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Research and development

Understanding the industry and the needs of the customer lie at the heart of Cargotec’s research and development. Our technology leadership is based on solutions designed with an awareness of growing environmental requirements and enhancing the customer's productivity.

Customer and industry
Customers are the most important drivers of Cargotec’s R&D. Extensive collaboration with clients underlies nearly all of our successful projects.

The ability to understand customer applications is one of Cargotec’s most significant competitive advantages. This understanding builds on continuous dialogue with the customers as well as on decades of cargo and load handling experience. Before and during the development of new solutions, our engineers visit customers’ facilities to learn of the requirements they set for our solutions.

Being a market leader requires that innovations are developed to meet the needs of entire industries, as well as individual customers. Cargotec often works with customers who are forerunners in their fields – be it in marine load handling, operating a container terminal or on-road load handling. This way, Cargotec’s solutions take part in creating future standards in our different fields of operation.

Emerging markets are vital for the company’s future. During the past two years, Cargotec has established R&D units especially in Asia in order to be close to customers in the growth areas of the world economy. Achieving growth in developing markets often requires vast infrastructure projects such as building container ports or developing waste management solutions. To ensure that new transport networks can serve for up to decades, especially energy efficiency and environmental aspects need to be taken into account in their design.


Environmental aspects in product development

For several years, Cargotec has emphasised environmental aspects – such as energy efficiency, minimising emissions and noise levels and preventing oil leakage – in the product development. As a result of increasingly strict environmental requirements and growing fuel costs, customers are looking for energy efficient solutions more than ever before.

Cargotec is increasing the research side of its R&D. The emphasis of Cargotec’s R&D is in environmentally sound, energy efficient and safe technologies. These three aspects are taken into account right from the beginning of the R&D process.

The demand for environmentally friendly technologies can be expected to grow in the near future. This is why Cargotec aims to provide customers with products which surpass environment and safety requirements of current legislation.

In R&D, Cargotec pays close attention to its products being safe not only for the environment, but also for the user. We have developed, for example, applications to help the drivers of Cargotec equipment to decrease the possibility of human error.


Working together in R&D

Cargotec has been formed of many industry leaders with great know-how in technologies. To find synergy benefits and enable better transfer of knowledge within the company, we have started to consolidate our R&D processes.

To stay on the forefront of technological development, Cargotec forms also partnerships in R&D. Cargotec has acquired an interest in FIMECC (Finnish Metals and Engineering Competence Cluster Oy), a cluster of strategic excellence in metal products and the engineering industries comprising companies, universities and research institutions.

By clicking on the links on the right, you can learn more about Cargotec’s Pro Future™ family, our research facilities in India and Italy, the FIMECC cluster and individual R&D case examples from recent years.