The company describes the channel as a formal programme with its own support infrastructure rather than an ad hoc arrangement, and says it is looking for established independent dealers across the country. No territories, targets or investment figures have been given.

Stephen Saunders, Managing Director of Jungheinrich UK, said: “This is an exciting new chapter for dealers across the country and Jungheinrich UK.”

Nick Smith, the company’s Dealer Network Development Manager, said: “There are many excellent independent materials handling businesses across the UK.” He added: “We want to work with high quality, professional businesses looking to grow, and who believe partnering with Jungheinrich could truly strengthen their customer proposition.”

For the independent dealers who make up most of forktrucks.com’s membership, this is worth a careful look rather than a quick yes. Jungheinrich has sold direct in the UK for decades, and a partner programme that sits beside a direct operation raises the obvious question of where the line is drawn between a partner’s customers and the manufacturer’s own. The notice does not say, and that is the first thing to ask.

The second is what “dedicated support” means in practice: demonstration stock, parts pricing, warranty administration and training are the items that decide whether a franchise pays. Dealers already carrying another marque will also want to know whether exclusivity is expected. None of this is a reason not to enquire; it is the list to take into the conversation.

Shakespeare began in materials handling at 16 as an apprentice and has held senior posts at Linde and Jungheinrich as well as at independent firms. He joined Impact Handling in 2020, and became Chief Executive of Aprolis UK in 2022 after the group, part of the global Monnoyeur organisation, acquired Impact in 2021. Aprolis UK now takes in several companies employing more than 600 people nationwide.

“I’m delighted to be joining the UKMHA Board and to have the opportunity to contribute to an organisation that supports companies of all shapes and sizes across our industry,” Shakespeare said. “From expanding apprenticeship opportunities to increasing access to training, development and upskilling programmes, we have a real opportunity to equip people.”

Rob Fisher, Chief Executive of the UKMHA, said: “The addition of Steve to our Board is a real coup for UKMHA. He brings a wealth of leadership experience together with an exceptional understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing the sector today.”

The appointment matters to the independent end of the trade for a practical reason. Aprolis has been one of the busier buyers of established UK dealers in recent years, and its chief executive now sits where the association’s training and standards work is decided. An emphasis on apprenticeships and access to training, if it follows, is the part of the association’s output that a small dealer actually uses.

The fund plans to invest in up to 20 start-ups and selected deep-tech funds, mainly in Europe and the United States, across physical AI, energy, enterprise AI and logistics. It is led by founding General Partner Christian Noske, who previously led European investments at NGP Capital and was a founding partner at BMW i Ventures and at Alliance Ventures, the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi vehicle.

Jungheinrich describes its backing as a long-term commitment to the fund’s strategy. Whether the €100 million is entirely Jungheinrich’s money or includes outside investors has not been stated.

Uplift Ventures was set up in April 2025 to take Jungheinrich beyond its core business. At its founding, Dr Lars Brzoska, Chairman of the Board of Management, said: “With Uplift Ventures, we are strengthening Jungheinrich’s innovative power and opening up new and forward-looking business areas.”

For a dealer or a fleet operator the interest is indirect but real. The sectors named are exactly the ones producing the automation, battery and software products that turn up in warehouses a few years later, and a manufacturer with a stake in twenty of those start-ups will have first call on what works. It is a longer game than a new truck model, and one to watch rather than act on.

Customers can order the truck from 1 September 2026. The ETV 4i carries load capacities of 1.4 to 2.5 tonnes and lift heights of up to 14 metres, and is pitched at distribution centres, production supply and multi-shift operations.

Oliver Hißnauer, Product Manager for Reach Trucks at Jungheinrich, said: "With the ETV 4i, we are targeting customers for whom every second counts in the warehouse. The vehicle is designed to combine maximum handling performance with high efficiency and a clear focus on the driver – both in terms of ergonomics and its safe and precise operability."

The performance claim rests on a set of PRO functions fitted as standard. liftingPRO doubles the lifting speed to up to 1.6 m/s without load, which Jungheinrich says is the highest lifting speed in its class on the market. loweringPRO doubles the lowering speed to up to 1.2 m/s, and reachPRO increases reach speed. The company says the hydraulics are controlled sensitively enough, with semi-automated auxiliary functions, to keep mast transition smooth at maximum speed.

"Especially at high storage levels, the lifting and lowering speed determines productivity per shift," Hißnauer added. "With the market-leading lifting and lowering speed of the ETV 4i, our customers can significantly reduce their handling costs per pallet, which means that the vehicle costs are quickly amortised, especially in multi-shift operations."

A fully integrated lithium-ion battery underpins the design, with short charging times and intermediate charging removing battery changes. Dropping the classic battery tray also opens up the view of the wheel arms and load, which Jungheinrich presents as a safety gain in narrow aisles rather than merely a packaging one. Options include integrated light strips, load capacity monitoring, a configurable positioning laser and a camera system for load placement.

Two things are worth holding in mind before the speed figures do the deciding.

The first is that 1.6 m/s is the unladen figure. Every reach truck lifts faster with nothing on the forks, and the number that governs a shift is the laden speed at the height actually being served. Jungheinrich has not published that here. Anyone comparing trucks on this basis should ask for laden lift and lower speeds at their own top beam level, from every manufacturer on the list, and compare those instead.

The second is that the amortisation argument is explicitly a multi-shift one, and Hißnauer says so plainly. Seconds saved per pallet only turn into money where there are enough pallets and enough hours. On a single day shift with a modest throughput a faster mast may buy very little, and the lithium-ion package — genuinely useful where there is no time for a battery change — is answering a problem that a single-shift operation does not have.

The visibility point may prove the more durable advantage. Removing the battery tray is a sightline change as much as a charging one, and sightlines are what the incident reports keep turning on.

Pelagia Shetland Limited, of Point of Scattland, Gremista, Lerwick, pleaded guilty to breaching Regulations 11(1) and (2) of the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998 and section 33(1)(c) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. The company was fined £420,000 and ordered to pay a victim surcharge of £31,500 at Lerwick Sheriff Court on 26 August 2026.

The incident happened on 10 October 2024. Curtis New, a 41-year-old forklift supervisor, was called to clear a blockage. Finding the interlocking safety gate difficult to open, he removed a panel and entered the machine area. As he walked along the stationary conveyor to reach the blockage he triggered a sensor which restarted the machine, and he was struck repeatedly by its pushers before a colleague hit an emergency stop button.

He was treated at the scene by first aiders and airlifted to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, where he spent 10 days in intensive care and a further 10 days in a high dependency unit. He suffered eight fractured ribs, a pelvis fractured in five places, a fractured clavicle and scapula, and two collapsed lungs. He was later transferred to Gilbert Bain Hospital for rehabilitation, and has since said he does not wish to return to his role.

