Dingli Brand Guidelines: The 2005 Deqing Maker of Scissor and Boom Lifts

A 2005 start north of Hangzhou.

Dingli is the brand of Zhejiang Dingli Machinery Co., Ltd., an aerial work platform maker in Deqing county, part of the city of Huzhou in Zhejiang province, north of Hangzhou. A 2020 profile on the Huzhou section of China Daily’s regional website gives its founding year as 2005 and describes a company devoted to the design, manufacture, sale and servicing of aerial working platforms. Its founder is Xu Shugen: Vertikal.net called him the company’s chief executive and founder in 2023, and KHL’s Access International interviewed him as chairman in 2022.

The company’s own Chinese-language timeline sets out its growth in factory phases: a first plant in production in 2007, a second in 2011 and a third in 2015, which it describes as an automated assembly line for aerial platforms. A fourth phase followed in 2020 and a fifth, for high-reach booms and scissors, in 2023, the company says. It also says it listed on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2015.

An early outside view comes from KHL. In July 2010 its correspondent reported that a new Dingli factory, run as Zhejiang Green Power Machinery, had reached full production on a 40,000-square-metre site with four assembly buildings and 150 workers. It was building scissor lifts from 6 to 10 metres with hydraulic or electric drive, 16-metre articulating and telescopic boom lifts and rough-terrain scissors from 10 to 18 metres, with a 6-metre compact scissor about to follow.

The regional government press has since followed the business. China Daily’s Huzhou pages reported in October 2021 that a Dingli plant had been named in December 2020 among the first batch of Zhejiang “future plants,” a provincial list for factories using connected and data-driven production, and the first from Huzhou to make it. The same report said the company was building platforms for export to Europe and the United States and had a business presence in 80 countries and regions.

Shared parts and long reach.

Dingli builds scissor lifts, articulated and telescopic boom lifts and vertical mast lifts, according to the Huzhou profile and the company’s website, which says it has developed more than 200 models and holds CE and ANSI certifications for them. Its Chinese-language profile describes electric drive as a priority across the range.

In a 2022 interview with Access International, Xu explained the company’s modular approach: common parts are shared across 85 percent of the range, including one type of lithium battery system, so that rental companies can stock fewer spares and repair a whole series once they know one machine. He said the approach also lets Dingli’s automated lines produce a scissor lift every six to eight minutes and a boom lift every half hour, which are the company’s figures.

The same article described two boom ranges. The Hybrid Range Extended series adds a small combustion engine to electric boom lifts of 22 to 34 metres working height, acting as an on-board charger for the lithium battery where sites have no charging points; Xu said it was designed for European and North American customers. The High Metre series of nine electric and hybrid models, from 36 to 44 metres, was developed at Dingli’s research centre in Germany, set up through its part-ownership of the spider-lift maker Teupen.

The company lists honours of its own. Its timeline says it received the International Powered Access Federation’s pioneer award in 2019, describing itself as the first Asian brand to win it, and an International Awards for Powered Access prize in the scissor and mast category in 2024. It also says China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology named it a single-product manufacturing champion in 2021.

Lifts, rental yards and trade shows.

Aerial work platform makers present themselves through the machines first. Scissor lifts, articulated booms, telescopic booms, truck-mounted platforms and tracked spider lifts are usually painted in a single strong colour, such as an orange, a blue, a red or a yellow, with the maker’s name and the model code set large on the chassis or the boom. Seen across a site, the colour does much of the work a logo would do elsewhere.

Much of the industry sells to rental companies rather than to the people who use the machines, and its pictures often show that. Brochures and websites favour long rows of identical scissors and folded booms in a rental yard, machines lined up on a delivery truck, and close views of control boxes, battery packs and parts that a fleet workshop would care about. Product names tend to be strings of letters and numbers that encode working height, width or drive type.

The other stock image is the machine at work: a platform raised against a steel frame, a warehouse ceiling or a building facade, with operators in hard hats and harnesses at height. Electric and hybrid drive, lithium batteries and low-noise indoor use have become common themes in recent launches, described in the makers’ own words.

Trade fairs and awards fill the rest of the calendar. New models are often unveiled at The ARA Show in the United States, at bauma in Munich and at APEX, the access-equipment show in the Netherlands, while the industry press runs its own prizes, such as the International Awards for Powered Access. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

Magni, MEC, Teupen and the US trade cases.

Dingli grew abroad through minority stakes and partnerships. Vertikal.net reported in August 2020 that it had held 20 percent of Magni, the Italian telehandler maker, since 2016, and a stake in MEC Aerial Work Platforms of California, which it dated to 2017. Rental Equipment Register reported in November 2023 that MEC and Dingli became manufacturing partners in 2016, that Dingli took a minority ownership stake in 2018 and that it had now increased its investment. The August 2020 Vertikal.net report itself was about a new holding: Dingli had bought 24 percent of Teupen, the German spider-lift maker, and said it would open a research centre in Germany. The report also noted that Dingli had signed a deal in 2019 to represent Platform Basket in China.

Two of those holdings have since ended. In December 2023 Vertikal.net reported that Magni had bought back Dingli’s 20 percent, with the two companies saying their sales and design cooperation would continue, and that Dingli planned a larger stake in MEC, aiming at full ownership in the medium term. In April 2024 it reported that Teupen’s owner had repurchased Dingli’s 24 percent before selling Teupen to the American lift maker Altec. Dingli’s Chinese-language website still describes Magni, MEC and Teupen as acquisitions.

Dingli has also been named in United States trade cases. The US Department of Commerce issued a final countervailing duty determination on mobile access equipment from China in October 2021 and an order that December. Its final antidumping determination, published on 22 February 2022, names Zhejiang Dingli Machinery as one of the two mandatory respondents, and an antidumping duty order followed on 14 April 2022.

For a design guide, Dingli shows how an industrial maker presents itself through production scale and shared engineering. Compare MEC Aerial Work Platforms, its American partner, and Teupen. For this guide we use a deep blue, graphite and a teal on cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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