What's in a name?
September 9, 2011 By: Pit & Quarry Staff
Bucyrus was an old company. It predated Pit & Quarry magazine, which began publishing in 1916. And it was older than the company that recently gobbled it up – Caterpillar Inc., which was created with the 1925 merger of Holt Manufacturing and C.L. Best Tractor.
Bucyrus Foundry and Manufacturing Co. began life in Bucyrus, Ohio, in 1880. Thirteen years later the company moved its headquarters to South Milwaukee, Wis., where it produced steam shovels, and in 1904 supplied most of the shovels used to dig the Panama Canal.
The company changed its name to Bucyrus-Erie in 1927 when it merged with the Erie Steam Shovel Co., the country’s leading manufacturer of small excavators at the time. Bucyrus-Erie was under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for about two years in the mid-1990s, and in 1997 took the name Bucyrus International Inc.
Caterpillar purchased Bucyrus in an $8.8-billion transaction that closed July 8, and you can read more about the acquisition and what it means to the aggregates industry in the Pit & Quarry September Buyers' Guide issue.
When I first heard of the deal, I was certain Caterpillar would hang on to the long-standing Bucyrus brand name for its new mining-equipment offerings. But the Caterpillar name is the biggest in heavy equipment, so it shouldn’t have surprised me when the company announced it would brand the equipment Caterpillar.
“For the past several months, Caterpillar has evaluated the best approach for branding legacy Bucyrus products,” says Caterpillar Group President Steve Wunning. “We sought input from dealers, customers, the leadership of Bucyrus and outside industry and branding experts. The conclusion was a single brand— Caterpillar— for our mining products.”
Wunning says it became clear it would be in the best long-term interests of the company’s business to have a single brand for its mining customers. At a Caterpillar press event last month in Milwaukee, Caterpillar showed off many photos of its new mining-equipment line, already made yellow through the magic of Photoshop.
And when we visited the Bucyrus Museum, I couldn’t help but think how the Bucyrus name has gone the way of its famous Big Muskie drag line – gone but not forgotten. –Darren Constantino
(In the photo at top, Luis de Leon, previously COO for Bucyrus and now a Cat v.p. leading the new Mining Products Division, discusses the branding of legacy Bucyrus equipment.)
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