The Health and Safety Executive found that the perimeter safety fencing around the machine, designed to isolate its power supply whenever the interlocking gate was opened, had become insecure after a panel was damaged. The gate had been struck by a forklift truck in early 2024, damaging its locking mechanism and making it difficult to open. Rather than use the gate, two senior staff, including Mr New, had taken to removing the loose panel to clear frequent blockages, without isolating the power first.

The company reported the incident to HSE on the day it happened. It has since reinstated the perimeter fencing so that the gate is the only means of access, and updated its safety practices to make clear that staff must never bypass safety barriers.

HSE inspector Matty Spiers said: "This was a wholly avoidable incident that left a man with life-threatening injuries, and it happened because a basic, well-understood safety control was allowed to fail. Interlocking guards exist for one reason: to stop people reaching dangerous machinery while it's still live. When that gate was damaged, it should have been repaired properly and its integrity restored immediately, not left in a state where a determined employee could simply lift out a panel and walk into a hazardous area."

He added: "Curtis New is fortunate to be alive. He suffered catastrophic injuries carrying out a task that should never have been possible without the machine being isolated first. Employers have a legal duty to make sure guarding and interlock systems are properly maintained, and that any weakness is identified and corrected without delay. This isn't a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise, it's what stands between a workforce and a serious, life-changing injury."

The forklift is upstream of this one rather than in it, and that is exactly why it belongs on this page. Nobody was struck by a truck. A truck hit a guard, months before anyone was hurt, and the damage was never properly made good.

Impact damage from lift trucks is one of the most routinely under-reported events on any site. A clipped guard, a scuffed upright, a bent gate frame — these get logged as cosmetic, if they get logged at all, because nothing stopped working and nobody was injured that day. Here the mechanism that was damaged was the one whose entire purpose was to cut the power. From the moment the lock stopped working properly the machine had no reliable means of being made safe, and it stayed that way long enough for a workaround to become normal practice among senior staff.

The other detail worth pulling out is the word "frequent". Blockages needing clearing often enough to breed a shortcut are a production problem before they are a safety one, and the shortcut follows the friction. A gate that is hard to open, on a machine that jams regularly, will eventually be bypassed by someone experienced enough to think they can judge it. Mr New was the forklift supervisor, not a new starter.

Set against the £40,000 imposed on The Micro Spring and Presswork Company and the £400,000 on Clearaway Recycling, both reported below, the range here reflects turnover, culpability and harm rather than any difference in the character of the failing.

The Micro Spring and Presswork Company Limited, of Enfield Industrial Estate, Redditch, was fined £40,000 and ordered to pay £5,032 in costs at Kidderminster Magistrates' Court on 25 August 2026 for breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.

The incident happened on 24 June 2024. A 36-year-old employee was assisting with the lifting of a newly purchased pillar drill, weighing 500kg, using a forklift truck at the company's site. The machine became unstable during the operation and fell onto him, fracturing twelve ribs.

The Health and Safety Executive found that the lifting operation had not been properly planned or risk-assessed.

HSE inspector Charlie Rowe said: "This was a serious incident which has resulted in significant injury and was entirely preventable. Employers should always ensure lifting operations are properly planned by a competent person, appropriately supervised, and carried out in a safe manner."

The truck was not doing anything exotic here. Moving something heavy across a site is what it is there for. But a pillar drill is not a pallet: it is tall, narrow, top-heavy and has no lifting points designed for forks. Set it on the tines and there is very little holding it upright, and very little margin if the load shifts, the floor is uneven or the mast goes back at the wrong moment.

Rowe's phrasing — planned by a competent person, appropriately supervised, carried out safely — is the language of Regulation 8 of LOLER, although the charge brought was the general duty under Section 2(1). The point stands either way. The lift that goes wrong is rarely the one done fifty times a week. It is the one-off: the new machine coming off the delivery lorry, the job that falls outside the standard risk assessment precisely because it is not standard work, and the job on which nobody thinks to ask who is standing where.

Worth setting alongside the £400,000 imposed on Clearaway Recycling a fortnight earlier, reported below. The gap between the two figures reflects turnover, culpability and the harm caused rather than any difference in the nature of the failing, because the failing was the same in both: a person and a moving load occupying the same ground with nothing planned to keep them apart.

Two years and two months separated the injury from the sentence.

Kühne joined the family business in 1958 and became Chairman of the Management Board of Kuehne+Nagel Speditions-Aktiengesellschaft in 1966. From 1975 he served as Chief Executive Officer of Kuehne+Nagel International AG, and from 1992 to 2011 as Chairman of its Board of Directors. Since 2011 he had held the position of Honorary Chairman.

Dr. Joerg Wolle, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Kuehne+Nagel International AG, said: "With the passing of Klaus-Michael, we have lost a visionary, a great entrepreneur and an extraordinary personality. Our thoughts are with his widow Christine Kühne. The Board of Directors and the entire company will honour Klaus-Michael Kühne's memory with the utmost respect and gratitude."

Stefan Paul, CEO of Kuehne+Nagel International AG, said: "The news of Klaus-Michael Kühne's passing has deeply saddened us all. Klaus-Michael Kühne embodied logistics and global trade like no other. On behalf of the Management Board and the employees of Kuehne+Nagel, we extend our deepest sympathies to his family."

The group he leaves employs approximately 88,000 people across more than 1,300 sites in close to 100 countries, serving around 400,000 customers. It is the global number one in air and sea logistics and holds strong positions in road and contract logistics.

Freight forwarding is not this site's usual territory, and no forklift truck features anywhere in the story. It is worth marking all the same, because contract logistics is one of the largest single buyers of materials handling equipment there is, and the shape of that industry is part of what Kühne built.

The through-line of his sixty-eight years at the firm was the asset-light forwarder: a business that sells control of the movement rather than ownership of the vehicles. Applied to warehousing, that same logic is a good part of why third-party operators think about trucks as a contract-length service with a defined rate and a defined availability, rather than as capital equipment to be owned outright and run into the ground. Anyone who has quoted a fleet into a 3PL site knows the shape of the conversation that produces.

His personal holdings also reached well beyond forwarding, taking in stakes in Hapag-Lloyd, Lufthansa, the chemical logistics group Brenntag and others, which is a reminder that in this industry the container, the aircraft, the tanker and the pallet have never been separate businesses for very long.

The machine was supplied by Aprolis Equipment Distribution, part of Aprolis UK, which describes it as one of the largest and most specialised machines of its type supplied in the UK, and its customer as the first operator in the country to deploy a dedicated barge handler of this kind.

