What have contractors who are engaged primarily in roadbuilding been adding to their equipment fleets in the past five years? To get a better picture of this, we zeroed in on a segment of contractors defined both by their market and their buying activity, and took a deeper dive into what they have financed.
For this study, we looked at financed equipment tracked by Equipment Data Associates from 2010 to 2014. We further sorted this data by the most active financed buying segment of roadbuilding contractors – those who have financed more than 40 machines in the past five years. Although financed machines do not represent the totality of the market, since contractors can also purchase equipment with cash or a letter of credit, financed machines can represent 40 to 75 percent of the purchased market depending on the type of machine.
The 124 contractors we included in this segment were defined by industry codes SIC 1611 Highway and Street Construction and/or NAICS 237310 Highway, Street and Bridge Construction, and/or were determined by editorial judgment to be primarily engaged in roadbuilding activities. We divided them into three size groups, determined by annual revenues reported by Dun & Bradstreet and other industry sources:
Together, this segment financed 5,898 new machines and 4,995 used machines between 2010 and 2014.
With our larger contractor slice, the trend of new financed purchases over used purchases has been significant since 2012, and in 2014, new purchases were 64 percent above the number of used equipment purchases.
