I've never been to before, listening to the team, listening to the customers and learning the market, and we will continue to do that, and we will make small and incremental changes when needed.
“Because of the complementary nature of the
products and the geographies, we have the luxury of going and listening to the customer and doing what's best, which is like truly a luxury in this environment where there are a lot of [mergers and acquisitions] that are predicated on immediate savings. We don’t need to do that because we have two really healthy, strong businesses with very rich traditions that need to be respected and understood.”
14 | Fall 2023 |
www.ochmagazine.com
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