It combines a 10-metre outreach with the ability to reach as much as four metres below quay level, handling containers weighing up to 37 tonnes. That below-quay, or "negative lift", capability is the point of the specification: water levels on the Thames can move by as much as seven metres in six hours in some locations, and without it the machine would simply run out of reach at low water. Konecranes rates the same truck at 45 tonnes in the first and second rows for terminal work, 41 tonnes in the third row and 32 tonnes in the fourth.

Its 113-tonne operating weight created a second problem. The machine's working position had to be assessed against the concrete piling supporting the wharf, with engineers confirming it could stay on reinforced sections of the quay while retaining enough outreach to reach containers on the barges across the full tidal range.

Getting it there was its own exercise. After assembly and testing in Markaryd, Sweden, the reach stacker was dismantled into five sections, moved to Gothenburg and shipped to Immingham, with route planning needed for the oversized loads on the road leg to London. Seven specialists from several organisations rebuilt it at Barking over two days using a 100-tonne crane, specialist lifting equipment and a 16-tonne forklift, after which it went through inspection, commissioning, operator familiarisation and live testing over the water before handover.

Andy Armitage, Sales Manager – Heavy Equipment at Aprolis Equipment Distribution, said: "The final result is a highly specialised piece of equipment that has been engineered specifically for the unique operating environment on the Thames."

Konecranes announced the order on 12 February 2026, having booked it in the fourth quarter of 2025 for delivery in the second quarter of 2026. The customer was not named then and has not been named since. At the time, Anton Nilsson, Sales Area Manager, Lift Trucks at Konecranes, said: "This order reflects growing customer demand for application-specific reach stacker solutions that combine robust engineering with digital support. In waste-to-energy operations, reliability and safety go hand in hand."

The interesting part of this is not the size of the machine but the fact that it is a reach stacker at all. Barge work at a tidal wharf is conventionally crane territory, and the site already has a ship-to-shore crane. What the barge handler adds is a second, mobile means of moving containers that does not depend on the crane being available, which is why Aprolis frames it as resilience rather than capacity.

The trade-off is that a wheeled machine puts its whole weight, plus the load, plus the overturning moment of a long reach, onto a quay that was never designed with it in mind. The piling assessment is the quiet centre of this story. Any operator contemplating something similar on an older wharf should expect the structural survey to shape the specification at least as much as the lifting chart does.

One detail that will amuse anyone who has run a yard: it took a 16-tonne forklift to build the reach stacker.

The notices covered two hazards: exposure to wood dust and the risks from rider-operated lift trucks. HSE found that employees had not been properly trained to operate the lift trucks, that staff had not been face-fit tested for their respiratory protective equipment, and that workers were not under appropriate health surveillance.

At a hearing on 20 August the company was fined £20,000 with £5,000 costs for breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. Managing director Alistair Wright was fined £5,000 with £2,500 costs and disqualified from acting as a company director for five years.

An HSE inspector said: “Exposure to wood dust can cause asthma, respiratory conditions and cancer – yet this firm failed to act on legally-binding notices.”

Two points for anyone running trucks in a yard or a mill. The first is that untrained operation is a breach in its own right; no incident is needed for HSE to act, and here none was. The second is the director disqualification, which follows from ignoring notices rather than from the underlying hazard. An improvement notice is a deadline with a court at the end of it, and the cheapest response is to meet it.

Asaf Curelaru, Operations Director for UK & Ireland at Exotec, said that "labour availability is becoming one of the defining issues for warehouse operators in Europe", adding: "In the UK, turnover remains high, and many businesses are finding it difficult to build stable, scalable warehouse teams. This makes automation increasingly relevant, not as a standalone answer, but as part of a broader strategy to improve resilience, productivity and consistency."

On cost, he said: "Rising warehouse costs and the need for greater storage density are also key reasons businesses are investing in automation. Automated systems can help operators improve throughput and make better use of existing warehouse space, but the business case is often held back by the level of upfront investment required."

The comparison drawn is with Italy, where the Industry 4.0 and Transizione 4.0 programmes offered tax credits of up to 20 percent against qualifying investment in automated equipment and robotics, capped at €2.5 million. "The UK's limited targeted automation incentives risk leaving businesses at a competitive disadvantage," Curelaru said. "While other countries encourage automation, UK businesses are having to fund these investments themselves, making automation projects difficult to justify despite mounting labour pressures."

Exotec says its systems are in use by more than 50 brands across over 200 sites, including Carrefour, Decathlon and Uniqlo.

Two things are worth adding to the argument, neither of which appears in the release.

The first is that the Italian scheme held up as the model is no longer open. The Transizione 4.0 credit closed to new investment on 31 December 2025, with a run-off to 30 June 2026 for orders already accepted and deposits of at least 20 percent already paid, and Italy's 2026 Budget Law replaced it with an accelerated depreciation mechanism. Italy has not stopped supporting automation, but the specific instrument being described has just been retired.

The second is that the replacement is closer to what the UK already does than the argument implies. Full expensing gives companies a 100 percent first-year deduction against qualifying new plant and machinery, with a 50 percent first-year allowance on special-rate assets, and the £1 million Annual Investment Allowance covers unincorporated businesses and second-hand equipment. That is not nothing, and it is not a small allowance by international standards.

Even so, the distinction Curelaru is reaching for is a real one. A credit comes off the tax bill pound for pound. A deduction is worth only the tax rate applied to it, and is worth nothing at all to a business with no taxable profit to shelter — which is precisely the business finding a capital project hard to justify. The complaint is not that the UK offers no relief. It is that the relief on offer does least where the investment case is most marginal.

For anyone weighing a truck fleet rather than a robot fleet, the same allowances apply to lift trucks bought outright. The position differs under contract hire and lease, where the allowances sit with the lessor and reach the customer through the rate rather than being claimed directly. That is a conversation worth having with an accountant before the capital case is written rather than after it.

James Connolly, 49, died on 11 June 2023 at a construction site in Ince, Cheshire, when the telehandler driven by Michael Nixon reversed into him. HSE found that a turning circle had been available but was not used, that Nixon reversed without a banksman, and that he was using his mobile phone contrary to the site rules.

At Warrington Magistrates’ Court on 11 August, Nixon, 46, of Heswall, Wirral, was sentenced to 12 weeks’ imprisonment suspended for 12 months, fined £800 and ordered to pay £2,000 costs after pleading guilty to breaching Section 3(2) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.

HSE inspector Laura Royales said: “Workplace transport incidents remain one of the biggest causes of deaths in the workplace. It is vital that drivers follow the site rules and do not cut corners and put lives at risk.”

This prosecution was of the driver, not the company, which is less common and worth noticing. The duty on an individual employee under Section 3(2) is to take reasonable care of others affected by their work, and reversing a telehandler with a phone in hand and no banksman was held to fall short of it. The same duty sits with every forklift and telehandler operator, whoever employs them.

