Caterpillar 287D
The trend that people have been talking about for years began to accelerate in 2016.
As one dealer told me recently, “We’re seeing a major shift from contractors buying excavators to mini excavator and anti-skid steering gear.”. Although this means contractors need two operators rather than one, they are making up for the extra labour costs by increasing productivity, flexibility and mobility compared with a decade ago, the field of equipment buying has indeed changed, and nothing says that more than taking data from a sister company in the field, EDA, to look at some of the new machines that are getting financing.
Looking back over the past decade, the natural comparison is 2007, when sales of many machines’financing units peaked and then plunged into the great recession. Whether a machine type has returned to 2007 levels is a key question. A quick look at the graphs shown here shows that the decisions for the types of machines mentioned by the distributor are separate: Backhoe, mini excavator, slide steering and small track loaders (CTLS) .
Mini excavator’s unit sales are expected to grow by 28% compared with 2007. And, as I said before, the CTLS has been a strong machine category and is expected to be 41% higher than 2007 sales by the end of this year if the nine month sales trend holds. However, backhoes and brake steers did not fare well after the recession. Unit sales for both machines have hovered around half of what they were in 2007. Sales of backhoes accounted for 52% of 2007 sales in 2014 and are expected to fall to 41% this year. Skid steers, often seen as a direct competitor to cts, is expected to drop 49 per cent from 2007 this year. Of course, none of these machines (or dealer reviews, especially backhoes) will disappear or be relegated to the status of niche machines. But if this trend continues, their position in the field of construction equipment is bound to shrink.
