Hiremech’s relationship with fork lift truck manufacturers Caterpillar has lasted for quite some time now so it is always of interest to us to see our partners doing so well on the global stage. Our status as the exclusive Caterpillar lift truck supplier for London is a source of great pride for everyone involved down at Hiremech and we absolutely love supplying the best quality fork lift trucks to the capital.

Global conference

That’s why we were delighted to see that our old friends were taking part in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Industrials conference. The event took place last week at a prestigious London hotel. The conference was mostly focused on how the relatively unstable world economy could affect the logistics industry.

The main speaker was Vice President of the finance division, Mike DeWalt – who explained CAT’s innovative plan to overcome such obstacles as a global decrease in demand for construction as well as ways to ensure that CAT fulfils its environmental objectives.

Other sectors still strong

However, construction isn’t the only piece of CAT’s significant pie. The company has many different fingers in projects all over the world and have seen a significant rise in the profits of their mining, engine manufacturing and diesel locomotive projects. This diverse portfolio of assets and businesses should help the company as they steer through a year that might be a relative ‘slump’. However, every journey is fraught with difficulties and we should see CAT come out well on the other side.

Decreasing turnover

While CAT’s expected turnover may have decreased by 10%, there are still signs that the company is making a sizeable profit. The company made a grand total of $42 billion last year – which still fell short of their expected profit.

This is supposedly due to the fact that both demand for construction and also for energy and transportation projects has fallen by a combined total of 20-30% in the last year.

However, Mike DeWalt was quick to point out that shareholders were still making a minimum profit of $3.50 per share. That’s higher than any other construction manufacturer in the world and is another indication of how massive CAT really are.

Interesting future

It was fascinating to listen to DeWalt talk about the future of not just CAT but also the logistics industry. CAT may have suffered a small dip in profits but the future of the company and construction is still very bright. It will be really interesting to see how the company goes into the next century. It spent the last one at the very top.

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