Clearaway Recycling Limited, of Archers Fields, Basildon, pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The company was fined £400,000 and ordered to pay costs of £10,259 at Chelmsford Magistrates' Court on 13 August 2026.

The incident happened on 28 October 2023. The woman was crushed between a gate post and a mobile shredder while accessing the tipping yard.

The Health and Safety Executive found that the company had not managed the movement of pedestrians and vehicles at the site. This allowed it to become custom and practice for pedestrians to walk in areas close to moving vehicles, including the shredder, as well as close to lorries and forklift trucks.

HSE inspector Joanne Williams said: "Where pedestrians require access to working areas, safeguards must be in place to protect them, including providing adequate segregation or separation distances between pedestrians and vehicles in the area."

The machine that caused the injury was a shredder rather than a lift truck, but the failure identified was not specific to any one machine. It was that pedestrians and vehicles shared the same ground as a matter of routine, and forklift trucks are named in the findings alongside the shredder and the lorries. Any yard where trucks and people move through the same space without marked walkways, barriers or separation distances is exposed to the same finding.

The phrase worth dwelling on is "custom and practice". That does not describe a one-off lapse or a rule being broken on the day, but a pattern that had become normal and would presumably have been visible to anyone crossing the yard. It is the sort of condition a segregation audit exists to catch, and it is generally easier to see in someone else's yard than in one walked through every day.

Almost three years separated the incident from the sentence. Operators inclined to treat a near miss as having passed without consequence may want to note that timescale.

Four-way shuttles such as the Movu Atlas store and retrieve pallets multi-deep within a racking structure, travelling both along and across the aisles rather than up and down a single lane. They have become one of the more sought-after answers to high-density pallet storage, driven by rising property costs, the constraints of brownfield buildings and the need to get more out of a footprint that cannot easily be extended.

Under the agreement the shuttles integrate directly into Jungheinrich's warehouse management system, with shuttle systems, conveyor technology and mobile robots orchestrated through a single Jungheinrich software stack. The two companies are targeting food and beverage, cold-chain logistics and third-party logistics.

Dr Tobias Harzer, Chief Automation Officer at Jungheinrich, said: "Customers today no longer expect individual automation components, but seamless automation solutions. Together, we combine shuttle technology, software, integration and service into an overall system that fits seamlessly into existing warehouse structures."

Noë van Bergen, Chief Sales Officer at Movu Robotics, said: "Four-way shuttle systems increasingly combine high-density storage with other functionalities like replenishing picking processes and sequencing goods for dispatch just in time, all within the same footprint."

Movu says its shuttle systems are in use in more than 200 warehouses and already feature in Jungheinrich customer projects across Europe and North America. Named installations include Coppenrath & Wiese and Mascot online in Almere, the Netherlands, where ten four-way shuttles serve around 11,500 pallet locations.

The commercial logic behind the deal is visible in Jungheinrich's own half-year figures, reported below. Automation & Warehouse Equipment grew orders 22.5 percent to €588 million, but the segment still recorded an EBIT loss of €6.7 million at a margin of minus 1.4 percent. Growing automation revenue while losing money on it is a familiar position across the sector, and standardising on one shuttle supplier is a considerably cheaper route out of it than developing the technology in-house or buying a company that already has it.

For a UK operator the question this raises is not really automation against trucks. Four-way shuttles compete with drive-in racking and with very narrow aisle, and the honest comparison is on throughput, selectivity, and what happens on the day the system is down. What does not change is that a shuttle warehouse still has to be fed and cleared at the ends, which is counterbalance and reach truck work, and trucks in that role tend to work harder and clock more hours than the same trucks serving conventional racking.

Incoming orders for the six months to June reached €2.954 billion, up from €2.743 billion a year earlier. Revenue was essentially flat at €2.669 billion, a rise of 0.5 percent. EBIT fell to €144.9 million from €210.5 million, taking the margin down 250 basis points to 5.4 percent. Adjusted EBIT was €178.7 million, a 6.7 percent margin.

The gap between the two EBIT figures is €33.8 million of one-off effects, which the company broke down as €20.5 million relating to the sale of its Russian subsidiary, €7.4 million in residual effects from the strike at Lüneburg and €5.9 million from its transformation programme.

Dr Lars Brzoska, Chief Executive, said that "incoming orders showed a positive trend and were significantly higher than the previous year's figure", adding that "at the same time, one-off effects and continued competitive and pricing pressure impacted our earnings".

The segment split repeats a pattern now visible across the sector. Industrial Trucks & Services took orders of €2.417 billion, up 4.9 percent, on revenue of €2.241 billion, down 1.9 percent. Automation & Warehouse Equipment grew orders 22.5 percent to €588 million and revenue 12.9 percent to €471 million, although the segment recorded an EBIT loss of €6.7 million at a margin of minus 1.4 percent.

Free cash flow was negative €99 million, against a positive €57 million a year earlier, reflecting acquisition activity during the period. Full-year guidance, adjusted on 23 July, is for orders of €5.5 to €6.1 billion, revenue of €5.3 to €5.9 billion and EBIT of €340 to €400 million.

Read alongside KION's results published a fortnight earlier, the picture across the two German groups is consistent on one point and divergent on another. Both saw automation grow strongly while conventional truck revenue slipped. But KION's order intake fell 6.6 percent while Jungheinrich's rose 7.7 percent, so the two are not seeing the same demand — a reminder that group-level order figures reflect regional and customer mix as much as the state of the market.

The more useful signal for UK buyers is the pricing pressure Brzoska refers to. Competitive pricing squeezing margins while volumes recover is the condition in which discounts are available, and Jungheinrich is the second manufacturer in a fortnight to describe it in those terms.

The half also covered two acquisitions. Jungheinrich took its 4.9 percent stake in EP Equipment on 29 July, reported below, and on 6 August agreed to buy All Lift Forklifts, a family-owned Sydney rental specialist and dealer trading for more than 26 years from six sites across Australia. All Lift will keep its own brand. Neither purchase price was disclosed.

Second-quarter revenue reached €780 million, 15.6 percent higher than the same period last year. Recurring operating income for the half rose 33.4 percent to €87 million, and net income increased 56.8 percent to €51 million.

Europe was the clear driver, with revenue up 16.6 percent to €1.197 billion. Sylvain Blaise, President of the Ancenis-based group, attributed that to the rental and agricultural sectors together with market share gains in telehandlers, and described the half as showing "remarkable momentum".

The picture was less comfortable elsewhere. North American revenue fell 8.3 percent to €240 million, which the company put down to tariffs, and conditions in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East were also difficult.

The order book stood at €1.09 billion at the end of the second quarter, 4.4 percent higher than a year earlier and equivalent to roughly six months of sales visibility. Manitou now expects full-year revenue growth of 6.5 to 8.0 percent, up from 5 percent previously, with a recurring operating margin of 5.3 to 5.6 percent against an original 5.0 percent.

