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British firms have been encouraged and found it mutually beneficial to link with Continental firms. Andover Trailers seems to have found an ideal partner in its deal with Goldhofer of Bavaria.
AEfew British companies are quietly getting on with the business of uropean unity all on their own: one is Andover Trailers, which has been cooperating with Goldhofer of Bavaria for the past couple of years. The Hampshire-based trailer maker has built up a formidable reputation for heavy haulage equipment and other trailers over the past decade—and won the Specialist class in CM's 1994 Trailer of the Year competition—but the Goldhofer deal seems to have given Andover a further boost. It has even started selling German trailers to the Germans...
Andover Trailers is profitable now, with an l'A annual turnover of around £3m, 35 employees 8 and a plant that's set for expansion. But like tmany in the industry, it went through a rough 1^ patch during the recession of the late eighties.. iAnd like other survivors, it chose to diversify ito prevent such problems recurring: "Our shareholders have always been frightened of being governed by the UK construction indus
try—the Goldhofer deal gets us out of that," says managing director Tim Wright.
"They can carry us into export markets we're too small for," adds joint general manager Ivan Collins (pictured left). "Some competitors have tried to diversify into completely different products; we wanted to stick with trailers".
"The strategy is working," says Wright. "Now we're down to the nitty-gritty of making trailers."
But Andover's European adventure has not quite followed the original plan. When CM visited Goldhofer's Memmingen plant last year, the scale of the operation (435 employees and a turnover of around 100m Deutschmarks) made Andover look like just a small offshore assembly plant.
Goldhofer needed a source for its cheaper range of drawbar trailers and its President, Ralf Schiller, said at the time that there was "no technical overlap and no market overlap" between the two.
Capabilities
But Collins points out that Andover Trailers is "not just another Czech Republic or Hungary," and the Bavarian firm was surprised by its capabilities. So AT is not just selling Goldhofer heavy haulage gear (long-time customer Cadzow has bought a £180,000 modular unit designed specifically for UK conditions) but is building heavy equipment for them, to reduce their sixmonth delivery times. The Andover plant is working on a pair of power-steered four and six-axle trailers for a customer in Dresden.
Andover has adopted the same computer aided design (CAD) system as the German firm, and plans to build Goldhofer-style extendible trailers and a fully modular system that is lighter than the Cadzow gear. The neck, decks and back bridge will be Andover designs; steering arms and linkages will be Goldhofer. This reduces development costs, and means that spares are readily available on the Continent, The first example should be completed next spring.
The Goldhofer deal is important but Andover has plenty of other activities on the go, such as axle conversions: AT is adding third axles to 12 Seddon Atkinson waste trucks for AFM in Portsmouth, and CM spotted an MAN 17.322 drawbar prime mover with a shortened chassis and an air-suspended tag axle.
Also in the Andover yard was a three-axle Superlow trailer intended for M25 signage work; unlike last year prize-winner, it had a narrow neck and was fitted with a donkey engine and a 42-tonne/metre PM crane.
Lansing Linde has recently bought half a dozen trailers for transporting its forklifts. The stepframe design has a double beavertail and a floor that elevates to the gooseneck. It is fitted with Lawrence David curtainside bodywork. "I tend to feel that there are trailer manufacturers and bodywork manufacturers—you should concentrate on what you do best," says Collins. "As far as I'm concerned, forklifts are a concentrated load and you don't want a converted curtainsided trailer."
On a smaller scale there is Andover's new
plant body, based on the Superlow design, which caused a lot of interest at the SED plant show. On ERF or Volvo FH chassis the body has a laden deck height of 970mm with the air suspension dumped—almost as low as the trailer.
CAD allows the company to look at various combinations of ramps and beavertails, borrowing features from existing trailers. It helps with drawbar outfits too, to check clearances and coupling fits.
All this activity means that the company will have to expand, adding 750m2 to its 1,300m2 of manufacturing space, and a new suite of offices. The Goldhofer deal is clearly not an idealistic move—Ivan Collins is scathing about European developments such as the Social Chapter—but a practical decision. Could this be an approach for other UK manufacturers? Perhaps, but there's no doubt that both Andover and Goldhofer have been lucky in their choice of partners.
by Toby Clark