APB World Tour 2019!

16-05-2019

We feel it is important to promote CPT in general at geotechnical events around the world. That is why you can often find us as sponsor or exhibitor at these events. Besides the general promotion of the CPT method and technology, these events provide us the platform to present our company, our innovations and our product range. Not only to existing and potential customers, but also to the academics and engineering practitioners. Last month we participated in two such events.
 
From 1 to 3 April 2019 the 13th Australia New Zealand Conference on Geomechanics took place in Perth, Western Australia. This conference, with approximately 40 exhibitors and 460 delegates, was very suitable to meet up with existing and new contacts on the other side of our globe. We contributed to the event as a Silver Sponsor allowing us to receive delegates in a booth and promote ourselves in image and sound. We received a lot of attention for our recent development, the COSON-ST, the state-of-the-art machine for hands-free soil investigations. Based on information exchanged during ANZ 2019 we expect this highly innovative technology to come ashore in Australia in the near future. During the conference we also met a few companies that may have the potential to represent us in Australia and New-Zealand and create possibilities to further improve the sales, service and support to customers in that region.

From 8 to 14 April 2019 we were much closer to home as we were present with a booth at the Bauma 2019, an event of an entirely different order. With 3,700 exhibitors and more than 620,000 visitors from 200 countries, it is the world's most relevant trade fair for the construction machinery and mining machinery industries and—in terms of exhibition space—it is the world's largest trade show. Our focus was on the European introduction of the hydraulic pile pusher for silent & vibration-free pushing of (precast) piles. Of course we were hoping to do very well, but we tried to hold back on our expectations, as we are such a small player in between all those industry giants.
 
After the exhibition it is fair to say that our expectations were exceeded in many ways! Those who became familiar with this method for silent and vibration-free pushing for the first time left our booth with a clear interest to get more information and budget quotations. Those visitors who were already familiar with the technology showed immediate interest to receive more detailed quotations and to see the machine “live in action”.  We expect quite a few international visits at the current project site of Drukpaal.nl in Delft (the Netherlands). During the next 4 to 5 weeks they are executing a pile pushing project for a bridge in the middle of the historic center. Bauma 2019 strengthened our belief that this technology will be adopted in Europe over the next few years and that A.P. van den Berg and Drukpaal.nl will be rewarded for their entrepreneurship to introduce this technology. We did not expect too much attention for CPT technology, but we left the exhibition with a lot of new contacts with interest in CPT systems. So plenty of opportunities to build on and a few are already close to an order!

Now back in Heerenveen, we are again preparing for the next international event, so we are looking forward to see you somewhere around this globe! We are booked for the XVII European Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ECSMGE) in Iceland and the XVI Panamerican Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering in Mexico, but more may follow….