The split between a strong Europe and a weak North America is becoming a pattern this reporting season. Hyster-Yale, reporting in the same week, cited tariffs on steel and imported components as a continuing drag on its American operations.

Manitou also reported progress on LIFT 2030, its energy transition programme, including first deliveries of electric telehandlers and the formation of HM Battery Solutions, the lithium-ion joint venture with Hangcha behind the Le Mans battery plant reported here in July.

For UK plant hire firms and agricultural dealers, rental demand pulling European telehandler volumes upward is worth reading alongside the order book. Six months of visibility suggests lead times are firming rather than easing.

The 295,000 sq ft facility was formally opened on 5 August, although production had already begun in July. It takes the Columbus campus to 1.9 million sq ft in total and adds 140 jobs, bringing employment at the site to more than 2,100.

The plant is dedicated to electric models, building the Class 1 stand-up counterbalance forklift for both the Toyota and Raymond brands. Concentrating electric production in a purpose-built facility, rather than adapting existing lines, reflects how far the balance of the market has moved.

Brett Wood, President and Chief Executive of Toyota Material Handling North America, said that 66% of all lift trucks sold in North America were electric in 2023, and that the figure now stands at approximately 70%.

Tony Miller, Chief Supply Officer, said the factory was the result of decisions taken years earlier, describing it as "the result of thinking beyond today". Koichi Ito, President of parent company Toyota Industries Corporation, said the facility demonstrated the group's long-standing approach to innovation.

The investment is notable less for its size than for its focus. Manufacturers have been announcing electric models for some years, but committing nine-figure sums to capacity that builds electric trucks exclusively is a firmer signal about where volume is expected to come from.

The trend is familiar to British operators. Electric models have accounted for the majority of counterbalance sales in the United Kingdom for some time, driven by lower running costs, indoor air quality requirements and the practical difficulties of refuelling internal combustion trucks on multi-shift sites.

For dealers and end users, the more immediate questions raised by a shift of this scale tend to be about battery chemistry, charging infrastructure and residual values rather than the trucks themselves.

Revenue for the quarter was $812.9 million, down from $956.6 million a year earlier. The operating loss narrowed sequentially to $18.4 million from $28.0 million in the first quarter, but remained wider than the $8.5 million loss recorded in the second quarter of 2025.

Bookings were the brighter figure at $680 million, up 17 percent on the first quarter and the fourth quarterly increase in a row. The company said improved demand and higher bookings should support increased shipments and revenue, but that customer delivery schedules and sourcing transitions had pushed back the timing of the recovery, with the strongest improvement expected in the latter part of the year.

Tariffs remain the central problem. Costs on steel, components and other imported materials are still elevated, and while pricing, sourcing and product-cost measures are expected to deliver increasing benefit through the second half, the company does not expect to offset all tariff-related expense.

The result sits awkwardly alongside the European reporting season. KION and Manitou both improved their profitability over the same period, and Konecranes reported a record order book last month. The common thread across all four is that orders are recovering faster than margins.

Hyster and Yale are long-established names in the UK, and the group also owns Bolzoni, the attachments manufacturer, and Nuvera, its fuel cell business. A weak year for the parent does not translate directly into difficulty for British dealers, whose trading conditions are set by UK demand rather than North American tariffs.

It is worth reading the loss for what it is. Revenue fell while orders rose, which is the signature of a manufacturer working through a thin order book taken in a weaker period while a better one builds up behind it. The question is whether the cost measures land before the improved volume arrives.

The platform is built for 24-hour, multi-shift environments. EnerSys quotes extra-fast charging and opportunity charging of up to 300 percent nominal energy throughput per day, which the company says makes it suitable for up to three shifts a day in heavy-duty warehouse and distribution centre applications.

The batteries use a modular construction that delivers high energy content while fitting existing battery trays and supporting a wide range of forklift models. Tailored energy configurations are offered so that packs can be matched to individual truck types, and the modular build is also intended to make dismantling and recycling easier at end of life.

Safety and control come from the company's own battery management system, carried over from the established NexSys iON platform.

The tray compatibility is the commercially interesting part. One of the practical obstacles to converting a mixed lead-acid fleet has been that lithium packs frequently do not fit the compartments in trucks already on site, forcing operators to change batteries and trucks at the same time. A pack that fits existing trays allows a fleet to convert gradually, truck by truck, as leases fall due.

Opportunity charging is the other half of the argument. A lead-acid operation running three shifts typically needs a battery change room, spare batteries and the labour to swap them. Charging during breaks removes that requirement, and for many operators the space and labour saved is a larger number than the energy saving.

Energy is already high on the agenda for British operators. The report published this month by Consultus Sustainability and its partners found widespread concern about energy costs across the materials handling sector, but limited action so far in response.

The report, "The state of energy and sustainability in the UK material handling industry", is based on a survey of UKMHA members drawn from forklift truck manufacturing, supply, dealership and end use. Dealerships accounted for 42 percent of respondents, manufacturers 32 percent and other industry roles 26 percent, with 37 percent describing themselves as small-to-medium operations.

Members rated their concern over volatile energy costs at 8.05 out of 10. Against that, 37 percent said they had no internal resources dedicated to managing sustainability, and 40 percent of those with net zero targets admitted to having no strategy for reaching them. Eighty-four percent were operating with no energy management system in place to track or mitigate waste, 53 percent had implemented no energy efficiency measures in the previous 12 months, and the same proportion had no plans to improve efficiency over the coming year. Only 4 percent believed they tracked their energy use "very well", and 10 percent had a dedicated internal sustainability manager.

Natalie Dunbar, head of net zero services at Consultus Sustainability, said: "This survey has shown a worrying trend within the material handling industry that we actively want to address and support. As energy prices continue to spike, efficiency and sustainability measures shouldn't be seen as an optional extra. In a market where wholesale industrial electricity costs remain locked at roughly 75% higher than pre-2021 levels, rapid decarbonisation and energy management have transitioned from corporate social responsibility into the baseline for financial survival."

She added: "Whether it's cost challenges associated with sustainable measures, or a simple case of feeling overwhelmed and unsure about what steps to take, it's clear more education is needed for firms to start building energy resilience and protecting margins. From zero-upfront funded solar installations to rigorous virtual energy management, taking control of your consumption is the only surefire way to futureproof your operations against an increasingly volatile market."

Rob Fisher, CEO of the UKMHA, said: "Rising energy costs remain a serious concern for our sector. Highlighted both by the challenges businesses face and the opportunities for improvement, this report focuses on the needs and feedback from UKMHA members. It also demonstrates a strong business case for action. Energy efficiency and sustainability initiatives can deliver cost savings, operational resilience, competitive advantage, and improved access to investment."

