The benchmark

Developing a credible list of America's largest crane owning companies has been a year-long effort. On the following pages are our final results, which we consider to be a good, solid start in this challenge - our act50 benchmark.

Initially, we surveyed more than 120 companies throughout the US, Canada and Mexico, asking them for information about their crane fleets and capacities. At the time of writing, some 54 companies complied but we realize we are still missing a few of the major players in the North American crane market. We will spend the next year procuring data from these additional companies, with the goal of bringing our list up to 100. Perhaps after seeing our first annual act50 these companies will come forward to participate.

Companies are listed by their act50 Index, which is calculated by adding together the maximum lifting capacities in US tons of all crawler cranes and mobile cranes in a company's fleet. Tower crane capacities are not included in this listing. In our December 2006 issue we will feature a list of top tower crane owning companies, and next year we will add our tower crane ranking to the act50.

All companies in the list were contacted and given the opportunity to supply fleet information and other data. In some cases, where no data is submitted, or it is incomplete, we have based a company's equipment fleet figure on estimates due to the lack of information. As the vast majority of crane-owning companies are privately held, it can be difficult to obtain and verify figures, although we do approach independent industry sources to assist when an estimation is required.