Cargotec’s Danish Partner SAWO Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary

Flemming Christensen, a former service engineer at Hiab Copenhagen, founded the first SAWO workshop in 1962. In the early 1980’s, he eventually took over all Hiab Denmark workshops and the sales team, integrating them into SAWO. Both Cargotec and SAWO praise the close partnership that has endured for half a century. 

“They import and sell our whole Hiab product portfolio in Denmark and have managed to raise our market share steadily,” said Greger Jacobson, senior vice president, markets load handling at Cargotec.

“In addition to posting great sales results, they are a joy to work with. They are motivated to do a great job every day. Going forward, we hope they keep developing the markets as they have done so far,” continued Jacobson. “SAWO delivers improvement proposals to us based on their customers’ experience. This kind of customer feedback is really useful for our continuous product and service development.”

Today, SAWO employs 200 people in 12 workshops across Denmark. The partnership of Cargotec and SAWO has survived many economic ups and downs and they are facing the current market challenges together. Quality requirements are higher than ever while prices are really low, and, in general, customers are really focused on life-time costs.

“Having a reliable partner is very important, especially when times and competition are hard,” said Flemming Christensen, SAWO owner. “We really appreciate our close cooperation with Cargotec and want to solidify it further in the future,” he concluded.