Linde Material Handling is much more than a forklift manufacturer. Paul Hamblin spoke to senior executives Ulrike Just and Torsten Rochelmeyer at LogiMAT.
Remember a simpler world? When you ordered goods to be delivered by the postman, accompanied by the familiar incantation, ‘Please Allow 28 Days for Delivery’? The days when forklift truck manufacturers built forklift trucks?
Those simpler days are long gone and while some may rue their passing, we can only step back in admiration and gratitude at some of the myriad benefits. For instance, order something today and get it…. Today.
Of course, forklift truck manufacturers still very much conceive, develop and build forklift trucks. But they also do a great deal more than make trucks. Why?
“We’re moving with our customers, because customers today don’t just need a truck, they need someone to solve very strong needs in their warehouse,” says Ulrike Just, EVP Sales and Service EMEA for Linde MH and a recent head of Linde MH in the UK and Ireland.
“On a basic level, customers need safety, and they need energy solutions to operate in an effective way. As they move towards automation they need a trusted partner alongside. Then you need orchestration, you need the software to make it all happen, you need the software to combine manual and automated trucks.”
It’s a fact that the world of logistics provision is much more complex today than it was even a decade ago. “Exactly, and we need to provide the commercial solutions to help our customers run their warehouses effectively.”
The logic is unarguable. But is the famous ‘red one’ still a truck maker at heart?
“The truck is still the core of the Linde brand,” offers Torsten Rochelmeyer, Senior Director Strategy and Solution Portfolio. “The challenges for the customer today are rising costs, managing complexity, volatility. To meet those challenges, it’s not enough to be able to get from A to B in the warehouse. You need to integrate solutions, and productivity and performance are at the heart of that. To answer your question, yes, the truck is the core, but the accompanying solutions bring essential customer value.”
To the outsider, it might appear that Linde MH has developed this holistic expertise in an impressively short period of time. How have they done it so quickly?
“I wouldn’t say it’s been a quick process,” counters Ulrike Just. “For years we’ve been the number one for safety solutions, the number one for energy solutions. Building this expertise around automation and software was something in which we invested massively. We started with partnerships, but it became clear that we had to build up expertise in-house.”
Global partnerships
Linde MH’s global footprint has an important role to play in the story.
“Obviously we have a very strong footprint in Europe but now we also have an extremely strong footprint in China,” she continues. “And China is really leading innovation especially in automation and software, so this combination enables us to develop around the clock, around the globe, 24/7. We have that twin radical approach – knowing what is needed in Europe but also on the other hand that very radical Asian approach, pushing forward relentlessly. This speed gives us a lot of innovation power.”
One view of Chinese innovation might be that it provides competitively-priced copies of premium European machines, often to the detriment of first-class European manufacturers, of which Linde MH is clearly one. UIrike Just does not subscribe to this view, pointing out that the Linde brand is the only international forklift provider with a significant market share in China, adding to its strong manufacturing, R&D and collaborative presence in the territory.
She also points to the company’s potentially game-changing partnerships. A key partnership with Nvidia, announced in 2025, aims to take industrial automation to the next level with the support of Nvidia’s Omniverse AI platform.
Partnerships bring benefits across many levels, says Just:
“Our partnerships help us to develop quickly, and also push us out of our comfort zone. It’s about picking the best of both worlds and meeting the demands of each market. We are extremely proud of our portfolio.”
Rochelmeyer adds: “We were established in China in 1993, so we’ve been a player for over three decades there. And we benefit from that on a global scale.”
Linde MH have been impressive in identifying future trends in logistics and then developing the solutions to meet emerging needs. How do they see the future?
Ulrike Just: ‘We will see warehouses orchestrated, with some manual resources and many automated, humanoid robots flawlessly working together pretty autonomously.
“Another change is on the commercial side – we may see more customers buying as a service, for instance where the service is for an agreed number of picks, rather than simply buying a truck or an AGV. Logistics is something our customers would like to give to another party to take care for them, while they focus on their core business, or on marketing or development.
Torsten Rochelmeyer adds: “Tomorrow’s warehouse will be automated and digital, because those are the levers to achieve the next level of performance. AI will leverage those processes. At the same time, our world is becoming more agile and complex, so the ability to plan something for the long term will be less and less feasible. Resilience will be about flexibility, so that is what we will need to deliver for our customers.”