Construction firms in Dubai are turning to new markets in a bid to find cranes needed to build projects across the city.
In the past Europe has provided the majority of the cranes that fill the Dubai skyline but those resources have been virtually exhausted.
Gallagher International, which rents 53 mobile cranes to developers here, had leased its entire fleet last week.
"You have to say no to your customers. You cannot find cranes anywhere," said Arty Wartanian, General Manager at Gallagher. "People are going to China to buy them [cranes] because sources in Europe have dried up." Building analysts say Dubai has emerged as the world's fastest-growing city, as well as its largest repository of building cranes.
"Dubai is the biggest market for tower cranes," said Klaus Binder, who heads tower crane production for the German manufacturer Liebherr. "No other city in the world has such a number. Maybe Shanghai did three or five years ago.There are growing markets in Russia, but they are not as big as Dubai's." The frantic growth is the result of vast sums of money being ploughed into luxury real estate in the city.
Binder believes there are between 1,100 and 1,200 tower cranes in the whole of the UAE, mainly in Dubai, which is roughly five to 10 per cent of the world's active tower cranes one of three varieties used in construction.
Dubai has many thousands more mobile cranes and crawler cranes those on wheels or tracks. A recent article in Construction Week magazine said crane prices have jumped 30 per cent this year, while the two major European manufacturers Liebherr and Potain were so backlogged that Italian and Chinese cranes were taking a growing share of the Gulf market.
It is not just cranes in short supply. The simultaneous building booms in Abu Dhabi and in nearby Qatar and Bahrain have emptied the market of bulldozers, excavators, pile drivers and other machinery. Prices of raw materials like concrete, glass, steel and aluminium are soaring, as is demand for labourers and engineers.
A worker said: "We get different machinery every week. It is always delivered because the buildings have to go up quickly."
By Emirates Today Staff
© Emirates Today 2006
