The Liebherr family business was established in 1949 by Hans Liebherr. The great success of his first mobile, easy-to-assemble and affordable tower crane was the foundation on which the company flourished. Today Liebherr is not only one of the world’s leading manufacturers of construction machinery, but is also an acknowledged supplier of technically innovative user-oriented products and services in numerous other fields.

In the UAE, the world’s largest boom telescopic mobile crane, a Liebherr LTM11200-9.1, was used for moving parts in the fabrication of a self-propelled rig known as a seajack at Port Rashid, Dubai in August 2009. Specialist builder Lamprell needed to lift and place the top two segments on the rig, named Leviathan.

The four legs, each 86.46m-high, incorporated eight segments. For the seventh and eighth segments, each weighing 52 tonnes, the crane was positioned alongside the seajack to provide a 26m radius and capitalise on the cranes telescopic boom, capable of reaching up to 100m, to ensure fast lifts and speedier erection times for each of the legs.

Liebherr equipment also played a prominent role on the Dubai Metro project, with a LTM1250-6.1 used to perform a twin lift of the 32m-long by 10m-wide by 6m-high steel gantry that, once fitted out, was destined to become the pedestrian bridge spanning the four lanes of the Sheikh Zayed Road at Jumeirah Lake Towers Metro Station.