“The ability to adapt has played a key role in our history”
The founder of Havator, Ahti Hanhirova (1918–1990), started his successful career as an entrepreneur in the late 1940s. Hanhirova made a considerable investment in construction in 1956, which is when today’s operations are considered to have begun. The company acquired its first mobile crane in 1966.
“Adapting to the requirements of the markets has always been a guiding principle of Havator’s operations. We have always directed our resources according to the demands of our customers. The ability to adapt has played a key role in our history,” says Havator’s President Erkki Hanhirova.
Today, Havator is Group offering crane, special transportation, section assembly and harbor crane services. The Group specializes in the management of projects in cooperation with its expert partners.
Havator operates from 32 offices in Finland, Sweden, Norway and the Baltic States. The company primarily serves customers from the construction sector and manufacturing, oil refining, energy production, mining and infrastructure projects. Group sales amount to over EUR 110 million, and Havator employs approximately 600 personnel.
The strength of Havator as a provider of lifting and specialized transportation services is based on versatile and modern equipment. Havator fields an extensive fleet of diverse hydraulic cranes and tracked lattice boom cranes, with 1250-tonne Demag CC 6800 lattice boom crane as the flagship. At the other end of Havator’s equipment range are the small mobile cranes. Dozens of our 30-50-tonne mobile cranes are at work every day at the construction sites of private homes and larger buildings.
Growth required new forms of management
Havator was a purely family-owned company until 2006, when the Group started looking for venture capital to secure its potential for growth. At the same time, the Group developed the operations of its Board and Executive Team and enhanced its oversight systems.
“In a family-owned business, blood can be thicker than competence when the company comes to the point when achieving systematic growth and building a functional organization requires outside expertise. We did not make that mistake,” Erkki Hanhirova says.
Havator grew extremely rapidly in 2006–2008. In a few years, Havator grew from a company with net sales of EUR 37 million to a Group with a turnover of EUR 100 million.
“Achieving growth for the Group requires new ways of thinking. Havator acquired companies of various sizes operating in different industries and countries, and the Group opened new offices through organic growth. Honing this diverse set of operations into a single, smoothly functioning whole was no small challenge,” says Jussi Yli-Niemi, who took up the duties of CEO in 2006.
The Group’s newest offices have been opened in Stockholm (opening in May) and Äänekoski, which serves the entire Jyväskylä economic area.
“Today, we are one united Havator, whether we are talking about lifting services, special transportation or installations in Sweden, Finland, Norway or the Baltic States. This way of thinking and operating is the only way to achieve synergies between our different sectors,” Yli-Niemi points out.
Safety First in the future too
In 2010, the CapMan Buyout IX fund made an investment in Havator, marking a major step forward for the company. With CapMan on board, Havator obtained more resources to make new acquisitions and keep growing in Sweden and Finland.
“Over the last decade, we have developed into a Group that has thrived due to its expertise, ability to adapt and focus on occupational safety. A company like ours needs a sufficiently large market area to make the most of the mobility of our fleet and wide network of offices,” says Erkki Hanhirova.
Thanks to the strategy adopted by the Group, Havator is capable of taking responsibility for extensive projects and offering a full complement of services from design to implementation. This has led to the company winning major, multi-year contracts, for example in Äänekoski and Kalasatama.
“We face the future with confidence, since the significance of cost-efficient sub-contracting is only increasing in large-scale industrial projects. There will be continued demand for high-quality operators who follow a Safety First approach to occupational safety and take the needs of the customer into account. The importance of Safety First thinking will only increase in the future,” Hanhirova concludes.
Havator 60 fact file
600 employees in 2016
60 units of machinery will be purchased in 2016–2017
60 new employees will be hired in 2016–2017
6 reporting languages
60th anniversary celebrated in connection with Erkki Hanhirova’s 60th birthday on 13 May in Entertainment Center Toranda in Tornio (other events in Finland and Sweden will be announced later)
