Okay. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. I'm Jerry Revich at Wells Fargo Securities, and I'm thrilled to welcome Joe Creed, Chairman and CEO of Caterpillar. Joe has three decades of service at Caterpillar. Also joining us from Caterpillar is Alex Kapper, Vice President of Investor Relations. Alex has nearly two decades of service at Caterpillar. Joe, Alex, thank you very much for joining us. Before we get started , Alex has a few reminders for us.
Before we begin, we encourage those attending remotely to be mindful of your local safety protocols. Today, we'll make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. For a full list of risks that could cause our actual results to vary materially from the information we're sharing with you today, please see our most recent SEC filings, including our 10-K. We also may refer to non-GAAP numbers. For a reconciliation to the appropriate U.S. GAAP numbers, please see the appendix of our most recent earnings presentation. In addition, please note that Caterpillar policy does not allow meetings to be recorded with smartphones or other devices unless specific approvals have been granted prior to the start of this meeting. Finally, we'll post the video and a transcript on our website, investors.caterpillar.com. Now I'll turn it back to our host.
Thanks, Alex. With the riveting legal portion of the program out of the way, Joe, thank you again for doing this. As we look back, your analyst day, less than a year ago, you've already raised your revenue targets. Can you just to frame the conversation, update us on how the organization is tracking on key strategic pillars that you outlined in November from a high-level standpoint?
Yeah, Jerry, and thanks, and I appreciate everyone dialing in. It's great to see everybody. It's hard to believe it's been just a little under a year since we had our analyst day and launched our refresh strategy, but I couldn't be happier with how the team has rallied around it and how things are going. As you know, even in the spring, just due to some continued increased demand and discussions with our customers, we even increased our revenue guidance to 6%-9% in 2030 compared to 2024 and increased our capacity investment in our large engines to 3x 2024 levels. From our standpoint, we're off to a great start. We had a good year in 2025, but really off to a really amazing start to the year in the first half in 2026. We think we'll see mid to high teens top-line growth.
Our OPACC growth has been tremendous, which is, we've stated to everybody, our definition of winning. Each of the segments has great tailwinds. We get a lot of attention on power and energy right now. We continue to have strong backlog growth. We're working really hard to increase capacity every single day for our customers to get as many units out as we can and better through our existing capacity. So, that's been a challenge for the team, both on the turbine side and the large engine side. Anytime you're trying to increase capacity but also increase your throughput and work the supply chain, those guys are really busy, but they're doing an amazing job getting that done.
We've also seen, in power and energy, really, really strong years, both last year, a record year even, and this year on pace to do better in oil and gas. I think power generation gets a lot of attention right now, but our oil and gas business is doing really, really well, particularly around natural gas and gas compression. All these, the increase in power generations is going to have to be fed. Most of it, a lot of it will be gas-fired in the future, and so we're going to move a lot of natural gas in the next few years, and I think that's an also very strong part of our power and energy business. Excuse me. When you look at CI, they had a really great second quarter and off to a great start this year.
We've been able to outperform the industry over the last 18 months. Last year, we instituted some merchandising programs that really boosted us and got us off to a great start. Those have continued to pay dividends. Our strategy around commercial excellence is paying off. I think there were some parts of the construction industry that were frankly, we were maybe not paying as close of attention to or underserving or our strategy maybe wasn't lined up to meet those customer needs. Particularly Cat Compact, which we launched at CONEXPO. We're really excited about being a little more retail friendly for that small customer who owns one or two pieces of equipment and buys every few years. It's a very fast growing part of the construction industry for us.
On the rental, in the last earnings call, we talked about the dealer JV on major projects. That will allow us to compete with our equipment on some of these mega projects where an individual dealer rental fleet maybe didn't have the fleet to support that type of project. We're seeing great sales to users growth this year, both retail and then rental fleet loading as well. We've been pleased with RI. The orders in RI have been really strong. I think that's going to be a little steadier growth. We're seeing great order intake on large mining trucks and then heavy construction is kind of a follow-on to CI. Across the board, in particular in RI , we're seeing great services growth and it started to pick up.
