Kobelco Construction Machinery USA last week opened new North American headquarters in Houston. Following the termination of a 10-year agreement with CNH in late December, Kobleco excavators will once again be directly marketed by the company in the United States and Canada.
Since the start of 2013, Kobelco executives have been working to re-establish a presence in North America, starting with the acquisition of its new location in Houston. The centrally located facility will serve as a temporary home base for the company while a custom headquarters and manufacturing facility is built nearby. A comprehensive parts inventory will be on hand at this location, with equipment being stored near Port of Galveston, Texas, as well as several other strategically located ports around the country.
In addition, Kobelco announced a new leadership team, naming Katsuhiko Morita as president and CEO, and past Kobelco employees Ron Hargrave as vice president of sales & marketing, George Lumpkins as product marketing manager and Eric Hoffman as national parts manager.
“Once dealers learned that Kobelco would be directly marketed again in North America, the phone started ringing,” said Ron Hargrave. “The level of enthusiasm from past, current and prospective dealers has been unprecedented. One of the biggest challenges for many manufacturers today is building and maintaining a dealer network. The quality of Kobelco’s products and services has stood the test of time, which helped us to quickly secure stocking orders to have inventory in dealer yards in time for the spring 2013 selling season.”
Kobelco is known for its line of excavators in the 3,000- to 180,000-pound classes.
“We are committed to manufacturing quality equipment and pricing it aggressively for today’s competitive marketplace,” said Morita. “With a full network of established dealers behind us, we will be in a solid position to gain market share fairly quickly.”
Kobelco Construction Machinery USA produces a full range of crawler excavators for the rental, landscape, construction, aggregate, roadbuilding, material handling, site preparation, recycling and ancillary markets, including zero tail swing, standard and compact models. For more information, visit www.kobelco-usa.com.
