Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Tadano builds and sells cranes and aerial work platforms that construction and infrastructure companies use to lift heavy things.
Tadano is a Japanese maker of cranes. If a job needs something heavy lifted — a steel beam onto a skyscraper, a bridge section over a river, a wind turbine part into place — Tadano likely sells a machine that does it. The company builds rough-terrain cranes, all-terrain cranes, truck-mounted cranes, and aerial work platforms, and it sells them to construction firms, infrastructure contractors, and rental fleets around the world.
The business splits into a few pieces. The biggest is the mobile crane division, which makes the wheeled cranes that drive to a site, telescope a boom out, and hoist loads. A second piece is the smaller vehicle-mounted cranes often seen on Japanese roads, used for utility work and light lifting. A third is aerial work platforms — the buckets and scissor lifts that put workers up in the air safely. Customers pay upfront for the machines and then pay again over the years for parts and service, which is where a lot of the steady money comes from. Tadano's real edge is trust. A crane failure is catastrophic, so buyers care deeply about safety records, reliability, and dealer support. Tadano has built that reputation over decades, especially in Japan, and it competes globally with Manitowoc and the crane arm of Caterpillar, among others. It also bought the German crane maker Demag in 2019, a bet on scale that has weighed on profits while the company integrates it.
The company is headquartered in Takamatsu, Japan, and its shares trade on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Like most capital-goods makers, its results swing with construction spending and interest rates — when contractors are confident, they buy cranes; when they aren't, they rent or wait. Tadano pays a dividend and has focused on paying down debt from the Demag deal while pushing newer electric and safety-focused models.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026