It kind of flattened out a little bit last year, but services is still a really important piece of our strategy and how we take care of our customers after they buy our equipment. Mining rebuilds are picking back up again, and CI seeing great services growth as well. So, when you look across the business, it's nice to see all three segments that are performing well. Our industries are in good shape, and the strategy's starting to take hold. We've been spending a lot of time on the road as well as an executive team, having regional leadership conferences. Spent, week before last was in Asia with the team and really talking about the strategy refresh and getting the teams rallied and leaders globally rallied behind it, and we're starting to see the benefits of it.
Super, Joe. Thank you. Maybe we can dive in power and energy. You folks have been able to bring capacity online ahead of our expectations, and I'm wondering if you could just talk about if you've been ahead of your plan for reciprocating engines and turbines. If so, what have been the drivers of that? The pace that you're adding capacity, it feels like you're adding about 20% per year as the supply base ramps, as we think about the 2030 targets, anything that we need to keep in mind in terms of any points that become lumpy as you bring additional supply online?
Yeah, like I said, the team's working really hard, both teams, the turbine team and the large engine team. They're doing a great job. I would say turbine's capacity additions are on plan. We announced that one a little bit later than the large engine capacity increase. Large engines, we've been able to be slightly ahead, two or three months, I would say. But it's hand-to-hand combat. As I said, you're adding capacity while we're trying to increase throughput. We're getting more through our existing assets. There's a lot of work going on in the supply base as well, which is a lot of the investment is going towards the supply base, so that we can continue to increase our capacity for large engines. But also, our services growth really depends on having large engine parts and components to support the aftermarket.
This capacity investment's really for our oil and gas and power generation and services growth objectives, as well as the other diverse uses of the large engines. I think it's not going to be a straight smooth line up and to the right, but it's also not going to be a cliff event. Like I said, we've been ahead. Things can happen. If we have a machine go down in the factory, we're handing them out every day, so there's not a lot of slack in the system. We can see some bumps in the road as we go. Having said that, we're trying every quarter to get more product out to customers. We're talking to them on their deliveries, and making sure we meet their needs.
I think we'll continue to every year, it won't be a cliff event, try to get more units out. The team's done an amazing job because there's a lot going on. I think you were able to visit, what was that, a year ago, we were in Lafayette, and we had just had the new building up, and now they are packaging units in there. We're trying to do some creative things as well. Time is of the essence here because the demand is on top of us. We talked about using, for turbine packaging, our Wamego facility, repurposing it. We were able to do that in 12 months. We're looking at our existing assets. We brought back the 10-MW, former MaK medium-speed engine, which is great for power generation, that we're able to start shipping units here, hopefully later this year.
We're going to look at all of our existing footprint because that's the fastest way for us to do this. One of the things we're looking at now is, we have an engine facility that does locomotive engines, and that business is not at capacity by any means. With some minor investment, can we do some large Cat engines in there, just to relieve some of the pressure. We're still working on some of those things, but those are the types of the things that the ideas that the team on the ground keeps coming up with, and I'm proud of how they've been able to react.
That's a really interesting comment. Is that the 10-MW unit? Or is that the 3500, the 2.5 MW units when you say repurposing those facilities?
Yeah, or if we can put them in there with existing capacity. The Wamego facility was really PGM packaging for Solar Turbines. The 10-MW, we are using the footprint that we had. We had a lot of supply base and footprint. We had just stopped building those engines three years ago, I guess 2022, 2023. What we're looking at potentially in our existing footprint are our 3600s, because we are seeing strong demand for gas compression too, which is primarily what that engine platform is used in. It's a great situation to be in. One of the things we're doing is continuing to stay even closer to our customers.
Our oil and gas customers have been with us a really long time, so we want to make sure that we have a great position in that industry, particularly when it comes to moving natural gas, and we want to make sure we have the supply needed for those customers over the next two to three years as we see the build-out and the need to move a lot more gas just to feed all this additional power generation that's coming online.
Joe, the big investor concern on power and energy is that there's a lot of capacity coming to market, 100 GW or so, both reciprocating and turbines. The concern is we could ultimately see discounting and also concerns about slower pace of permitting. Obviously, you folks have a history of operating and navigating cyclical markets. What's your perspective on the supply-demand risk, and can you talk about how Caterpillar would respond whenever we get to the point where supply outpaces demand?
Yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of news out there. I've been with customers, as last week I was on the West Coast with customers. We had a big power gen customer come in talking to us about future projects. Yesterday, I stopped in to visit them. We're not seeing customers slow down right now in their need for power generation. I think we'll see how this all shakes out over time. But there's a lot more of bringing your own power, which I think favors us actually, in the industry from equipment supply at large. From a demand standpoint, we're not really seeing customers change their behaviors right now. So we continue to talk to them. We'll definitely keep an eye on it as we move forward. As far as everyone and competitors and ourselves bringing capacity online, I think that's true.
We've been very, I would say, measured about how we brought this capacity online. As you know, in our analyst day, we said two times, and that was based on customer discussions. You saw how the hyperscalers and everybody increased their CapEx forecasts. We were talking to them, so that's when we moved to three times. We brought the turbine investment online. We continue to stay really close to our customers. For us, one of the advantages I would say is we didn't just look at data center demand, which is definitely driving a lot of demand for us. But we looked at our oil and gas, talked to our oil and gas customers. We look at these engines are used in mining applications. They're used in marine and tugboat applications. So they're used for diesel standby or natural gas prime.
The capacity is pretty fungible across the industries that we serve, which are pretty broad. Don't forget, a lot of the investment goes into the supply base and internal component capacity, which will serve our aftermarket needs moving forward. We have services growth planned and initiatives, so it's an important part of our strategy. So we've been pretty measured, I think, in how we've done this. We don't need to be at that full capacity we're installing to get the return. We expect a cash payback before the end of the decade. We have a really strong backlog into the next two years of line of sight, starting to take orders into 2029, even our first order into 2030 on turbines. Having said all that, what you said I think is true.
At some point, I think the industry wants and probably needs to be in free supply. That's standard mode for us. We have industry-leading margins in power and energy. We've been very measured and taken what I think are appropriate price action given the supply-demand situation. But also we've been pretty measured about it. We have long-term customers that we want to serve for the next few decades. They've been with us a long time, and I think we've generally proven we're a premium brand. We're close to our customers. We have a great value prop. In a free supply market, we can be very competitive and maybe even grow share. So, I think at some point we'll get there. That's sort of, in my view, I consider that almost normal operating mode. This is what we're in now is sort of unusual times.
Joe, maybe just to double click on that last comment. So for power and energy as a segment, you folks have consistently pushed pricing over extended periods of time. Caterpillar is obviously focused on service, and you mentioned that we're not taking outsized price increases. Is it fair to expect whenever supply outpaces demand, we'll still hold the line on price? Because you folks are obviously the market leader in a range of product lines that we're talking about here.
Yeah, I think it's tough to predict what the industry will be like. We need to be competitive, and we'll always be competitive. Our pricing really is based on the value prop that we bring to our customers. There's a lot of things that go into the pricing discussion, not just cost, not just supply-demand, but the value we add and the life cycle, total cost of ownership for customers. We are the premium brand, the reliability and durability that comes with our products, and these heavy demand, high demand applications are highly sought after. I think as you've said, we've seen downturns, and I wouldn't expect it to be a downturn, but maybe we enter free supply situations.
We'll be as disciplined as we can be in the pricing section, and I don't think from a pricing standpoint, what you would have seen historically is probably similar to what you would see moving forward. I don't think it's a huge change.
Yeah. Appreciate the color. Can we just pull on the thread that you mentioned a couple of moments ago? The way you folks manage backlog is unique in that you have framework customer agreements, and so you hold customer slots for those that you have customer agreements with. Can you just for those on this call that are less familiar with your approach, can you talk about what proportion of your turbines and high horsepower engines are typically purchased by framework customers and just spend a minute, if you don't mind, around the converting those slots into orders. How do you folks run that?
