Finnish liftmaker. In 2026 Kone announced it would combine with Germany's TKE to form the world's biggest liftmaker. Kone will pay €5bn in cash and give €15.2bn-worth of shares in the merged business to Advent and Cinven, a pair of private-equity firms that five years earlier led a consortium to acquire TKE for €17.2bn. Kone, working with CVC, another private-equity outfit, had also bid for the business at the time. TKE's stint in private-equity hands has forced it to become more competitive.
The merged company will have a global market share of about 28%, according to Jefferies, an investment bank—several floors above America's Otis, the current leader with 18%, and Switzerland's Schindler, which had vied for second place against Kone with 15%. Kone claims the deal will yield cost savings of €700m a year.
Kone is a leader in servicing and modernisation, with 19% of revenue coming from doing up old lifts, compared with an average of 15% for the rest of the industry, according to Bernstein. Both Kone and TKE have sizeable footprints in Europe but Kone is stronger in China, whereas TKE has a larger presence in America. Merging the two service networks promises to boost technician productivity and profits.
Of the $110bn spent on lifts worldwide in 2025, new ones accounted for $33bn, servicing $61bn and modernisation $16bn, according to Roland Berger. After a two-year warranty period, service contracts are typically renewed every two years for the 15-20-year life of a lift, after which it requires modernisation. At the end of that period around 40% of lifts are still serviced by the original seller. There were 10m lifts over 15 years old worldwide in 2024; Kone expects the figure to rise to 16m by 2030, with 300,000 a year in line for anything from a minor upgrade to full refurbishment. A slump in construction in China, where half the world's 20m lifts keep vast cities on the move, has lately weighed on global sales of new lifts.
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