When the roof truss of the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, the world's largest cricket stadium, was being erected, there was a crane at work that most spectators would never think about. When India's first metro rail networks started taking shape over city skylines, there were crawler cranes doing the heavy work below the headlines. When Reliance Industries built the world's largest refinery complex in Jamnagar, 75 cranes were deployed on site over 18 months to make it happen. Behind each of these landmarks, the name that kept appearing was the same: Sanghvi Movers Limited.
Founded in Pune on November 3, 1989, by the late Chandrakant P. Sanghvi, a man who is rightly regarded as the pioneer of the organised crane rental industry in India. SML started with a simple but powerful observation: the country was going to grow, and it was going to need to lift enormous things to do so. 36 years later, that bet has paid off in ways that go beyond any balance sheet. SML is now the world's 5th largest crane rental company by the IC Index 2025, Asia's largest, and one of the consequential heavy-lift infrastructure partner India's industries may have ever had.
A Fleet Built for a Nation's Ambitions
Numbers alone don't capture SML's scale, but they offer a starting point. The company operates a fleet of over 450 tyre-mounted and crawler cranes, with lifting capacities ranging from 40 to 1,600 metric tonnes. It runs 15 maintenance and warehousing depots across India, holds 175 acres of freehold land dedicated to crane parking, and is simultaneously active at more than 130 sites across the country at any given time. Its crane fleet is supported by more than 200 trailers and hydraulic axle lines, operated in-house to eliminate the third-party delays that plague less integrated competitors.
The equipment comes from the most demanding OEM manufacturers in the world: Liebherr, Demag, XCMG, Sany, Manitowoc, Kobelco, and others and is maintained under an Integrated Management System (IMS) that carries ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 45001 certifications. The company's QHSE record is not just good; it is exceptional: a Total Recordable Incident Rate of zero in both 2023 and 2024. That kind of safety record, sustained across hundreds of live heavy-lift sites, reflects a culture, not a policy document.
450+ CRANES IN ACTIVE FLEET | 130+ ACTIVE SITES PAN-INDIA | 36+ YEARS OF LEGACY |
The Wind Decade: How SML Powered India's Green Transition
The story of how SML became a national institution cannot be told without the wind energy chapter. Between 2005 and 2016, a period the company now calls the Wind Decade. SML made a calculated and courageous decision to shift from basic mobile cranes toward sophisticated crawler cranes with lattice booms capable of reaching heights of over 150 metres. That was exactly what India's growing wind turbine sector needed, and SML was ready.
Over that decade, the company added 11 new depots, grew its employee base beyond 1,000 people, and delivered more than 10 GW of wind capacity. By the end of that period, SML was the preferred crane supplier for every major wind OEM operating in India: Suzlon, Vestas, and Siemens Gamesa among them. Today, that legacy has grown to 17+ GW of wind turbine generation installed across roughly 15,000 turbines erected across the country, with a 50-60% market share in the renewable wind segment.
“Behind every wind turbine, every metro pillar, every refinery column, and every nuclear dome, there is a crane. And more often than not in India, that crane belongs to Sanghvi Movers.”
Dominant Across Every Critical Sector
What is truly remarkable about SML's position in the market is not dominance in one area but across virtually every infrastructure-intensive sector the Indian economy runs on. The company holds commanding market shares in industries that most Indians interact with every single day.
India's cement industry has grown from 55 MTPA in 1989 to roughly 600 MTPA today. The country added approximately 230 GW of thermal power capacity between 1989 and 2025. India's oil and gas sector spends between ₹50,000 and ₹80,000 crore annually on capital expenditure. SML operates at the centre of all of it.
On the nuclear front, the company has been part of some of India's most strategically sensitive and technically complex construction projects including Kakrapar, RAPS, KKNPP, BHAVINI, Kalpakam, and Kaiga. Lifting reactor components, steam generators, and dome structures for nuclear plants demands a level of precision and safety discipline that very few heavy-lift operators in the world are equipped for.
Beyond Crane Rental: The EPC Evolution
SML's transformation in recent years has been equally about depth as it is about scale. The company has moved well beyond simply deploying cranes on site. Under its Elevate 2030 strategy, SML now offers complete end-to-end Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) solutions, functioning as a single-window partner from design and planning all the way through to commissioning.
SML'S END-TO-END EPC SCOPE
Erection of static and rotary equipment, with precision alignment and grouting
Structural fabrication, pre-assembly, surface preparation, and painting
Onsite spool fabrication, welding, and NDT-compliant erection
Integrated Civil, Mechanical, Electrical & Instrumentation (CMEI) delivery under one contract
Complete wind EPC - from land acquisition and civil foundations to grid energisation and SCADA
Rigging engineering, lifting plan design, and heavy transport logistics
To date, SML has erected over 5,00,000 MT of equipment and structures across refineries, petrochemical plants, power stations, steel mills, cement plants, and wind farms. Over 20,000 major equipment lifts have been completed successfully. The heaviest single piece of equipment erected was a 1,605 MT product splitter for GAIL at Usar, a feat that ranks among the most technically demanding industrial lifts ever performed in India.
Expanding India's Ambitions Abroad
A company that has spent three decades building India's infrastructure from the inside out is now taking those capabilities beyond the country's borders. SML's group structure today includes three entities: Sangreen Future Renewables Private Limited, which provides turnkey wind EPC services; Sangreen Logistics Private Limited, handling end-to-end logistics for wind energy assets; and Sanghvi Movers Middle East Limited, expanding into Saudi Arabia's construction and oil and gas markets from Riyadh.
The international expansion is not opportunistic. It is the natural next step for a company that has, over 36 years, built the technical depth, the safety culture, the fleet strength, and the institutional credibility to compete on the world stage. The IC Index already ranks SML among the top five crane companies globally, a recognition that reflects not just fleet size but the sophistication of the services the company delivers.
The People Who Make It Run
Heavy machinery does not lift itself. Behind SML's 450+ crane fleet are over 600 trained operators and 120+ maintenance specialists, a workforce with 350+ cumulative years of QHSE expertise. The company holds GWO (Global Wind Organisation) certified training status, and its internal safety recognition programmes saw 133 awardees in 2023, 146 in 2024 and 160 in 2025. Managing Director Rishi C. Sanghvi, who took the helm in 2019 after studies at Cornell and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been deliberate about building not just a bigger company but a better one, focused on technology, safety, and a global outlook that his father first envisioned.
There is a particular kind of nation-building that happens in the background, without ribbons or press conferences - the slow, grinding work of putting steel where it needs to be, raising the structures that power homes, create jobs, and move people. Sanghvi Movers has been doing exactly that work, on every significant infrastructure frontier India has ever opened, for over three and a half decades. The cranes may be the most visible part of the story. But the real story is the company behind them.