Yeah, this has been something that we really started four or five years ago when we saw data center demand really picking up for us, and that was really driven by cloud compute. Data center business was driving great growth and power and energy before really this sort of onset of AI, which just really accelerated it. Our processes have been in place, which is great. The largest hyperscalers and large colos, and data center customers, and not just only data center customers, others that want to provide power. We're starting to see oil and gas customers move into providing power for various applications, because they understand the equipment and know how to run the fleets, and it's great growth for them.
Yes, we have framework agreements with a lot of these customers. You rewind prior to five years and how a lot of our business works, it is dealers will secure business and place orders on us, and we transact through them. In a framework agreement on the reciprocating engine side, still transacted through the dealer network, but we have relationships with these large data center builders and operators who will operate in many dealer territories and geographically diverse. That allows us to do a few different things. One, make it easier for them to do business with us from a contracting standpoint. Two, we can coordinate support on site with our local dealer, wherever their site is, which our local dealers bring a ton of value with their expertise, local knowledge, local contacts. From our standpoint, allows us to really get in front of demand planning in a constrained environment.
Each one of these framework agreements is a little different. They are tailored to what the customer needs, but we are definitely looking three years, sometimes three to five years out on a rolling demand planning exercise, and we sit down with these customers monthly and continue to look at that and adjust the forecast. Then on a rolling basis, there are commitments, depending on how far out you are, on the level of volume. Then those are in the pipeline, not necessarily when you get farther out in the backlog. So when we get close enough that they are ready to make them a firm order, then we convert them into the backlog, and that happens on a rolling basis. So it is not super smooth. I think, particularly now moving out, we have had three really strong quarters of backlog growth.
I think that backlog growth, I worry about just getting super used to having that big number of backlog growth every time. There is a lot more we are looking at, and I think given where we are at and how far out we are planning, some of that will be lumpy in how we convert to firm orders. But it has been a great process and allowed us to really have a lot more confidence in how much capacity to put in, when do we need to have it in, and then really allowed us to serve our customers a lot better, making sure they get the units when they need them. So you start to see extended lead times, and we are pretty full for 2027 on large engines and turbines.
But customers will. This also allows us to adjust our schedule if they want to delay by a few months, then we can move the schedule around in the factory, and it allows us potentially to bring in last minute orders if we see them. We also reserve slots, and are trying to plan a lot farther out with our oil and gas customers who do not typically plan on that level of horizon. So we have engaged them a lot more. So we are able to be pretty flexible, as flexible as we can to try to accommodate as many of our long-term customers as possible and meet all their demands.
Joe, the interesting dynamic is with you holding slots before they become firm orders, the lead times that we are hearing for your customers are a lot longer than the length of backlog would suggest. Like you mentioned, 2030 for turbines and 2029, 2030 is what we are hearing for larger reciprocating engines as well. The way you report backlog, unlike others, you are essentially underestimating the visibility that you have in terms of we just look at the backlog, the underlying demand, it feels like it is higher than backlog as those commitments convert into orders. Is that right?
Yeah, I do not know if we are underestimating. By the process, I think that is the right way for us to think about it. We have line of sight past the backlog is what I would say, and farther than what we have in the backlog that we continue to plan with customers. On a rolling basis, we kind of bring them in when we think it is, "Hey, we need to start thinking about firming up that factory slot and delivery date and start ordering material." That allows maximum flexibility for us and our customers. Yes, we have line of sight past what we have out there. If there are any customers dialing in as well, happen to listen to this or watch afterwards, that does not mean we cannot take orders. If we say we are taking orders that far out, we still, like I said, have some flexibility.
Schedules move around. For oil and gas customers, we kind of do a level of allocation, and then we will release those over time if, in fact, we do not need them. So, it is a complicated process, but I think a very involved one that allows us to serve as many possible customers as we can, particularly in this constrained environment.
Joe, this dynamic of moving schedules around, is that any more intense than usual given the power grab in the industry, or is it pretty similar to what we would have seen four or five years ago?
It's been pretty consistent in how we do it, just given the fact that we're full, it requires a little more intensity of just truly understanding what level of flexibility we have and still be able to meet everyone's demands. But we're not seeing major changes in how we would typically schedule our factory or do those types of things.
