17 February 2016, 10:21
HİDROMEK, the leader in the Construction Machinery sector in Turkey, was established in a 200m² workshop in 1978 in Ankara. At first, HİDROMEK produced digging and loading attachments for farm tractors. These tractor units were used as Backhoe Loaders that satisfied the needs of the Turkish market and its customers. During the first ten years, HİDROMEK supplied its products to municipalities, the army, sugar beet plants, electricity and water utility departments, road works and construction companies of various sizes. These units were used during the infrastructure, road building and repair, water works and various other projects, which enabled these services to reach many parts of the country. One fitting example of this is that the natural gas infrastructure project in Ankara was completed using only HİDROMEK models.
HİDROMEK produced its first completely in-house designed, self-styled Backhoe Loader in 1989. It started to produce a real construction machine, as opposed to machine that was converted from an agricultural tractor platform. This was a turning point for both HİDROMEK and Turkey. During the same years, HİDROMEK started to grow by investing in its workforce, new production machines, new facilities and new technologies. For the rapidly increasing machine park, it started to invest in aftersales and service networks.
Until 1999, HİDROMEK sold its products only to the domestic market. In that year, it began exporting Backhoe Loader units to Tunisia and entered the international construction equipment markets.
In addition to the Backhoe Loader range, during 2000, HİDROMEK entered the excavator market by producing its own range of excavators. Today, it produces wheeled and crawler excavators under six different weight classes.
HİDROMEK highlights
On November 18th 2013, HİDROMEK INC. has agreed to acquire the motor grader business of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI). With this agreement, HİDROMEK has acquired MHI’s business of world renowned motor graders, a construction equipment mainly used for ground preparation, road building and snow removal. This acquisition will enable HİDROMEK to own MHI’s design and production related know-how and technologies, after sales operations as well as full ownership of MHI-Pornchai Machinery Co., Ltd., MHI’s production facility in Thailand that has until now supplied MHI’s products to markets around the world. HİDROMEK will be capable of designing, producing, distributing and servicing of Motor Grader machines worldwide after this acquisition.
With the vision of “Being a world class Brand”, HİDROMEK continues its current operation out of five locations (three in Ankara, one in İzmir, one in Thailand), equipped with latest technology of robotic welding and CNC cutting machines from premises covering 120.000 m² open and 80.000 m² covered areas. HİDROMEK has an investment of USD 125 million into new premises and production facilities, this will be dedicated to the production of the full HMK EXCAVATOR range doubling the current capacity. The new plant will cover an area of 1 million m², the construction has started and is due to be operational in 2017.
Hidromek finished 2015 as the “Turkish Market Leader” in the backhoe loader and hydraulic excavator construction equipment categories.
In the domestic market, it has seven fully owned service centers supported by fifty eight authorized service outlets to provide aftersales service support required by its customers. In the export markets, it works with a network of over 100 dealer outlets, providing aftersales service support to the local customers. In addition, it has two fully owned subsidiaries; HİDROMEK West (Barcelona, Spain) and HİDROMEK Rus (Krasnodar, Russia) to provide the local support customers in European and Russian markets demand.
Current HİDROMEK number of employees has reached 1,700. The company works together with more than 100 international and over 300 domestic suppliers. As a result, HİDROMEK directly and indirectly provides thousands of jobs across the world.
Source: HİDROMEK