Morris Material Handling is in joint venture discussions with partners in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
Morris already has a relationship with crane builder Standard Fabrications in Dubai – the crane builder uses Morris componentry. Now the two are discussing a joint venture in Abu Dhabi. Morris business development manager Brian Yates said that the Dubai market was already worth £200,000 ($350,000) to Morris in the UK and the market in Abu Dhabi was potentially much larger, given the industrial development taking place there. Yates said he anticipated that Morris’s share of the new Abu Dhabi company would be in the region of 20%.
The new initiative marks growing activity by Morris in the Middle East, coinciding neatly with a revival in the price of oil.
Last year Morris took a 49% stake in a joint venture in Saudi Arabia with AH Al-Zamil after serving as a supplier for most of the 1990s.
Yates said that Morris was also selling crane kits to Iranian crane builder Arian Company. This year sales to Iran would be worth between £500,000 and £600,000 ($750,000 to $900,000), he said. Arian is a dominant supplier of engineered large cranes in Iran and, with the assistance of packaged kits supplied by Morris, is now moving into the market for medium-sized cranes.
Forming a joint venture is against Iranian law, Yates said, but the current government appears to have a more liberal attitude on the issue to previous ones and therefore he believed there were prospects for strengthening the relationship with Arian in the future.