Joe, earlier in our conversation, you mentioned the rising mix of behind the meter. With all of the power solutions that you have for backup for front of meter and behind the meter, you're in a really good spot to see where data center architectures are headed. Can you just talk about what you think the mix will be for behind the meter based on work that you're looking at? Then within that, what do you think will be the mix between reciprocating engines and turbines, if you're willing to share?
Yeah. I don't think I can really say the exact mix. What I can say is we're seeing a lot more interest in natural gas prime power behind the meter. We'll see how that plays out. That doesn't mean that we're seeing less demand for standby diesel backup. I think it's going to depend really project by project, region by region, what type of power access is available for the data center as it's being constructed and is going to be operated. I think you're seeing a lot more push towards, even if there is utility grid power available, want to make sure that the data centers aren't causing electricity rates to increase on the communities around them, make sure we're not increasing the risk of power failures or brownouts.
So that alone, I think, is going to drive a different level of discussion of if you're going to pay for the power, do you want to just go behind the meter and do prime gas or do you want to have diesel standby and backup? I think more and more you'll see, and we're starting to see some regions where even if you're grid connected and you have diesel backup, you hear a lot more discussion around curtailment. So if in fact, like in Texas, if we're having a hot day and the grid's feeling like it's starting to get to its capacity, can they curtail and go off the grid and run on their local gen for a while just to get through whatever peak of demand we're starting to see?
All those get weighed into the best design for the site, what is available, how much gas is available. I think all that also tends to put us in a great position because of the diversity of our portfolio. Between turbines up to 38 MW all the way down through our recip offerings now as big as 10 MW. You get to our 2.5 MW, 3 MW offerings, which are very strong. We can mix and match, and we can also have modular solutions that allow a data center to start at a certain power range and then grow over time. We can offer a lot of redundancy in the solutions that we have, given the flexibility we have, which they like. We are seeing a lot more discussions around what is the best option.
Even yesterday, we had a customer in, getting us in even early in how they design the site. That way they can take advantage of the various offerings that we have. I think it is something that is still evolving, but the trend we are seeing right now is a lot more requests to engage on behind the meter offerings.
In those conversations, Joe, what are customers telling you is the long-term plan for these assets? What do you think will be the mix of perpetual behind the meter versus peaker plants? How do you think that all shakes out if we are having this conversation in 10 years?
Most of what we are seeing, I do not want to say all of them, we have units that will go in and then I think eventually a grid connect, and then they become peaker units, or they become curtailment. They will get run more than standby, but maybe not prime forever. A great majority of the sites that we are talking to, the plan is they are the prime power. It is the power plant that is going to be there to provide the power for the future. I think when you look at the economics of the investment that gets put in, we can be pretty competitive with the grid in some areas, depending on rates. I would not say it is the majority that are temporary. Majority of what we are talking about, at least with customers right now, will get installed and get run for prime power into the future.
That's part of our also capacity planning for supply base and components. We'll hit overhaul cycles in the future. We need to be ready with our dealers to be able to handle that type of demand, which we really haven't seen in the past, that many units come up for maintenance at one time, and it's a great opportunity for us. We want to make sure our customers stay running and get the most value out of the asset. I think a lot of it will come down to availability of grid. Will it really get upgraded? Then not just once it's available, there'll still be economics behind it. If you've made the investment and it's working well, I think we'll see those units continue to run. But I think there'll be a mix.
Joe, earlier you spoke about gas compression. Caterpillar has a really strong market position within that application. How big of a demand driver relative to data center is it? I think just based on the data center capacity adds, we'll require roughly 2 GW-5 GW of annual gas compression demand for your turbines and reciprocating engines. Is that directionally the right ballpark that your teams are seeing? Can you put that into context for us with what's happening on the ground?
Yeah, we're definitely seeing increased demand for gas compression, both turbines, which we use for more gas transmission, interstate pipeline type of applications, and then our reciprocating engines with gas gathering. It's definitely an increase in demand. That's what customers are asking. I'm not sure yet that the forecasts for natural gas have really caught up, too, because it's pretty evolving of more behind the meter. Gas fire data center is going to require more gas to be moved. I think that's still evolving. My opinion is it's probably not caught up yet on forecasting. There's going to be a great opportunity here. Obviously, we're also seeing some disruptions in oil and gas, just given some of the issues and geopolitics going on around the world. We've been moving a lot more gas to feed LNG export facilities here in the U.S.
