German Crushing & Screening Plant Manufacturers (2026)

Germany’s crushing and screening plant manufacturers are led by four names: Kleemann (Wirtgen Group), HAZEMAG, BHS-Sonthofen, and thyssenkrupp Polysius. Their weight in the market is real money: John Deere paid roughly EUR 4.6 billion for the Wirtgen Group in 2017, with Kleemann’s crushing technology part of the package.

How large is Germany’s crushing and screening equipment sector?

Germany builds crushing and screening technology inside its wider construction machinery and building material plant industry, and that industry turned a corner in 2025: order intake ran 18 percent above the prior year, even though revenue still slipped about 1 percent after a hard 2024. For 2026, the VDMA construction machinery and building material plants association expects nominal revenue growth of 5 percent. Joachim Strobel, chairman of the VDMA division, has been blunt about the constraint: weak margins leave manufacturers little room for the investments the recovery demands.

The sector’s convening power is harder to argue with. bauma 2025 in Munich drew around 600,000 visitors from more than 200 countries and 3,601 exhibitors from 57 nations in a single April week. No other country hosts anything comparable for this equipment family.

Geographically, the industry sits in three clusters. Kleemann builds in Göppingen, east of Stuttgart in Baden-Wuerttemberg. HAZEMAG and thyssenkrupp Polysius operate out of Westphalia in the northwest. BHS-Sonthofen sits in the Allgäu region of southern Bavaria. Each cluster grew out of a different industrial tradition: Swabian machine tools, Ruhr-area heavy plant engineering, and Alpine iron working.

Who are the leading German crushing and screening plant manufacturers?

Four OEMs anchor the sector, each with a different center of gravity.

Manufacturer	Base	Core strength
Kleemann	Göppingen	Mobile tracked jaw, cone, impact crushers and screens
HAZEMAG	Dülmen	Impact crushers, feeders, stationary plant
BHS-Sonthofen	Sonthofen	Vertical shaft impactors, sand production
thyssenkrupp Polysius	Westphalia	Heavy primary crushing for mining and cement

Kleemann (Wirtgen Group)

Kleemann is Germany’s biggest name in mobile crushing and screening. The company traces back to 1857, when Ferdinand Kleemann set up a file-cutting shop near Stuttgart; rock and stone processing entered the program in the early twentieth century, and the Wirtgen Group took an 80 percent stake in 2006. Today the Göppingen plant produces four tracked product families: MOBICAT jaw crushers for primary crushing, MOBIREX impact crushers, MOBICONE cone crushers for secondary and tertiary stages, and MOBISCREEN screening plants, plus mobile stackers. Since Deere & Company completed its acquisition of the Wirtgen Group in December 2017, Kleemann has sold through a group that employed around 8,200 people and shipped to more than 100 countries at the time of the deal.

HAZEMAG

HAZEMAG, based in Dülmen in Westphalia, is the historical home of the modern impact crusher. The company’s founding technology is the Andreas impact mill, patented in 1946, which established the principle of controlled impact force for mineral crushing. HAZEMAG is marking 80 years of the impact crusher in 2026, and current machines still work on the 1946 principle with modern wear materials and digital controls layered on. The product range covers primary and secondary impact crushers, hammer mills, apron feeders, and material handling for the cement, aggregates, mining, and recycling industries, mostly as stationary or semi-mobile installations rather than tracked units.

BHS-Sonthofen

BHS-Sonthofen is an owner-operated group whose roots go back to a diocesan iron-smelting operation founded in 1607 in Sonthofen, southern Germany. The group runs eight locations worldwide across three divisions: process technology, recycling technology, and building materials machinery, which is where its crushing equipment lives. The specialty is vertical-shaft crushing for high-value final products: the rotor impact mill (RPMV and RPMX) uses an impeller rotor that BHS states is the only one of its kind, built for producing crushed sand with tight particle shape, and the rotor centrifugal crusher (RSMX) handles selective crushing of mineral materials. Where Kleemann sells mobility, BHS sells product quality in the final tonnes.

thyssenkrupp Polysius

thyssenkrupp Polysius covers the heaviest end of the market: primary crushing stations for mining and cement plants. The portfolio includes titan double-shaft hammer crushers, mammut single-shaft hammer crushers, jaw crushers, double-roll crushers, roll sizers, and apron feeders that accept feed lumps up to two meters. Reference projects show the scale: for Yamama Cement, the company delivered fully mobile crushing plants rated at 1,800 tonnes per hour each. After-sales runs through 20 service offices in 18 countries plus five service centers, which matters to buyers commissioning a crusher meant to run for decades.

The European context

German OEMs compete inside a strong European field. Finland’s Metso and Sweden’s Sandvik sell tracked crushing plants worldwide, and Austria contributes two specialists in SBM Mineral Processing and Rubble Master, the latter focused on compact mobile crushers for contractors. A serious buyer usually benchmarks a German quote against at least one Nordic and one Austrian alternative. The German pitch tends to rest on engineering depth, wear-part quality, and resale value rather than the lowest sticker price.

What equipment do they build, and what should buyers specify?

The German range covers the full aggregate and mining flowsheet: jaw crushers for primary reduction of run-of-quarry feed, cone crushers for hard abrasive rock in secondary and tertiary stages, impact crushers for softer stone and recycling, vertical shaft impactors for sand and particle shape, plus the screens and feeders that hold the train together.

