Specialist market research and forecasting company Off-Highway Research believes 575 new all-terrain, rough terrain and truck cranes will be sold in South America this year. That may not be very many – perhaps 6 percent of the market in the world excluding China – but it would be an enormous improvement on the continent’s fortunes throughout the 2010s.
The Petrobras corruption scandal paralysed the construction industry for most of the 2010s, causing a collapse in the Brazilian construction equipment market. As arrests started to be made in 2014 as a result of investigations, sales of machines fell in the space of a year to less than a third of what they previously were. This broad collapse in demand included mobile cranes.
