History
The origins of Sany lie in Lianyuan Welding Material Ltd, a company founded in 1986 by Liang Wengen, Tang Xiuguo, Mao Zhongwu and Yuan Jinhua, who left their previous jobs and first established the company with a capital of sixty thousand yuans in the town of Maotang, county-level city of Lianyuan.
In 1991 Lianyuan Welding Material Ltd. was officially renamed Sany Group Co., Ltd. and its headquarters were officially moved to Changsha. Since then, the company has experienced continuous rapid growth (at an annualized rate of around 50%), spurred by China's economic boom, specifically growth in its construction sector.
Sany Heavy Industry Co., Ltd was founded in 1994 as a subsidiary of the Sany Group. Sany Heavy Industry went public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange on July 3, 2003. On June 17, 2005, the company conducted the split share structure reform and realized full circulation of its shares. After this event, its market cap started growing at a very fast rate, jumping from a total of RMB 4 million yuan in 2005 up to a total of RMB 137 million yuan in June 2011.[13]
Since its foundation, the headquarters of Sany have received official visits from several political leaders, including Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.[14]
In 2010 the operating income of Sany reached just under 34 billion RMB, a 79% year-on-year increase.[15]
During the 2010 Copiapó mining accident, a crane manufactured by SANY was used in rescuing the Chilean miners.[16] A pump from the company was donated to the Tokyo Electric Power Company to assist with the emergency response to the Fukushima I nuclear accidents.[17]
In 2011, Sany signed several contracts to open new manufacturing centers, the most important of them include the Zhuhai[18] and Lingang New City[19] centers, and the fifth international equipment plant in Indonesia, the latter with an investment of US$200 million.[20]
In January 2012 Sany agreed to acquire a 90 per cent stake in Putzmeister, a Germany-based manufacturer of concrete pumps, for €324 million, with CITIC PE Advisors (Hong Kong) Ltd. agreeing to purchase the balance of 10 per cent.[21]
In February 2012, Sany and Austria-based Palfinger announced a market venture to make and sell mobile cranes, a project with a total investment of $143 million, plus the construction of a sales unit in Salzburg for $5.4 million.[22]
In 2012, through affiliate Ralls Corp., Sany acquired four wind farm projects in Oregon. Later in the year, though, the Obama administration ordered the wind farms divested after it was determined their location next to the Naval Weapons Systems Training Facility in Boardman, Oregon represented a national security risk. The divestiture—the first of its kind since 1990—was ordered by the US Treasury Department, which chairs the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment.[23]
In 2014, Sany's Huerfano River Wind Farm was acquired by Tamra-Tacoma Capital Partners. Tamra-Tacoma Capital Partners and Sany soon after announced plans to construct 1 gigawatt of wind infrastructure in the United States. The Huerafano acquisition marked Sany's first partnership with a U.S. mainland investment firm. Tamra-Tacoma Capital Partners initiated litigation against Sany America on August 31, 2016, alleging Sany fraudulently misrepresented the plant's production and had no maintenance program, leaving the asset "worthless" according to the complaint. On February 6, 2019, the case was settled and subsequently dismissed with prejudice.[24]
In March 2017, Sany and Star Energy announced plans to construct 1 gigawatt of wind infrastructure in the United States.[25]
In 2021, the company was ranked 468th in the Forbes Global 2000, first among heavy equipment manufacturers in China and second in the world.[26]
In 2023, Liang Wengen retired as the chairman of the Sany Group at the age of 67.[27]