Buyers writing an RFQ to a German OEM should pin down five lines before asking for a price. First, the feed: rock type, hardness, abrasiveness, and maximum lump size decide jaw versus impact at the primary stage. Second, throughput, meaning required tonnes per hour at the bottleneck stage rather than a site-wide average. Third, the target product fractions and whatever national concrete or road-base code the output must meet. Fourth, configuration: tracked mobile plant for multi-site contracting, or stationary and semi-mobile for a long-life quarry. Fifth, the drive concept. Diesel-hydraulic remains the default where grid power is unreliable, while German OEMs increasingly offer diesel-electric and all-electric operation for lower fuel burn per tonne.

Wear parts deserve their own paragraph in any negotiation. Jaw plates, cone liners, blow bars, and screen media are consumed continuously, and the wear-part supply chain into the buyer’s country often decides between two technically similar machines.

Where is African and emerging-market demand coming from?

A growing share of the order book for this equipment family is African, and the demand is structural: roads, ports, new cities, and housing all start with graded aggregate. The internationality of bauma tells the story from the supplier side, with visitors from more than 200 countries traveling to Munich in 2025. The import statistics tell it from the buyer side: South Africa sources its industrial and construction machinery mainly from the United States, Germany, and China, per the US International Trade Administration’s country commercial guide.

The buyer-side detail differs sharply by country, and we cover it market by market. Egypt’s aggregate demand is anchored by a construction market above 50 billion dollars and the awkward fact that desert sand is too smooth for structural concrete; the procurement path, quarry licensing, and letter-of-credit mechanics are in our Egypt aggregate crushing and screening line guide. Senegal’s coastal infrastructure program and basalt belt make it West Africa’s most concentrated aggregate story, covered in the Senegal aggregate crushing equipment guide. Namibia is a smaller but well-defined market where a handful of quarry operators supply the whole country, mapped in our Namibia quarry and aggregate crusher supplier guide. And South Africa, the continent’s most mature equipment market, buys almost everything through established dealer channels, as our South Africa mobile crushing and screening plant buyer guide lays out, with Kleemann already on the standard shortlist there.

For a German OEM, these four markets illustrate the same pattern: the machine is imported, the support is local, and the buyer is a named quarry operator, contractor, or cement group rather than an anonymous tender. That makes the demand reachable, if the manufacturer knows who to contact.

How do German manufacturers find buyers today?

The sector’s sales machinery was built around two events and a dealer map.

bauma in Munich is the world’s largest trade fair for the industry, and the next edition runs April 3 to 9, 2028. Between baumas, the German industry gathers at steinexpo, the demonstration fair held every three years inside Europe’s largest basalt quarry at Homberg/Nieder-Ofleiden; the twelfth edition runs September 2 to 5, 2026, with machines crushing rock live in front of buyers. Both fairs work. Both are also expensive: once stand construction, machine transport, and a week of senior engineers’ time are counted, exhibiting typically costs $300 to $900 or more per qualified lead, and the pipeline goes quiet in the years between editions.

The dealer network is the second pillar. A distributor in Johannesburg or Cairo carries stock, wear parts, and service technicians, and no outbound program replaces that. The limitation is coverage: dealers concentrate where the installed base already is, so a Senegalese quarry group or a Namibian contractor expanding capacity often has no local touchpoint for a German brand at all. Field sales trips to fill those gaps run $500 to $1,200 or more per qualified lead once travel and management time are priced in, and they scale linearly at best.

Digital channels close the gap between fairs and dealers. Buyers in the markets above research suppliers in English and French search long before they request a quote, which is why supplier-side visibility and direct outreach now decide who gets onto the shortlist for orders the dealer map never sees.

Frequently asked questions

Who are the largest German crushing and screening plant manufacturers?

Kleemann, part of the Wirtgen Group under John Deere, is the largest German name in tracked mobile crushing and screening. HAZEMAG leads in impact crushing technology, BHS-Sonthofen specializes in vertical-shaft crushers for sand production, and thyssenkrupp Polysius builds heavy primary crushing stations for mining and cement, including fully mobile plants rated at 1,800 tonnes per hour.

How does German crushing equipment compare with Chinese alternatives?

Chinese plants usually win on purchase price. German OEMs compete on lifecycle economics: wear-part life, fuel burn per tonne, uptime, resale value, and engineering support during flowsheet design. Buyers running hard abrasive rock at high utilization tend to recover the German premium through availability; buyers with short projects and soft rock often do not.

Do German crusher manufacturers have service networks in Africa?

Coverage is uneven. The Wirtgen Group sold into more than 100 countries at the time of the John Deere acquisition, and Kleemann appears on standard dealer shortlists in South Africa. thyssenkrupp Polysius runs 20 service offices across 18 countries. Elsewhere, support often routes through regional dealers or fly-in technicians, so buyers should ask for the named service point in their country.

Which trade fairs show German crushing and screening technology?

Two events matter most. bauma in Munich, the industry’s largest fair worldwide, drew about 600,000 visitors in 2025 and returns April 3 to 9, 2028. steinexpo, held inside the Nieder-Ofleiden basalt quarry, runs live crushing demonstrations and holds its twelfth edition September 2 to 5, 2026. Both draw African and Middle Eastern buyer delegations.

For German OEMs: the buyers exist, the channel is the gap

If you build crushers, screens, or feeders in Germany, the African demand described above is already researching suppliers. The question is whether your company appears while budgets are being set, or only after a competitor’s machine is on the shortlist. papaverAI runs outbound programs that identify named quarry operators, contractors, and cement groups in your target markets and open direct conversations, at $150 to $300 per qualified lead against $300 to $900 at a trade fair and $500 to $1,200 through field sales, with cost falling as the system learns your market. See how it works or write to burak@papaverai.com through our contact page.