31.03.2022

Reinhold Bräuner 1936-2022

We have received the sad news that tower crane veteran and entrepreneur Reinhold Bräuner, of MTI-Lux has died.
Please register to see all images

Reinhold Bräuner

He passed away on March 24th following heart failure while asleep at his home in Norway, he was 85.

Reinhold Bräuner was born in Stuttgart in 1936, the middle brother of three boys, his parents were not at all well off, so daily life involved few luxuries. At the age of eight as the war moved towards its final stages, he and his elder brother were evacuated to live with an uncle who ran a farm around 70km away, as the bombing of Stuttgart and other large cities was stepped up. He never spoke much about the two years he spent on the farm, but the life seemed to have been crucial for his development and the way his life panned out. They were certainly tough years and his parents had to walk the 70km to see their children, something which they did once every six months.

After the war he moved back to Stuttgart and was enrolled in school where he appears to have done well, gaining sufficient results to qualify to study engineering. This led to him becoming a civil engineer and going to work for an elevator manufacturer, possibly C. Haushahn which was later acquired by Schindler. He then made a move into cranes, joining the design department Liebherr Biberach. He began to realise that being a design engineer was not really what he wanted from his working life, and when the opportunity to join Liebherr Export came along and the chance to move into sales, he jumped at it.

It proved to be the kind of work which suited him 100 percent, he travelled a lot and was very happy and also successful, selling cranes all over Europe. When the ‘oil adventure’ took off in Norway at the beginning of the 1970s he spent time in Oslo, helping with the provision of cranes building the first offshore platforms for the Norwegian sector of North Sea. Bräuner, now in his early 30s was “enthusiastic out of his mind about the development of the Norwegian oil industry.”

In 1977 he married a Norwegian girl Grete and promptly whisked her off to Brazil after Liebherr offered him a posting as a sales director. The couple remained in Brazil for the next three years, during which time their daughter Christine was born. By the time his three year contract came to end, the Brazilian economy and political situation had entered a challenging period and with a young daughter to take care of the couple made the decision to move back to the relative stability of Europe.
Please register to see all images

Reinhold managed to land a job with German tower crane manufacturer Peiner as sales manager. They settled in the town of Peine between Hanover and Brunswick, where Peiner Schraubenwerke AG, as it was formally known, was based. In 1986 the company began to cut back its activities to a single plant in Trier, so the couple relocated to the town, which is in the Moselle wine region, near the Luxembourg border. He continued to work for the company until the next cutbacks. By then his wife Grete had started her own business - MTI - Machine Trading International - selling cranes in Germany and Scandinavia. As she says: “MTI was more of a hobby than a business, and I ran it from home near Trier, but in actual fact my activities were not unsuccessful, so we decided that Reinhold would join me in selling used and new cranes.”

When the next downward cycle in the crane business came along the couple were obliged to extend their sales worldwide, which led to them working with the banks in Luxembourg, and able to raise letters of credit quickly and easily. The business took off and in the years that followed the couple sold a lot of Jost cranes in the UK, while buying and selling used cranes all around the world, including the USA, UK, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, Singapore and many others. Three employees joined them including the engineer, Thomas Reschke. The name was also changed to MTI-Lux, when the two moved the business to Luxembourg.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008 the crane industry took a hit, including MTI-Lux. As the crisis bit Grete and Christine - who was by then working in the business alongside her parents - decided to exit the crane market and do something less cyclical. Grete returned to her translation business, while Christine eventually decided to start a new life in Norway.

In late 2010 Bräuner launched his own flat top crane line under the Lux Cranes brand, which he had built in the same Arneburg steel fabrication plant in Germany as Jost. In 2014 after Jost had some issues with its cranes, he launched the Lux Cranes line of hydraulic luffers.
Please register to see all images

Grete and Reinhold Bräuner

After several years of travelling back and forth between Germany and Norway to spend time with daughter Christine and the arrival of Covid 19, the couple decided to join her in Norway, moving in April last year buying a house in Tromøya on the east coast south of Oslo towards Kristiansand and not far from the holiday home that they had had owned.

Reinhold Bräuner leaves behind his wife Grete, daughter Christine and three daughters from a former marriage, Susanne, Sabine and Beate, along with six grandchildren - three boys and three girls.

The funeral service will be held at the Tromøy Church on the 6th of April at 12:30.