Favelle Favco Brand Guidelines: Twin Towers Luffers to a Malaysian Crane Group

Australian roots, Malaysian owner.

Favelle Favco is a crane maker with Australian roots and a Malaysian owner. Today the name belongs to Favelle Favco Berhad, a company listed on Bursa Malaysia, the Kuala Lumpur stock exchange. English Wikipedia says it makes construction cranes under the Favelle Favco and Kroll brands, with its main plant at Senawang in Malaysia and production facilities and engineering offices in Sydney, China, Texas and Denmark. Its majority shareholder is Muhibbah Engineering, the Malaysian engineering group: The Star of Kuala Lumpur described Favelle Favco as Muhibbah’s 64%-owned unit in January 2026.

The story begins in Australia with the Favelle family. Cranes Today, the British trade magazine, wrote in January 2005 that the company was “originally established as an Australian company in 1962.” The magazine’s August 2006 history of the firm credits Eric Favelle with the decisions that took the Favco name into manufacturing in the United States, and English Wikipedia lists Eric Favelle, Edward Arthur Favelle, Edward Hastings Favelle and Harry Cole as its founders.

The years before Malaysian ownership were uneven. In the early 1990s, Cranes Today reported, Favelle Favco Cranes Pty Ltd introduced a new generation of diesel-hydraulic luffing-boom tower cranes, led by the M 760D, its largest model to that date; financial problems followed, and the next year the company went into receivership. In 1995 it was acquired by Muhibbah. At that time, Cranes Today reported in 2005, the crane maker’s manufacturing was confined to Australia; the magazine wrote in 2006 that Muhibbah ownership revived its fortunes.

Luffers for the tallest towers.

The brand’s reputation was made in New York. According to Cranes Today’s 2006 history, Favco delivered eight STD2700 internal-climbing luffing cranes for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1968, ordered by the contractor Koch Company. The cranes were planned at double the size of the largest Favco had built, the STD750, and the magazine wrote that they allowed the towers to be raised with eight cranes instead of twelve slower derricks.

That success led to an American venture. Favco International Corporation was set up in 1971, the magazine reported; Eric Favelle bought it a year later, and in 1974 it was sold to FMC Corporation, the owner of Link-Belt. Favco completed the design of the 1,081 tonne-metre STD 2300 the following year. FMC closed its luffing-jib tower crane factory in 1983, after the American recession of the early 1980s.

Under Muhibbah the business spread across several countries. Cranes Today reported in 2005 that Favelle Favco opened a Malaysian plant at Shah Alam, near Kuala Lumpur, in 1996 and a factory in Texas later the same year, and that by the end of 1996 Muhibbah had bought Krøll Cranes A/S of Denmark, a maker of very large hammerhead tower cranes; the magazine’s 2006 history dates that purchase to 1997. In 1996 it also bought the Manitex offshore crane business. By 2005 it described four product lines — tower cranes, offshore rig cranes, crawler cranes, and shipyard and port cranes — with diesel luffing cranes built in Australia and Malaysia and electric hammerhead cranes built by Krøll in Denmark. A 68,000-square-metre plant near Seremban opened in 2005.

The big luffers continued. The M 1250D of 1999, later uprated and renamed the M 1280D, went to Taiwan in 2000 for the tower now called Taipei 101; the M 760D Series II went to New York from 2002; and Cranes Today recorded a still larger model, the M1680D. English Wikipedia lists the Burj Khalifa, the Petronas Twin Towers, the Shanghai World Financial Centre and One World Trade Center among the towers built with its cranes.

Cranes and documentation.

Crane makers present very large machines largely through pictures. Their catalogues and websites lean on a small set of pictures: a tower crane standing over an unfinished skyline, a mobile crane with its telescopic boom fully extended, a crawler crane lifting a turbine section on a wind farm, or a loader crane folded neatly behind a truck cab. The machine itself becomes the logo at a distance, so the paint matters as much as the nameplate.

That is why colour does so much work in this category. Booms and jibs are painted in strong, flat tones, often yellow, red or white, with the maker’s name lettered large along the steel so it can be read from the street. Some makers go as far as naming their colours and applying them across a whole fleet, so that a crane on a distant site can be placed before its lettering can be read.

Closer in, the presentation shifts to the operator. Cab interiors, joysticks, load-moment displays and remote controls appear in brochures alongside outrigger layouts and load charts, with lettering that has to work on a decal, in a manual and on a small screen.

Trade fairs are the other stage. bauma in Munich, ConExpo-Con/Agg in Las Vegas, bauma CONEXPO INDIA and national shows in China and Japan are where new cranes are unveiled, often fully rigged on outdoor stands, and where companies announce acquisitions and new models. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and where its cranes are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Offshore, shipyard and skyline.

Much of Favelle Favco’s work is at sea. English Wikipedia says it makes offshore cranes with lifting capacities of up to 1,000 tonnes, and cites a 2013 analyst report that most of its crane orders that year were for offshore cranes. In 2005 the company told Cranes Today that construction cranes and offshore oil and gas rig cranes made up about 90% of its business, and that its offshore cranes ranged from small units for unmanned wellhead platforms to large rig models, shipped in containers. Closer to its Australian origins, the Royal Australian Navy’s Garden Island base in Sydney received a 100-tonne portal crane supplied by Favelle Favco, the Naval Historical Society of Australia reported in November 2021, similar in design to the two cranes that serve the Captain Cook Graving Dock.

The company became listed in its own right in the mid-2000s. Cranes Today reported in September 2006 that the Muhibbah unit had raised new capital through a stock market listing, and English Wikipedia records its shares as traded on the Main Board of Bursa Malaysia. The group has kept buying: in January 2026 The Star reported that Favelle Favco had acquired Seram Industries, a French company that designs, makes, installs and services lifting cranes and electric conveyors for industrial waste plants.

For a design guide, Favelle Favco shows how a crane name can carry a family’s history through several owners and countries. Compare Link-Belt, whose parent FMC once owned the American Favco business, and Liebherr, another maker of tower cranes. For this guide we use a harbour teal and a brass yellow with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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