The figure with the sharpest commercial edge is not any of the energy numbers. It is that 68 percent of respondents said customers now ask about sustainability criteria during procurement and bidding. That turns an environmental question into a tender question, and a tender question is one that gets answered whether or not anyone in the business finds it interesting.

The pattern the survey describes will be recognisable to most dealers. A business can be acutely worried about a cost and still do nothing about it, because the worry sits with the person paying the bills and the action would sit with someone who has no time, no budget line and no obvious first step. Eighty-four percent without any energy management system is not indifference so much as an absence of anyone whose job it is.

There is a direct read-across to the fleet. Electric trucks moved the industry's energy exposure from the fuel account to the electricity account, and lithium-ion opportunity charging moved a good part of it into peak-rate hours unless somebody has thought about when the chargers actually draw. A business that cannot say what its charging load looks like across the day is not in a position to know whether its last truck purchase saved money or simply moved it, and on these numbers most cannot.

Two caveats on the data. It is a self-selected survey of one association's members rather than a representative sample of the industry, so it describes the people who answered. And the 75 percent electricity figure is Consultus's own framing, offered by a firm that sells the remedy — which does not make it wrong, but it is worth checking against your own unit rates before it is quoted back at you in a proposal.

The full report can be downloaded from the Consultus Sustainability website.

Group revenue for the six months to June rose 3.5 percent to €5.687 billion. Adjusted EBIT increased 11.6 percent to €429.6 million and the adjusted EBIT margin improved 60 basis points to 7.6 percent. Net income was €207.6 million, more than four times the €47.9 million reported a year earlier.

The two segments moved in opposite directions. Industrial Trucks & Services, the forklift business, saw revenue slip 1.4 percent to €4.079 billion, though adjusted EBIT still rose 1.9 percent to €365.6 million at a 9.0 percent margin. Intelligent Automation Solutions grew revenue 17.6 percent to €1.629 billion, with adjusted EBIT up 35.3 percent to €106.0 million.

Order intake was the weak point, down 6.6 percent to €5.794 billion. Free cash flow also fell sharply, to €22.2 million from €161.9 million.

Rob Smith, Chief Executive, said KION had "performed well in the first half of financial year 2026 against a backdrop of heightened economic and geopolitical uncertainty". The group narrowed its full-year guidance to revenue of €11.525 billion to €12.025 billion and adjusted EBIT of €880 million to €980 million.

The order figure is worth sitting with, because it runs against Konecranes, which reported an order book 16.1 percent higher only days earlier, and against the UKMHA and Oxford Economics forecast of around 9.4 percent growth in UK forklift orders this year. Konecranes sells heavily into ports and heavy industry, while KION's industrial truck business is weighted towards general warehousing and manufacturing, so the two are not measuring the same demand.

The clearer signal is inside KION itself. Automation revenue grew nearly 18 percent while forklift revenue fell slightly – the same divergence visible across the sector, where spending on moving pallets automatically is growing faster than spending on trucks to move them manually.

Linde Material Handling and STILL are both substantial presences in the UK, and a profitable half at group level combined with a softer order book is the condition under which manufacturers tend to compete harder on price. For fleet buyers approaching renewal, that is not the worst backdrop.

The two companies announced a strategic partnership in May 2025, under which EP Equipment builds the bulk of the AntOn by Jungheinrich range. AntOn was created to give Jungheinrich a presence in the mid-tech segment – standardised, lower-cost trucks for operators who do not need the specification of the company's premium lines.

Jungheinrich describes the stake as a long-term investment and a further step in delivering Strategy 2030+, the plan under which the group is targeting €10 billion in revenue and a 10 percent EBIT margin by 2030. EP Equipment is expected to extend the AntOn line-up, concentrating on electric counterbalance and warehouse trucks.

Dr Lars Brzoska, Chief Executive of Jungheinrich, described EP Equipment as "one of the most successful and fast-growing companies in the material handling sector", adding that "with our investment, we are creating a strong foundation for our long-term partnership". John He, Chief Executive of EP Equipment, called the investment "an expression of mutual trust" that "underlines the close ties between our companies".

The mid-tech segment has become the most contested part of the European market. Chinese manufacturers have taken share at the value end for several years, and the established European names have responded either by building competing ranges themselves or, as here, by sourcing them from the manufacturers already doing it well.

Taking equity rather than relying on a supply contract alone is the significant part. Jungheinrich frames the stake as a foundation for deeper cooperation on technology and innovation and on product portfolio and market development, rather than as any claim over EP Equipment's production. What it buys is alignment – a supplier the group now holds a financial interest in, at a point when mid-tech volume is growing.

For UK buyers, the practical effect is a wider price ladder from a single source. A dealer can offer a premium Jungheinrich truck and an AntOn machine from the same supplier, with one parts and service relationship behind both.

Jungheinrich has been active on several fronts this year, having also taken a stake in Navflex to develop autonomous truck loading and unloading, reported below.

The compact vehicle combines an 800kg rear load platform with a towing capacity of up to 10 tonnes. This allows a single machine to transport tools, components and equipment while also towing trailers and other wheeled loads around a site.

The P0810-E uses a 48V electric power system with a quoted battery capacity of 360Ah. It has a maximum travelling speed of 25km/h, making it suitable for internal transport operations where manoeuvrability and controlled site speeds are more important than road-going performance.

The rear platform can be configured for different applications, allowing the vehicle to support aviation ground handling, engineering, manufacturing, maintenance and warehouse operations. Its compact dimensions also make it suitable for sites where larger commercial vehicles would be difficult to manoeuvre.

Electric operation eliminates exhaust emissions at the point of use and reduces noise compared with traditional diesel utility vehicles. Electric drivetrains also contain fewer moving components, potentially reducing routine maintenance requirements and helping operators keep vehicles in service for longer.

Although much of the materials handling industry's transition to electric power has focused on forklift trucks, vehicles such as the Charlatte P0810-E show that the same change is taking place across supporting transport equipment.

For organisations replacing ageing diesel vehicles, a machine capable of both carrying and towing could help simplify fleets, improve vehicle utilisation and support wider environmental objectives.

Charlatte provides spare parts and technical support for its equipment in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The framework, known as Workplace Transport Groupings, came into force on 19 January 2026 and changes how materials handling equipment is categorised for operator training, certification and risk assessment. It covers counterbalance forklifts, reach trucks, order pickers and a range of specialist workplace transport machinery.

Aprolis Training Solutions says it is still receiving a high volume of questions from organisations unsure what the guidance means for them, more than six months after it took effect. Jason Howard, Training Solutions Manager at the company, described it as "the biggest shift we've seen in workplace transport training for several years".

