Palfinger boss Klauser

“Bringing production back, not to Austria”

Palfinger CEO Andreas Klauser: "India is our new focus."(Bild: Palfinger/Peter Rigaud)

Andreas Klauser, CEO of crane manufacturer Palfinger, talks about the recession in Germany and other countries, the relocation of production from China and the new promising market of India. And he explains why he is no longer creating jobs in Austria.

"Krone": Palfinger is a cyclical, globally active company with good figures in recent years. Now there is a recession in parts of Europe. Is there any light on the horizon?
Andreas Klauser: We started this year with a very good order backlog from 2023. Now we are seeing a clear downturn. We have - as we say in English - a "mixed bag". We are working in markets that are completely underperforming, where the construction sector, the construction industry and the building materials trade are developing very negatively. This applies to Scandinavia, Germany and France. On the other hand, there are markets such as Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece that are developing extremely positively. Then we have markets that are very stable: We have significant growth behind us in North America, where we also expect a positive impact next year. So how much is Europe hurting? It is more than 50 percent of our business. America is now heading towards 30 percent, thank goodness. I can compensate there and we will continue to compensate. We have already scaled back the entire production figures here and will have a flexible working time model in the fall, i.e. one with fewer working days.