It is being reported in continental news outlets that New Holland has divested itself of the rest of the Kongskilde range, having parted with Overum back in April of this year (2024).
The company, said to be buying the rest of Kongskilde, is Seko of Italy, which has, so far, confined itself to producing mixer feed wagons, both trailed and self-propelled products.
Details of the sale have yet to be made public. The news was released in a letter from New Holland to the dealer network.
Neither of the two companies involved have confirmed the news and there is no indication of the development on their respective websites.
Abandoning full line ambitions
The sale signifies a significant reversal of New Holland’s corporate strategy which, up until recently, has been one of setting the company up as a full line provider of agricultural machinery.
Last autumn, the company’s brand president, Carlo Lambo, went so far as to suggest that the North American dealer network would need to be cleaned up, that is, he would be expecting dealerships to drop brands that competed with products that New Holland now had in its line up.
The news was not well received and little has been heard of it since, but over on this side of the Atlantic, it appears that the opposite tack is being taken, possibly due to the realisation that smaller dealerships are unlikely to thrive without a wide range of popular brands to offer.
Purchasing a company that specialises in tillage machinery is a big step for Seko, as its expertise appears to be in the livestock sector.
However, tillage equipment is said to have been slow to sell over the last year, so the price being asked may have made it a difficult deal to resist.