The old categories had become blurred over time, particularly where the capabilities of different machines overlapped or where newer equipment did not fit any existing classification neatly. The revised system is intended to simplify the categories, remove those overlaps and reflect the way machinery is actually used in modern warehouses, logistics hubs and distribution centres.

The practical risk lies in the records. Training delivered or logged under the previous categorisation no longer meets the updated expectations, and completed training may not be regarded as valid if it has been recorded under the wrong equipment category. Some operators will now fall into a different grouping than before, which can mean conversion or refresher training is required.

Any new training or refresher starting after 19 January must use the new codes, even where existing certificates remain valid until their expiry date.

Mixed fleets are where this bites hardest. A site running counterbalance trucks, reach trucks and powered pallet trucks may have operators whose certificates were issued under categories that no longer map cleanly onto what they drive. Where the records do not match the equipment under the new framework, the exposure is not only a safety one – it can surface during an audit or inspection, and it can complicate an insurance claim after an incident.

The check is straightforward enough to be worth doing now rather than at renewal. Take the list of trucks on site, take the list of certificated operators, and confirm that each certificate names a grouping that covers the machine the person actually drives.

The Finnish group, whose product range spans heavy-duty lift trucks, reach stackers and port handling equipment as well as industrial cranes, published its January to June figures on 24 July.

Pre-tax profit for the half fell 9.1 percent to €207.6 million and revenue was 5.3 percent lower at €1.93 billion. Second-quarter operating profit dropped 12.6 percent year on year to €119.6 million, on net sales of €1.02 billion, down 2.8 percent in comparable currencies. The comparable EBITA margin for the quarter stood at 12.7 percent.

Orders told a very different story. Order intake for the half rose 6.9 percent to €2.3 billion, with second-quarter intake up 13.4 percent in comparable currencies at €1.24 billion. The order book closed the period at €3.38 billion, 16.1 percent higher than a year earlier.

Konecranes expects net sales in 2026 to remain at approximately the same level or increase compared with 2025, with the comparable EBITA margin also roughly unchanged.

The shape of the result – softening revenue and profit against a strengthening order book – chimes with the forecast from UKMHA and Oxford Economics that UK forklift orders will grow by around 9.4 percent this year. Demand appears to be returning ahead of the margins, with work won now feeding through to revenue over the coming quarters.

For dealers and end users, a rising order book across the sector is also the point at which lead times typically start to lengthen again, after a period in which improved supply chains had been shortening them.

The five machines cover three-wheel and four-wheel counterbalance, reach truck, pallet truck and stacker formats. Notably, these are mainstream truck types rather than purpose-built automation platforms, suggesting an intention to automate the equipment operators already run rather than sell them something separate.

All five are built on a common technical foundation combining 3D LiDAR, multi-view depth cameras and what the company describes as an edge-cloud collaborative industrial large model. Hangcha says this gives the trucks environmental understanding, natural-language task comprehension, autonomous load handling, motion planning and proactive safety.

Natural-language instruction is the departure from convention here. Most automated handling equipment still requires tasks to be defined through fixed routes and pre-set rules, so a truck that can be told what to do in ordinary language would change how such fleets are commissioned and reconfigured.

Beyond individual trucks, Hangcha demonstrated cluster-level capabilities including distributed multi-vehicle scheduling, digital twin visualisation, remote resolution of anomalies and automatic charging.

The company presented the event as marking its transformation from a forklift manufacturer into a technology-driven provider of intelligent logistics solutions. Hangcha is China's largest forklift manufacturer and recently opened a lithium-ion battery plant at Le Mans in France in partnership with Manitou.

The announcement lands in a segment that has become busy over the past year, with ABB, STILL and Jungheinrich all moving on autonomous handling. The common thread is the loading dock and pallet movement between goods-in and racking, where operators see the clearest case for removing manual driving.

The programme replaces ageing diesel-powered equipment with electric alternatives and introduces shore power for vessels at berth, allowing ships to shut down auxiliary engines while alongside. DP World expects it to cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than 6,000 tonnes a year, while improving air quality, reducing noise and increasing operational reliability for customers.

The financing is structured around more than the EBRD loan alone. A grant of €19.7 million comes through the European Union's Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Facility, part of the Connecting Europe Facility, with the EBRD acting as the EU's implementing partner. A further €7.5 million is provided under Romania's Transport Programme 2021-2027.

The announcement comes only days after DP World put its first fully electric reach stacker into service at the Port of Santos in Brazil, reported here on 16 July – two electrification projects on different continents inside the same month.

Port and terminal handling equipment has been slower to electrify than warehouse fleets, and for understandable reasons: duty cycles are long, loads are heavy and the power draw of a reach stacker or straddle carrier is an order of magnitude beyond a counterbalance truck. Grant-supported schemes of this kind are increasingly how the step is being funded.

For UK operators watching the same transition, the Constanta project is a useful indication of the scale of investment involved in converting a terminal rather than a warehouse, and of the blend of commercial lending and public funding being used to make the numbers work.

The story began in 1956 with the LA model, Toyota's first forklift truck. Seven decades on, the company's counterbalance range spans electric, lithium-ion, diesel and LPG power, covering everything from compact warehouse work to heavy outdoor duty.

Among the developments Toyota highlights from that period is the System of Active Stability (SAS), introduced in 2002. The system monitors the truck's operating conditions and intervenes to reduce the risk of tip-over – still the single largest cause of serious forklift injuries and fatalities – and became one of the more widely imitated safety technologies in the sector.

Toyota attributes much of its approach to the Toyota Production System, the manufacturing philosophy built around quality, efficiency and continuous improvement that originated in the wider Toyota group and has since been adopted well beyond the automotive and materials handling industries.

The company says its focus for the coming years rests on three areas: electrification, automation and connected solutions. That mirrors the direction of the wider market, where electric trucks now account for the substantial majority of global forklift sales and telematics is increasingly treated as standard rather than optional.

For UK operators, the anniversary is a reminder of how much the counterbalance truck has changed while its basic job has not. The core principle – a rear counterweight balancing a load carried ahead of the front axle – remains exactly as it was in 1956.

Peter Hutchinson, 60, was helping to load bales of plastic waste into a shipping container on 4 November 2021 when a bale slipped from a forklift truck. He stepped backwards, fell around 1.5 metres from the ramp onto the concrete surface below and suffered serious injuries. He died in hospital on 23 November 2021.

The Health and Safety Executive investigation found that the company had failed to properly assess the risks associated with the loading operation. It had also allowed employees to access ramps without handrails, despite the manufacturer's instructions explicitly requiring them to be fitted.

Investigators further found that the firm had not adequately considered reasonably practicable alternatives to working at height, such as using the existing loading bays or placing containers on the ground.