I think natural gas has a very promising next few years and a long-term future. Really when you look at any forecast, whether they've caught up or not, natural gas is going to be a huge part of the energy mix globally for the next 15+ years. So it's a great opportunity. As you said, we enjoy a very competitive situation there because we have the right mix of products. We're proven very durable, and we have applications and engine applications that are bespoke designed to handle gas compression. So I think that's going to be a great opportunity for us as well.
Joe, from a margin standpoint, really impressive incremental margins in power and energy in the second quarter, over 40%. I know you won't run 40% incremental margins forever, but is that level of operating leverage sustainable in the near term for that line of business?
Yeah, I think 40% is a little noisy. We have some at an enterprise level, and we had some prior period tariff adjustments in there. We should have healthy incrementals. One of the things we did, we really focused during Jim's tenure, and those eight years, was putting a lot of discipline in the operating execution model into our business. We increased the profitability and margin profile of all three of the segments, and we intend to continue to operate in that disciplined fashion. Our definition of winning is OPACC dollar growth. We believe, and I think has proven that that's the best correlation that drives shareholder return over time. That's what we're focused on. Having said that, we put the margin range out there for a reason, just to kind of give everyone a band on how we think about operating.
My intention over time is to operate in the middle of that band. Tariff pushed us towards the bottom. I think it's around 31%, just as volumes increase as progressive with sales, just to kind of stay at that same part of the range. We want to claw our way back up a little bit. It won't be every quarter straight line, but we're going to have to outperform that just to get back to the middle of the range. But we want to be in the middle of the range. Some of that'll depend on product mix and region mix of where the business happens. But we have healthy operating margins in all three businesses, and we want to continue that. As we get more volume and operating leverage, our intent is to try to improve that as best we can.
Joe, let's shift gears to Construction Industries. You've been really focused on growing the rental business. We're hearing from a number of dealers that they are looking to double the size of their rental fleet with a five-year view. Can you just talk about why this initiative is so critically important to you folks now, and what does success for Caterpillar in the rental channel look like in five years?
Yeah, we love our dealers. They're amazing partners for us, and they're the ones who have the Cat assets in the rental fleet and serve the rental part of the industry. I think it's an area where we've had varying degrees of performance. Some dealers are really good at it. Some dealers have struggled in that area. We're definitely trying to push the performance. We don't have really a target fleet loading or target fleet size. We think we can have better penetration into rental sales into the industry than we have today, and it varies by dealer. The major projects JV, I think, is also going to allow us to compete on some of these mega projects where maybe a local dealer doesn't have the fleet, and we haven't had the fleet flexibility to participate in that.
But rental for us, and the way I think about it, if I step back, our mission statement is solving our customers' toughest challenges. A lot of customers rent, a lot of customers own or buy, and some do a mix of both. The philosophy that we need to take, and our commercial teams need to take is, I want customers to have the best solution for them based on the job, and I want as many customers in the cab of Cat machines as possible, because that's good for our business. A lot of customers, particularly if you get down to the BCP type of class of product and size product, will rent before they buy their first machine.
We want customers to start in Cat machines and then most mid-size contractors start as small size contractors, and we want them to grow with us. Rental to me is part of the overall construction industry strategy where we've been good, but we've had pockets where maybe we haven't been able to compete as well as we think we can. That's where the commercial flex on this part of the strategy comes in, is we want to be good at having flexibility for customers and meeting them where they're at for the particular job to make sure we have the right solution for them. That will drive a lot of rental opportunity. I think a lot of customers will rent, or they'll have a fleet and need to rent a little bit.
A lot of that just depends on the customer, the length of the job, their line of sight to jobs after the one they're on. All those go into a customer's decision process, whether to rent or buy, and we want to have the best solution to support them for their need.
Super. Joe, in terms of when we look at the Cat dealer rental share, just based on industry statistics, it looks about 8%. That implies about 20% share for earthmoving equipment, specifically. As dealers deliver towards growing their presence, if our checks are correct, they double their position in the rental fleet. Can you step us through how they do that without disrupting market pricing? I know Cat focuses on service, not discounting. Can we just double-click on how you folks can execute on that?
