Holland Lift Brand Guidelines: The Hoorn Heavy-Duty Scissor Lift Maker, Now a Sinoboom Brand

A consulting engineer and a 41-foot scissor.

Holland Lift was a Dutch maker of large scissor lifts based in Hoorn, in the province of North Holland. Vertikal.net, reporting on the company’s 25th anniversary in November 2008, says it was founded at the end of 1983 by the consulting engineer Martin Haak and began production in 1984. Its first units went to the Dutch steelworks Hoogovens, and its first production model was the 41-foot 125EV. KHL, reporting in 2023, gives 1984 as the year the company was established.

Haak did not remain the owner for long. According to Vertikal.net, the company was acquired by MBB in 1993 and by the American equipment group Terex in 1998. Terex came close to selling it to Haulotte in 2001, but an American investor stepped in through Stoneham Equipment and bought it in 2002, with the two directors, Menno Koel and Pieter Boogert, taking part of the equity. Late in 2007 the two directors joined a small Dutch private equity firm to buy out that investor, raising their own stake. Haak, meanwhile, stayed close to the product: Access International reported in 2009 that he was still the main designer, working from an engineering firm near Haarlem.

The machines were the reason the name travelled. Holland Lift built big-deck scissor lifts with high platform capacities. In the 2009 interview Koel listed high capacities, big decks and long service intervals as the main benefits, and said that working lives of more than ten years were common. A typical niche model of the time was the N-265, with a working height of 28.5 metres on a chassis 1.3 metres wide, used by firms installing high racking inside warehouses.

A small factory with a long order book.

The company stayed small by the standards of its industry. Access International reported that production in 2008 was around 350 machines, with some 60 people employed in Hoorn and a further 80 to 100 working at steel fabrication and painting subcontractors in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Netherlands. At that point it sold in ten or eleven European countries, its home market accounted for around 45 per cent of sales, and the rental group Riwal was among its largest customers.

Hoorn remained the base. In November 2008, Vertikal.net reported, the mayor of Hoorn opened a new building on a 6,000-square-metre plot across the road from the existing plant — the second new facility in three years — so that the original factory could be given over to final assembly. Part of the new building was set aside for Servi-Tec, the company’s German-based after-sales and rebuild business. Holland Lift also took a stake in its British distributor, Russon Access, around the same time.

In 2013 the company came under the same owner as Riwal: it was acquired by Pro Delta Investments, which also owns the rental group, KHL reported. In 2012 Holland Lift had bought the Sky High line of compact self-propelled booms, then built in Belgium, and in 2015 it sold that business on again, Vertikal.net reported. By the time of its closure the range ran to more than 30 models and variants, with working heights from 16 to 34 metres, platform capacities up to 1,000 kilograms, narrow and rough-terrain versions, and electric, hybrid and diesel power.

Design and documentation.

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.

Liquidation in 2023, a new owner for the name in 2025.

The original company is closed. In August 2023 Holland Lift International B.V. and its shareholder announced that they had decided to end its activities and liquidate the company, KHL reported. At the time it employed around 70 people in the Netherlands and, through Servi-Tec GmbH, in Germany. The company cited sharp rises in steel prices and running costs, supply-chain problems after the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, and fierce competition from “low price newcomers,” and said that a staff reorganisation in 2021 and new product launches had not been enough to secure its future.

The machines outlived the company. In April 2024 Vertikal.net reported that three former employees, led by former engineering manager Tjaco Sussenbach, had set up a parts, service and technical support operation within Sky High BV for what they put at more than 9,000 Holland Lift scissors still in daily use worldwide.

The name then found a new owner. In April 2025 the Chinese manufacturer Sinoboom bought the Holland Lift brand name and its intellectual property through its Dutch subsidiary, Sinoboom BV, Vertikal.net reported. Sinoboom said the designs would be moved onto its own CAD systems and adapted to its control systems, that prototypes would go through certification, and that the machines would be sold as Holland Lift by Sinoboom. It said production would start at its plant in Poznań, Poland, with the first models planned for the first quarter of 2026, followed by the rest of the range in phases and later by other Sinoboom plants.

For a design guide, Holland Lift shows how a specialist name can outlive the company that built it. Compare Sinoboom, the brand’s new owner, and Skyjack, another maker of scissor lifts. For this guide we use a deep polder green and a brick orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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