News

2020-08-23

Used Construction Equipment Prices Fall in SE Asia, Demand Slows with COVID-19

The prices of used construction equipment continue to fall, and bidding prices at major auctions are 10% lower than in the same period last year. This is due to a decrease in demand from Southeast Asia due to the COVID-19.

Akihiro Komuro
Akihito Komuro

Demand in Japan is steady due to the torrential rains in Kyushu and other factors, but the price decline in overseas markets has lowered the overall market.

Demand in the Philippines and Thailand also declined. In Southeast Asia, demand for cranes and other infrastructure-related equipment has been high for the past few years, but there have been several construction delays and stoppages caused by COVID-19. The average unit price at the crane truck auction was about 6 million yen, a 20% drop from January to March before COVID-19.

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Doosan Sells 10,000 Excavators in China in H1 2020

Doosan Infracore announced that it sold 10,728 hydraulic excavators in China in H1 2020. This is the company’s largest sales volume in nine years since it sold more than 12,000 units in the market in H1 2011. The company sold 1,320 excavators in June, a 23% increase in sales over the previous year.

Akihiro Komuro
Akihito Komuro

China’s hydraulic excavator market suffered a slowdown in the first two months of the year due to COVID-19 but is now consistently showing signs of a rapid recovery. Overall sales in the Chinese hydraulic excavator market exceeded 155,000 units in H1 2020, significantly exceeding the 125,000 units sold nationwide in H1 2019.

Source: Kikai-News (The original article was partially revised by the author.)

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Kubota To Build Factory for Small CN Equipment in US

FAR EAST: JAPAN REPORT

Kubota will invest up to US$ 93.9 Million (10 billion yen) by 2026 to build a factory for small construction equipment in the US. The company will manufacture crawler-driven models used for residential construction and other purposes locally to increase the production by 25%.

Akihiro Komuro
Akihito Komuro

With COVID-19, there is a movement of people moving from the city center to the suburbs in the US. Kubota expects that the demand for small construction equipment will increase in the regions where it has sales channels and aims to become the largest manufacturer in the US by increasing production. First, they will invest 5.6 billion yen (56 Million USD) to build a new factory in Kansas.

The company will start mass production of its “Compact Track Loader (CTL)” in September 2022. By 2023, annual production will reach 3,000 units. Depending upon demand, the company could be producing 5,000 units annually by 2026. Japan is producing about 20,000 of the same model. With the addition of 5,000 units from the United States, the total production will increase by about 25%.

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Taiwan Audi Teams with Noodoe To Create EV Charging Plan

To continue to promote the deployment of electric vehicles in Taiwan, Taiwan Audi officially entered the pure electric vehicle market at the end of 2019 and launched the “E-tron Future” reservation project.

Erik Martin
Erik Martin

To meet the pure electric future, Taiwan Audi has joined hands with strategic partner Noodoe to accelerate the deployment of Taiwan’s charging network. Evaluating home charging station installation and a cloud-based charging operating system paired with Taiwan Audi’s charging solution aims to realize a pure electric mobile life.

From north to south, Taiwan spans only about 500 kilometers.  At the same time, the main population centers are concentrated in the seven largest metropolitan areas. These cities–while clearly defined–are connected by a comprehensive road network that provides excellent advantages in the development of electric vehicles. Audi has been actively promoting the deployment of electric vehicles in Taiwan since last year. It is expected to introduce the first electric vehicle model ─ Audi e-tron – before the end of 2020 with a battery life of 417 kilometers (WLTP). Through the 150kW fast charge mode, it can be charged in 30 minutes to 80% power.

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How Does Market Brace for Low Speed EV Impact?

By August 12, after 20 days of product launch, SGMW’s MINI EV will hit a sales record of 15,000 vehicles, making it the world’s fastest car model reaching the threshold of 10,000 units.

Source: D1 EV      Read The Article

Qin Fen
Qin Fen

PSR Analysis: Consider BYD’s electric bus, SGMW’s MINI EV, as well as premium car brands like Tesla: These traditional and emerging automotive OEMs are reformulating rules of the auto game, with their own proprietary technology. 