Dealers are independent businesses, so they're going to set their rental rates. They need to be competitive to win, but I think that's where we have a lot of advantages of dealers knowing these customers because many of them own equipment. It allows a lot of flexibility in rent. Dealers can also, a lot of times will roll a piece of rental equipment out as used if a customer needs it over time and at a certain price point. Dealers will control the rental pricing. I think we can be competitive. The dealer's only going to do this if they're profitable, and I want our dealers to be profitable because that means they're healthy into the future as well. I think that we discipline in this as we do it.
I think there's a lot of opportunity for us where customers will find it attractive to rent from Cat dealers. Cat dealers will have to have the full suite. As you mentioned, it's not all just Cat equipment they're renting. We have allied programs for all the other light towers and equipment that we don't offer that they will have to have in their fleet. As we showed at CONEXPO, many of those additional types of equipment will have Cat engines in them when we can, because they're great customers of ours, which is also great. Dealers will utilize the rental business to get closer to customers, which is good for the overall CI business. It should drive, also, customers to want to come back and buy new equipment from us. One of our big pushes at CONEXPO, and continues to be, is services commitment.
Back to work in short amount of time if a machine is down, and the rental fleet's a part of that as well. We want dealers to have the right parts inventory, the right technicians available to service equipment right away. If in fact it's going to be down longer, a lot of times dealers can use the rental fleet to keep a customer running while they fix the machine. When you think of CVAs and all the offerings that can go to a customer, that's why I hesitate. Rental is very important. It's an area we're putting a lot of focus on, but it's part of the overall commercial offering that we should be offering customers to really satisfy their needs as part of the bigger system.
Joe, on that point, I know it's super early on the enhanced services commitment that you folks have rolled out at CONEXPO. How's that program doing? It sounds like there's really good potential to drive Customer Value Agreement adoption higher with the commitment. Are you seeing that translate, or too soon to tell?
I think it's early. There's so many customers in CI, but I think when you see the performance of CI overall, services are performing better. They continue to outperform the industry. We've had great STU growth. It's really hard to pinpoint, is that the one thing that's driving the performance? But it's part of the overall supporting the customers. I think to your point, should drive better CVA adoption, which will be good for our customers. But the biggest expense for our customers is downtime. That is the most costly thing that can impact them on a job site. The more we can put solutions in place that sort of guarantee customers that they're not going to have those long periods of downtime, I think it's going to be good for our business.
In terms of the product scope, so you folks started making your own telehandlers to control the production. Do you have the product lines in-house that you need to have in-house to deliver on the rental strategy? How are you thinking about the product range?
Yeah, we have the right product mix for our equipment. Particularly as you said, with the introduction of our telehandler here in the U.S. and North America. We have the Allied equipment program. We have partnerships to get the rest of the equipment that customers will expect to have when they come into a rental house. So, from a portfolio standpoint, I think we have all the tools. We need to make sure that we can keep up with demand, so we're ramping production in some of our CI facilities as well. As you saw, the backlog was up for CI and RI, and that's an area where we aren't in a similar situation necessarily for most of those products as we are in power and energy, where we're capacity constrained.
I would like to see that backlog come in by us getting production more in line with STU growth. I think there is an opportunity for us to catch up a little bit on how we are supplying our dealers for certain products, but we have the right portfolio.
In terms of the JV structure that you had mentioned, your dealers are really excited about the opportunities that that drives for them. Anything else that you folks are working on delivering to the dealer base to allow them to take on the rental companies head-on that is meaningful?
No, each one of them, like I said, they are independent businesses. We believe we have a recipe, and it is a demonstrated recipe that we have some dealers who are really great performers at rental. It is just a matter of best practice sharing and driving the philosophy that we need, that rental is part of the overall solution. I think from a strategy standpoint, we are in execution mode, and I think there is some opportunity here.
Based on the re-segmentation, it looks like there is considerable margin opportunity within the rail business, Joe. What is the pathway to OPACC growth for Progress Rail?
