RESHORING


only has the market’s growth been on a pretty consistent incline over the past year given the amount of investments in a number of critical industries, but that she believes it will continue to be on an upswing. Kevin Duhamel, Gorbel’s director of sales for overhead solutions, maintained that even with there being a number of large capital investments consistently made in various manufacturing, logistics and energy sectors, the rate of demand growth is somewhat more uneven than it had been five to seven years ago – prior to the Covid pandemic. This is largely because of some variation in different market sectors given the recent economic and geopolitical uncertainty and the impact of labour issues. “It is not unusual for people to sometimes be somewhat cautious,” Tim Gaydos, an advanced


crane sales specialist for Mazzella Companies, says, noting that earlier this year some companies were holding back on some of their capital spending, waiting to see how their end use markets would be performing. “But more recently they have started to release some of their funds again,” and as result, he said that while somewhat flattish year-on-year, US demand for overhead cranes and hoists is currently very high. And while it continues to vary somewhat by industry and project type, Brian Roberts, overhead cranes market development manager for Conductix-Wampfler, agrees that US overhead crane and hoist demand appears to be improving. Roberts says that there have been manufacturing investments, more large capital projects and a shift towards modernising and expanding existing facilities alongside selective


greenfield development in 2026, compared with what he termed as a bit of hesitation to do so last year – hesitation that he says had been largely driven by high interest rates (therefore financing costs), tariffs and uncertainty around the broader economic outlook. “But more recently we’ve seen increased


project activity and investment,” and people are generally cautiously optimistic that the market will continue to see more demand from currently active projects, manufacturing expansions and modernisations of aging cranes, Roberts explains. On the other hand, he explains that some of the the issues that slowed down the market in 2024 and 2025 could continue to influence investment decisions into 2027, stating, “That will largely depend upon how economic policies develop and how manufacturers respond to the broader


ochmagazine.com | Fall 2026 79


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