Sinoboom Brand Guidelines: The Changsha Boom Lift Maker Founded in 2008

A crane engineer starts again in Changsha.

Sinoboom was founded in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province in China, on 28 February 2008, the company says, and it exhibited for the first time that July at the China Shipbuilding Expo. Its founder is Steven Liu, a mechanical engineer who told the trade magazine Cranes & Access in a 2023 interview that he graduated in 1990 and spent his early career in the crane industry: first in the engineering department of the Changsha crane maker Puyuan, which was later bought by Zoomlion, then for six years at Sany, and then back at Puyuan, where he designed a new line of recovery trucks.

The idea for the business came from a trade show. Around 2005 or 2006, Liu told the magazine, colleagues came back from Intermat with brochures for self-propelled boom lifts, a kind of machine he had not seen before. His employer was not interested, since there was then almost no market for such machines in China, so he and a group of friends began drawing up designs at home in their spare time.

The first customer was a shipyard. It had bought a 30-metre boom lift from a Western maker, and Liu’s team asked whether it would buy a local machine designed around its own needs. The answer was encouraging enough for the group to start the company in 2008, with a prototype built from parts they bought with their own savings and space in small factory units that the local government offered to start-ups at subsidised rents. Liu said the name was chosen simply because telescopic boom lifts were what the company made. After a couple of years the team decided that the shipyard market was too narrow, and built a larger 38-metre boom lift for makers of port cranes, which Liu said helped the company grow. Finding suppliers for specialised components was the hard part of those early years, he said, and the team spent a lot of time developing them.

From booms to a full range.

Sinoboom’s own timeline traces the steps that followed. It joined the industry body IPAF in 2009. In 2010 its range gained CE certification and it built its first telescopic boom lift with a 44-metre working height. In 2011 it began moving to a new site in the Jinzhou Industrial Park, in 2012 its machines were registered in Australia under the AS1418 standard, and in 2013 the company moved into a purpose-built manufacturing base. A truck-mounted platform line followed in 2014, and in 2017, its tenth year, it launched a limited-edition anniversary range.

The bigger change came with rental. Liu told Cranes & Access that rental companies only began to appear in China around 2015, and that by 2017 rental “really began to take off,” which was when Sinoboom began developing scissor lifts. He described a factory opened in 2013 in the Ningxiang Industrial Park as the first phase of the company’s manufacturing site, followed by a scissor-lift assembly line in 2017, a boom-lift line in 2018 and a fourth phase opened in December 2021. At the time of the interview, he said, about 70 percent of sales were still in China and 30 percent overseas, and the company hoped to reach an even split by the end of 2025. The magazine described Sinoboom as privately owned.

Today the company describes a range that runs from scissor and boom lifts to spider lifts, vertical mast lifts, truck-mounted booms and telehandlers, with platform heights from 4 to 58 metres. It says its machines are used in more than 100 countries, in settings that include shipyards, ports, petrochemical sites, municipal works and stadiums. It also cites two trade rankings: seventh in the ACCESS M20 list of aerial work platform makers by sales, and 44th in KHL’s Yellow Table of construction equipment makers.

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.

Made in Europe for Europe.

Sinoboom has spent the past few years building a base in Europe. Its European business is run by the Dutch subsidiary Sinoboom BV from a head office in Ridderkerk, in the Netherlands, and in 2021 it established a plant in Poznań, Poland. In July 2024 Access International reported that the company would carry out full assembly of scissor and boom lifts for the European market there, in response to provisional EU tariffs on Chinese-made equipment introduced that month, which Sinoboom was appealing. At that time the Polish plant had about 120 staff and was building machines for North America ahead of a new Sinoboom factory in Mexico, the magazine said, and the company planned a European research and development team in Poznań to oversee local products and CE certification.

In April 2025, at the bauma trade fair in Munich, Sinoboom announced that Sinoboom BV had bought the Holland Lift brand and all of its intellectual property, according to Rental Equipment Register. The range of more than 30 models, from 16 to 34 metres in height, was to carry the name “Holland Lift by Sinoboom,” and the company said it planned to build the first models in Poznań during the first quarter of 2026, with the rest of the range to follow in phases. The theme of its stand that year was “Made in Europe for Europe,” with machines built in Poland on show alongside an SPA27J spider lift. Susan Xu, the chief executive of Sinoboom Group, said the purchase supported the company’s aims of widening its product line and deepening its presence in Europe.

For a design guide, Sinoboom shows a young maker that tells its story through dates: a founding day, factory phases, certifications and trade rankings, with a European name added to its line. Compare Holland Lift, the Dutch scissor-lift name it now owns, and Dingli, another Chinese maker of aerial work platforms. For this guide we use a steel navy and a signal amber with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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