Yeah. Rail, it has been an industry that is from a new locomotive standpoint, I guess I would separate it in how we look at it. Locomotives, particularly in North America, that has been a very depressed industry for almost a decade now, with very limited new locomotive deliveries into the industry at all. But when you look at the services side, Progress Rail, we have been able to grow services, whether that is through our track business or freight car business. The traditional Progress Rail services business has been healthy. From a locomotive standpoint, we have done some things to increase the throughput, lean principles in our factories, to improve the profitability. But at this point, we really need to see some volume before we would see a big inflection in rail. But services business is healthy. It has been growing for us.
Moving that to RI, I think also allows a lot of synergies from our standpoint, similar customers. We sell locomotives to mining customers around the globe, and they use a similar type of supply base and footprint.
On the mining side, copper is at cycle highs. You mentioned order activity has improved. We are seeing rising replacement demand as well. Where do you think we are in the broader mining cycle, and how would you characterize the prospect list?
Yeah, I am definitely happy with the order intake we have seen in RI in the last two quarters, really this year. Backlogs have increased. We are seeing good traction in large mining trucks. We are seeing customers request more quoting activity, and we have more autonomous trucks coming online. So we really have to execute for those customers who we have signed some recent deals with. But I think it is going to be a disciplined industry as we move forward. But we are starting to see a lot more activity when it comes to particularly large trucks, than we have in the past. So mining, if you just take a step back and you look at the minerals needed for the infrastructure build-out of the world, electrification of the world, mining is going to be a healthy business in the long term. And frankly, from our standpoint, particularly given where we are at, right?
As I mentioned, the capacity increase engines, those engines go into mining trucks. They go into power and energy, oil and gas, and others. Steady growth for us is better than boom and bust that we saw 15 years ago. I will take the discipline in the industry. I think when you do the math long term, the need for minerals is going to drive demand, and it is going to be a great business for us over the next decade.
Joe, let us wrap with a final question on technology. It has been key enabler in terms of driving the ability to do Customer Value Agreements, uptime. What are the one or two most important updates that we should know about relative to your technology initiatives and progress since the analyst day that you would frame for our group?
Yeah, technology, it is the middle pillar of our growth strategy, and I think it is going to determine who wins in the future. I think the way we look at it is there is near-term technology. We have great technology on machines today. Then obviously we are working on autonomy, semi-autonomy, orchestrating the job site of the future. What are the digital planning tools? How do all those integrate to make customers much more efficient? Particularly as physical AI becomes more capable, I think we can do a lot more moving from autonomy in mining. We have gone to smaller quarry sites now, but heading into construction, a lot of development work going on there. So the medium to long term, we are investing pretty heavily in those solutions, and I think that is coming along well.
In the short term, we have a lot of technology on machines that, frankly, we have what I would say is underutilization in the industry, so we are doing a few things. One, training our customers and making our customers better awareness. We are trying to make a lot more of the existing technology standard on our premium machines so that they are just available for customers. They do not have to know at the time of ordering. That will drive more scale and actually better throughput through some of our factories and efficiencies. But the main focus, and we talked a little bit about this at CES, then carried that forward at CONEXPO as well, from my standpoint, is it has to be easier to use.
Training operators in the cab, you can train an operator on the technology, and then next week that operator may go to a different machine and you have a new operator in there. It needs to be much more intuitive, and that's where the Cat AI Assistant and our digital teams are really working closely with the on-machine technology teams to really make the technology features we have, like Dig assist, Swing Assist, semi-autonomy Cat Command, all these in our safety systems, our productivity systems, make them much more intuitive for operators to use. I think that will drive more adoption as well, and then that will lead to more comfortableness around technology. Then you start to get to Cat Command, remote control, semi-autonomy, and ultimately autonomy.
Technology is a huge part of our strategic plan for the future, and we continue to make investments and working on strides of getting our customers to use what we have today.
Super. Well, that's a great place to end it. Joe, on behalf of our community, thank you very much for joining our group for the conversation. Really enjoyed our time together. Thank you. Thanks, everybody.
Yep. Thanks, Jerry, and appreciate everybody dialing in. Take care. Have a safe day.