Manitou UK Ltd and Thurlow Nunn Standen are pleased to announce TNS will become a Manitou Agricultural, Industrial and Construction dealer, effective from 1st January 2021.
Founded by Marcel Braud when he built the first all-terrain forklift in 1958, today the Manitou Group is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of material handling equipment. Now a global manufacturer, Manitou Group has 11 production plants, is active in 140 different countries and achieved over €2 billion turnover in 2019. The UK is the oldest and one of the largest export markets, recently exceeding 4,000 annual machine sales for the first time. Despite this growth, Manitou is proud to remain a family business with the founder’s sister currently Chairman of the Board.
Manitou specialises in material handling products. The current product range includes agricultural and construction telehandlers, rotating telehandlers, rough terrain forklifts, industrial forklifts, access platforms, warehouse equipment and attachments. Most machines include telematics as standard, which ensures the dealer can remotely access service information to minimise the need for a service callout but when a repair is necessary, the engineer attends the machine with advance knowledge of the necessary rectification.
Manitou UK Managing Director, Mark Ormond explains, “Manitou strives to produce market leading machines and support them with market leading customer service. That means partnering with the world’s leading machinery dealers. We are delighted to announce that TNS will be our authorised agricultural and construction product dealer in East Anglia as from 1st January 2021. Having worked with TNS before, I have no doubt about the standard of service they will deliver to our mutual customers.”
TNS will have access to the full range of agricultural and industrial products and services across its entire trading area. The Company will cover a slightly smaller geographical area for the Manitou construction product range and will be responsible for sales of new machines whilst providing aftersales back-up to existing customers.
The inclusion of Manitou in the TNS product portfolio clearly aligns with the business’s growth strategy in the ever-changing retail environment.
“The addition of the Manitou brand is one we are clearly excited about,” explained James Thurlow, TNS Managing Director, “as it demonstrates the Company’s desire to offer a full line product portfolio, which is strategically aligned to our customers developing business needs.”
TNS Sales Director, Chris Tew explained, “The Manitou brand offers quality, high performance and reliability across a broad range of product sectors, this well- respected brand is an excellent addition to our portfolio. All 5 TNS sites will promote Manitou’s full range of Agricultural material handlers, although it is still to be agreed if this will be mirrored by the Construction and Industrial product offering. We will now be looking to appoint a Manitou product specialist before the end of 2020 to develop and grow the market share across the Agricultural, Industrial and Construction sectors.”
Adrian Brown, TNS Aftersales Director explained, “We are in the process of designing our training programmes for the entire TNS service team. Although the appointment does not take effect until 2021, Manitou and TNS are now working together to train employees across sales, service and parts departments, ensuring machine and spare parts knowledge is in place ready for the new year. Aftersales is key to our long-term business objective and we continue to work with our teams to increase the effectiveness of our offering.” Adrian further commented, “TNS will also continue to offer full service and parts support to those Merlo customers we have support over the past few years until Merlo UK find a suitable partner in the East of England.”