Bertschi UK Limited was fined £425,000 and ordered to pay costs of £119,258 at Teesside Crown Court on 17 July 2026, for breaches of Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and Regulations 4(1)(a) and 6(2) of the Work at Height Regulations 2005.

The fatal event was the fall, but the trigger was a load slipping from a forklift while a person was working at height alongside it. That combination – a truck handling loads in the same space and at the same moment as people on a ramp or in a container – is a familiar one on any yard running container work.

Two practical checks follow from the case: that mobile ramps in use are fitted with the handrails they were supplied with, and that the question of whether the job could be done from an existing bay or at ground level has actually been asked before anyone works at height.

The transaction, valued at roughly $325 million, follows SoftBank's decision to exercise a put option embedded in the 2021 deal that saw Hyundai take its original 80 percent controlling interest. The predetermined price values Boston Dynamics at approximately $3.3 billion — consistent with the 2021 valuation.

Full ownership gives Hyundai greater strategic flexibility over the robot maker, including long-term decisions on investment, business strategy and a potential future stock market flotation.

For the materials handling sector, Boston Dynamics matters well beyond its famous robot dog videos. Its Stretch robot — which unloads trailers and containers at up to 700 packages an hour — is already working in UK warehouses, with DHL among the major logistics operators deploying it as part of a £550 million UK robotics investment announced last year.

Hyundai's plans point to deeper integration between robotics and manufacturing. The group intends to deploy Atlas, Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot, at a manufacturing plant in Georgia, USA from 2028, initially on parts-sequencing tasks, with the role expected to expand into component assembly by 2030.

The move consolidates Hyundai's position across the full spectrum of industrial automation — from its forklift ranges through port equipment to humanoid robotics — and signals where the group believes the future of materials movement lies.

The new series covers capacities from 2,200kg to 3,500kg and delivers substantial performance gains over its predecessor: lift speeds up to 65 percent faster and energy consumption up to 20 percent lower, based on VDI cycle testing – improvements aimed squarely at operations trying to move more product per shift without adding trucks or operators.

Visibility gets particular attention. The ERC-VG2 features what Yale describes as the largest through-mast window in its class, 34 percent larger than the previous model, improving the operator's forward view of forks and load. A near-zero turn radius supports work in congested dock and aisle areas.

Energy flexibility follows the pattern now standard across the industry: operators can specify lead-acid, thin plate pure lead or factory-integrated lithium-ion power, matching the truck to their duty cycle and charging infrastructure. Suspended and air ride seat options reduce shock and vibration through longer shifts.

"Supply chains and warehouse operations run on tight margins, and are pushed to squeeze as much productivity as possible from scarce labour resources," said Lauren Grady, Product Manager at Yale Lift Truck Technologies. "The ERC-VG2 series pushes electric forklifts forward with key improvements that help operations do more with less and keep total cost of ownership in check."

The launch was announced from Yale's Greenville, North Carolina base, with the cushion-tyre configuration aimed primarily at the North American market. It follows a busy product year for the brand, which also released a pedestrian detection dashboard and an automated counterbalanced stacker earlier in 2026.

The delivery comprises 15 electric internal terminal vehicles (ITVs) and three electric reach stackers. The ITV fleet alone is expected to cut CO2 emissions by more than 500 tonnes compared with the diesel equipment it replaces.

The equipment arrives as part of DP World's BRL 1.6 billion (roughly £230 million) expansion of the Santos terminal, which will lift container handling capacity to 2.1 million TEU by 2028. The operator has already spent over BRL 100 million electrifying 22 rubber-tyred gantry cranes at the site.

The results are showing up in the fuel figures: between January and April 2026, the terminal's diesel consumption fell 29.2 percent against its 2024 average.

For the wider materials handling industry, the significance is the machine class. Reach stackers — with lift capacities around 45 tonnes — have long been considered among the hardest equipment to electrify, for the same reasons heavy counterbalance trucks were: energy demand, duty cycles and charging windows. Fully electric examples moving from trade-show prototypes into revenue service at a major port marks a threshold moment, echoing the heavy-electric push seen this year from Jungheinrich's FalcOn prototype and Hyster's XTLG series.

European operators are following the same path — Kalmar confirmed this week it will supply Contargo Group with its first fully electric reach stacker, suggesting the technology is arriving in mainstream intermodal fleets on both sides of the Atlantic.

The F712 handles multiple load types and sizes – including open and closed pallets, containers and racks – at capacities up to 2,000kg and lift heights reaching 8.5 metres. ABB quotes positional accuracy of ±10mm and travel speeds of up to 1.7m/s while loaded, with certification to current ISO and ANSI safety standards.

The significant departure from most autonomous forklifts on the market is navigation. Rather than following pre-installed infrastructure such as reflectors, magnetic tape or floor markers, the F712 uses AI-enabled Visual SLAM to build and navigate its own map of the environment. For operators, that removes a substantial slice of the installation cost and disruption normally associated with deploying automation into a live warehouse.

The truck runs on ABB Robotics' AMR Studio software, a no-code, drag-and-drop suite handling setup, fleet coordination, traffic management and real-time visualisation. ABB says the platform delivers up to 20 percent faster commissioning and allows mixed fleets of tugs, movers and forklifts to be managed as one system rather than as separate installations.

The launch lands in an increasingly busy segment. STILL, Jungheinrich and others have all moved on autonomous handling in the past year, with the loading dock and pallet movement between goods-in and racking emerging as the areas where operators see the clearest case for removing manual driving.

Aaron Back, 41, a father of four, had been contracted by the company to dismantle pipework at the EMIR site on Wotton Road in Ashford, Kent. On 28 March 2023 he was working from a raised tipping bucket mounted on a forklift truck when he fell out of it onto the concrete floor below. He spent months in hospital.

The Health and Safety Executive investigation established why the forklift was being used at all: a scissor lift had been ordered for the job, but it was too tall to enter the area where the work was taking place, so the forklift and bucket were used instead.

Investigators found that no suitable arrangements were in place to manage the company's contractors and ensure safety on site. They also identified significant failings relating to unsafe work at height over a prolonged period, noting that HSE had given the company advice and enforcement action regarding the control of contractors and unsafe working at height as far back as 2013.

South East Refurbishment Limited, of Rochester, Kent, pleaded guilty to a breach of Section 3(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974. The company was fined £90,000 and ordered to pay costs of £27,241 at Margate Magistrates' Court on 7 July 2026.

Lifting a person in a bucket, on a pallet or in any attachment not designed and certified to carry personnel remains among the most common serious misuses of a forklift truck. Purpose-built integrated working platforms exist and are subject to specific requirements covering the platform, the truck and the way the two are used together.

The detail worth carrying away from this case is the reasoning that led to it. The correct access equipment was identified and ordered, then did not fit the space. At that point the job needed different access equipment, not an improvised alternative on the front of a forklift.