As a matter of fact, it’s not just the automotive market that needs to brace for the impact of electrification, the off-road market also is trending toward electrification.  The changing markets include passenger car, light commercial vehicle, medium and heavy duty vehicle, forklift, and lawn mower. Will this wave continue to expand to other off-road applications?  How much more will it change the rules of the game?     PSR

Qin Fen is Business Development Manager for Power Systems Research

Wacker Neuson Expands EV Offerings

German construction machine manufacturer Wacker Neuson has introduced a new product to their electric range.  The EZ17e is an electric zero tail mini excavator with lithium ion batteries and flexible charge management. 

Emiliano Marzoli
Emiliano Marzoli

The machine can be charged both with household 110v plugs or with a 415 volts quick charging point.  In the latter case only four hours are required to complete the charge.

According to the OEM, one battery charge can last a full workday.  In addition, it is possible to charge the machine on site while idling.  The machine allows monitoring of the power supply of the construction site to make sure it is not overloaded.  

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DATAPOINT: 2020 NA Off-Highway Truck Production Forecast Is 1,200 Units

The 1,200 units is the estimate by Power Systems Research of the number of Off-Highway Trucks to be produced in North America (Canada and the U.S.) in 2020.

This information comes from industry interviews and from two proprietary databases maintained by Power Systems Research: EnginLink™ , which provides information on engines, and OE Link™, a database of equipment manufacturers.

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Briggs & Stratton Files Chapter 11, Sets Sale Agreement

Briggs & Stratton (B&S) one of the  largest producers of gasoline engines for outdoor power equipment, and a manufacturer of power generation, pressure washer, lawn and garden, turf care and job site products, has filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.

Michael Aistrup
Michael Aistrup

The company has obtained $677.5 million in financing, with $265 million committed by KPS and the remaining $412.5 from the company’s existing group of lenders.

B&S also announced it has entered into a definitive stock and asset purchase agreement with KPS Capital Partners. Under the terms of the agreement, an affiliate of KPS formed for purposes of this transaction has agreed to acquire substantially all the company’s assets and assume certain customer, employee and vendor liabilities.

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The Green Future Has Big Oil’s Backing

BP’s action might be a pivotal moment where the green revolution stops being something, we are all dragged into and starts being an opportunity for the most responsive and agile innovators to rebrand themselves and capture new markets.  

Tyler Wiegert
Tyler Wiegert

For many people, the moment when COVID-19 became real was when the NBA announced the cancellation of the rest of its season. I was sitting at the counter of the coffee shop in the lobby of my Las Vegas hotel at CON-EXPO. My colleagues and I had been talking for a couple days about the odds of catching the virus at the show, but we all had made the decision that we would be ok attending.

And then we saw that announcement. By the end of the day, we had all decided to go home as soon as possible, and the show had announced it was ending a day early. As a 26-year-old who just caught the tail end of the millennial generation, there haven’t been a lot of things in my memory where I can look back and say, in the moment, it felt like things were different now. I was too young to remember 9/11, and I wasn’t politically engaged enough to understand what the first African-American president meant historically. But this morning as I was catching up on the news and thinking about the subject of this article, I read that BP had made an announcement about a major environmental initiative, and as I read it, I had a feeling like at that coffee bar in Las Vegas.

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COVID Creates Challenges and Opportunities in Power Gen

If you were hoping for COVID-19 to disappear from the news by the school year, it’s obviously not going to happen. With major companies like Google announcing they won’t be sending employees back to their offices until the summer of 2021 and COVID metrics climbing again in the South and West, we probably will be working on the impact of the pandemic well into next year.

Tyler Wiegert
Tyler Wiegert

It could almost be considered a truism to say that COVID-19 has been bad for business. The 33% annualized decline in GDP in Q2 2020 would apparently confirm that, and even the most positive about the economy must concede that a 9.5% single-quarter contraction is painful, to say the least. With businesses closed and housing starts in June lagging 4% behind last year, even with the brief reprieve when states began to reopen, the power generation segment has been hit hard by the pandemic.

Cummins, a giant in the industry, announced at the end of July that its revenues for Q2 2020 had fallen 38% from Q2 2019. That increased to 48% when looking at North America alone. Engine sales were down 47%, and power generation revenues declined by 37%. While Cummins was able to achieve positive net income because of a quick ramp-up in production in China after the worst of the virus had passed there, it was less than half of net income from Q2 2019.

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