Kalmar Brand Guidelines: A Swedish Town’s Name on Finnish Port Machines

A Swedish railway works, a Finnish state factory and a Kansas tractor.

The name comes from a Swedish town. Swedish Wikipedia records Kalmar Verkstad (KVAB) as an engineering works founded in 1902 in Kalmar, on Sweden’s south-east coast, to build and repair rolling stock for the railways around the town. In the 1950s it looked for other products and took over the making of small tow tractors, which Swedish Wikipedia says the state railways used on station platforms and SAS used to pull baggage carts; in the late 1960s it also built the Tjorven, a postal van with a glass-fibre body.

The lift-truck side grew elsewhere in Småland. Kalmar says the first forklift for a local sawmill was built in 1949 in a small workshop in Lidhult, and that Lidhults Mekaniska Verkstad (LMV) began serial production in 1952. Swedish Wikipedia adds a second root: heavy forklifts built from about 1959 by the brothers Rune, Holger and Sture Andersson on a farm outside Ljungby and sold as Ljungbytruck. The company says the state-owned Kalmar Verkstad bought LMV in 1974 and Ljungbytruck a year later, and the combined business traded as Kalmar LMV, with sales and service in more than 50 countries by the mid-1980s. It dates its first reachstacker prototype to 1985, with deliveries from 1986.

Two more lines joined later. Kalmar traces its straddle carriers to Härmälä, near Tampere in Finland, where it says the first straddle carrier for industrial use was built in the 1940s at a state metal works that was renamed Valmet in 1951. As part of Finland’s war reparations to the Soviet Union, the company says, the Härmälä factory received an order in the 1950s for 500 lumber carriers, and Valmet built its first container straddle-carrier prototypes in 1976. Its terminal tractors trace to Ottawa, Kansas, where the company says Ottawa Steel introduced what it calls the world’s first terminal tractor in 1958, for moving trailers around ports, warehouses and distribution yards.

Partek, Kone and Cargotec.

The pieces came together through a run of Nordic deals. Swedish Wikipedia says the engineering group ABB bought Kalmar Verkstad in 1990 and formed Kalmar Industries for the truck business; Kalmar says it took that name and listed on the Stockholm stock exchange in 1994. In the same year, the company says, the Finnish state-owned Sisu bought Ottawa Trucks and Valmet’s material-handling business. In 1997 the Finnish group Partek bought Sisu’s terminal business and a majority of Kalmar Industries, and by 2000 it owned all of it, according to both the company and Swedish Wikipedia.

Acquisitions widened the range. Kalmar says Partek bought Bromma, the Swedish container-spreader maker founded in 1965, in 2000, and that in 2001 Kalmar Industries bought Nelcon, a Dutch maker of ship-to-shore cranes and straddle carriers, together with the maintenance firm Groot-Hensen. The lift and escalator maker Kone bought Partek in 2002, and in June 2005 Kone split its material-handling units into a new listed company, Cargotec, made up of Kalmar, Hiab and MacGregor, English Wikipedia says.

Under Cargotec, Kalmar says, it equipped the first fully automated straddle-carrier terminal, opened in Brisbane in 2005 with its AutoStrad system, set up a plant in Shanghai the same year, and owned the terminal-software company Navis from 2011 until 2021. A planned merger of Cargotec with Konecranes, announced on 1 October 2020, was called off in March 2022 after the UK Competition and Markets Authority blocked it, English Wikipedia says. Soon after, Maritime Gateway reported on 31 March 2022, Cargotec announced it would leave Kalmar’s heavy port-crane business and focus Kalmar on mobile equipment such as straddle and shuttle carriers and Bromma spreaders. Kalmar says it transferred the heavy-crane designs and assets to Rainbow Industries in 2022.

How port equipment makers present themselves.

Port and terminal equipment is sold to a small, specialist audience: port authorities, terminal operators, shipping lines and the logistics firms that move containers inland. The makers’ own websites and brochures tend to show the machines at work rather than on their own, because scale is the point. A ship-to-shore crane is pictured with its boom reaching out over the stacked deck of a container ship; a gantry is shown against the quay it serves.

The smaller machines are presented in the same working settings. Straddle carriers appear in long rows between container stacks, reachstackers lift boxes at the edge of a yard, and terminal tractors pull trailers and chassis between the quay and the gate. Forklift trucks and empty-container handlers are photographed in timber yards, steel mills and inland depots as well as in ports, since the same makers sell to heavy industry and distribution.

Automation has added a second kind of picture. Alongside the machines, the pictures now include control rooms and screens, and a maker such as Kalmar lists automation systems and charging solutions as products in their own right. Kalmar says the first fully automated straddle-carrier terminal opened in Brisbane in 2005, and ZPMC lists automated terminals in Xiamen and Shanghai among its projects.

Delivery is part of the story too. Large cranes are often moved fully assembled by sea: ZPMC says its own fleet carries large products whole, and English Wikipedia says it ships cranes in a fully erected state, so a crane standing upright on a heavy-lift vessel is a familiar image in the trade. The guides in this group follow makers across Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United States and China, and set out what each company says about itself alongside what independent sources record.

A listed company since 1 July 2024.

Kalmar became a separate company in 2024. Cargotec’s board approved a demerger plan in February 2024, shareholders backed it on 30 May, and the partial demerger was registered in the Finnish Trade Register on 30 June 2024, English Wikipedia says; Kalmar Corporation (Kalmar Oyj) began trading on Nasdaq Helsinki on 1 July 2024. What remained of Cargotec renamed itself Hiab in 2025. Finnish Wikipedia lists investment companies of the Herlin family among Kalmar’s largest shareholders in April 2026.

Today the company says it is headquartered in Helsinki, with innovation centres in Tampere and in Ljungby, Sweden, and factories in Poland, China, Malaysia and the United States; Finnish Wikipedia names the plants as Stargard, Shanghai, Ipoh and Ottawa. Swedish Wikipedia says production at Lidhult ended in 2018 and moved to Stargard. Kalmar describes its range as terminal tractors, reachstackers, forklift trucks and straddle carriers, plus crane spreaders, sold with parts, service and automation, and says it operates in more than 120 countries. It launched what it calls a fully electric portfolio in 2021, along with a robotic portfolio, and its Kalmar One automation system is offered for container terminals.

For a design guide, Kalmar shows how one place-name can carry a century of mergers: a Swedish town’s railway works lending its name to a Helsinki-listed maker whose product lines began in Sweden, Finland and Kansas. Compare Cargotec, the group it left in 2024 and now called Hiab, and Konecranes, the Finnish crane maker Cargotec once agreed to merge with. For this guide we use a deep slate, a warm amber and a pale concrete grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kalmar’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.