Business View Magazine
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Texas was established as a one-building facility four
years later. It received a contract in 2000 to supply
the U.S. Army with rough terrain container handlers,
and subsequently received contracts for vehicle main-
tenance, field service support and after-market parts
sales.
A second RTCH contract with the U.S. Department of
Defense arrived in 2008, and the burgeoning Cibolo
campus now consists of 49,245 square feet of manu-
facturing space, 27,206 square feet for paint, service
and repair, a 37,000 square-foot parts warehouse,
a 32,000 square-foot research and product develop-
ment building and a 30,000 square-foot customer
support center.
“We started initially, right after the start of war, reset-
ting or rebuilding RT240s – a 56,000-pound capac-
ity rough terrain container handler, known as ‘The Big
Wretch,’” Speakes said, “and from then until about
2009 our business was rebuilding the wretches that
came back from war.
“In 2009, we actually began to produce, here in the
United States, the RT240, which has been our flagship
system since we started and was our main product up
and through 2013.”
Kalmar RT completed its series of Army contracts and
began retooling its business model in 2014, Speakes
said, a transition that included start-up production of
small and medium-sized forklifts and a redirection to-
ward commercial work, in addition to reconfiguring its
government offerings.
The RT240 is still sold worldwide, either for military
forces or in rough-terrain functions like mining. The
company’s medium forklift is sold to various commer-
cial entities throughout the Americas and the small
rough-terrain model is purchased primarily by the De-
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