All right. Well, good morning, everyone. Up next, we have Manitowoc, traded under the symbol MTW. They're a leading global pure-play crane company, serving various industries, including construction, infrastructure, and energy, with a strong reputation for innovation and reliability. The company provides a diverse range of high-quality, technologically advanced products to customers worldwide, and presenting on behalf of the company, we have Aaron Ravenscroft, CEO.
Hi, good morning, everyone. How are you today? I'm gonna test my technical skills. So for the majority of this presentation, I'll talk about the bigger picture and long-term focus of the company. But with respect to this slide, just a quick update. We recently held our earnings call, and we let out some guidance. Our revenue is around $2.2 billion for the year, and our expectations in EBIT are $125-$140. So this was a reduction from where we started the year. Entering the year, we expected that our tower crane business, which had started to cycle down 18 or 24 months ago, today, it's at sort of 2009 levels.
We had anticipated some bounce back in the second half, which we haven't seen. Additionally, in terms of our mobile crane business, things have really started to slow, and it's not completely unusual for the crane business that we see a slowdown as we enter the election time. I think it's been well-documented by many of the different construction equipment suppliers that business has slowed down in terms of the United States, and so we're trying to adjust our build schedules so we enter next year with a strong balance sheet.
For a quick history of the company, we were founded in 1902. We started in the crane business around in the 1920s, believe it or not, but it really wasn't until early 2000 when we bought the Grove and Potain businesses, where we became a global leading provider of cranes. We've got a full kit of cranes, one of the largest portfolios in the business. But as I tell folks, you know, we really spent one hundred years focused on the most cyclical and lowest margin portion of the crane industry, which is selling new machines, which we all love to make and sell and see.
But we spent the last six years really in a position to transform the company. So in 2016 , we spun off our food service business and became a standalone crane company. Needed to figure out how we could survive and be sustainable and grow over the long term without that consistent cash flow of the food service business.
We spent our first three or four years restructuring the business, took out about $100-$120 million worth of cost during that timeframe to get us to a baseline where we could start to grow. In 2019, we refinanced our debt and got ourselves in a position where we could start to do some acquisitions and have a little more flexibility with our balance sheet. That's really what followed the implementation of our today's strategy. We call it CRANES+ 50, but really, it's driven by how we drive our aftermarket.
We call it non-new machine sales, so pretty much anything that's not a crane, whether it be used sales, rental, service or parts or even digital activities that we do. So in 2021, we made two major acquisitions of two of our dealers. We historically have been dealer-based, but unfortunately, many of our dealers are struggling with succession planning, so we saw this as an opportunity to fill the gap, as well as to grow our aftermarket. So, as you can see here, we've spent the last three or four years really focused, one, on integrating our acquisitions, but also building on organic growth, adding locations.
And from my point of view, the real key to our business is how do we grow our field service tech population, given that our equipment is so complicated? It's a great opportunity to add value, but that's really where we're gonna drive our parts business and our relationship with our customers long term. And I'll get into that as we go through the presentation. Just a moment in terms of Manitowoc's culture. So when I joined the company in 2016 , we implemented what we call the Manitowoc Way. It's our version of the Toyota Production System.
Of course, early on, very focused on implementing lean on the shop floor with this, in conjunction with some of the restructuring we did to drive productivity and reduce our costs. I'd say since that point, we've also been very focused on improving our quality. We moved it over to new how we do new product development. That's been a big, big part of our story the last eight years in terms of getting our portfolio where it needed to be to be competitive on a global scale. And then we started to move it into safety as well as environmental.
A lot of folks talk about the different initiatives that they have around environmental or buying environmental credits, but for us, it's really changing how we do business and reducing our cost, quite frankly. We've talked a couple different initiatives we had in our earnings calls about addressing paint booths, and we've saved probably $1 million in total if I look at all the different initiatives we've had just to reduce, first, optimize how we run our paint booths, but then reduce the size of our paint booths and those sorts of things.
So I'm really proud of the fact that when we go and attack a problem such as environmental, we're literally physically trying to reduce our whether it be emissions or footprint. More recently, our focus around the Manitowoc Way and continuous improvement has been in the aftermarket. We've fully dedicated one of our long-term Kaizen lean leaders to our recent acquisitions and our new locations, and it ranges to a variety of things of how we improve.
One could be simple: What tools do we use? In a business like ours, we love to heat and beat with a torch and a sledgehammer, which isn't exactly safe or productive. So we've been very focused on improving the tools so the environment is much better for our employees as well as more productive. When you look at our rental assets, we've taken a tool we call TPM, Total Productive Maintenance, which historically would be used on machine tools in the factory, and we've applied the same methodologies to how we manage our rental fleet.
That way, we keep the value of our assets up, and we're able to sell those units as a high-value used units at some point. Additionally, how we do service and how we launch a service tech and optimizing the management of those field service folks, that's been a critical part of our success. To me, the Manitowoc Way is the most important thing that we do as a company, and how we engage not only our employees but also our customers. Moving to our strategy, as I say, we officially launched the Cranes+50 initiative, I think in 2021 in terms of name, but really it started in 2020 when we started to buy our dealers.
It was back then that we had launched our four strategic initiatives to drive our business, which is primarily around how do we, one, manage our portfolio of products, but then, two, how do we drive our aftermarket? So the first initiative is to grow our European tower crane aftermarket, and a big portion of this is rental. So having worked through dealers for a long time, most of our dealers, in fact, they do rental. That's 50% of their business.
So it's very normal in Europe to first rent a crane for two or three years before they actually sell the unit, once the acquisition value is down and the customer would like to finance it. The other area that we had is there's a lot of large international construction companies like Bouygues or Vinci in France, that when they get on a project, they have their own rental fleet, they have their own fleet of cranes, but typically, it's optimized for their own utilization, and they'll need the addition of cranes, and they ask for rentals. Historically, we wouldn't do that business, and we would lose potential large orders.
So today, we'll supplement those orders. They may need 50 cranes. Maybe they buy 25 of them. They may need to rent 10 of them to meet the needs of the project. So again, it's really about getting closer to our customers and then getting the consistency and the higher margin business in the rental. And then, of course, once you have a rental unit, if we don't rent it, we will typically sell it in the first couple of years, and that's usually our highest margin opportunities when we sell a unit from our rental fleet. Our second strategy is to grow our Belt and Road presence.
So this really started as how we build out our China business to compete with the Chinese. So we've long had a tower crane factory in China, but we ran it really as a factory that was manufacturing old designs from France. Today, I think we've launched eight or 10 different cranes the last couple of years, so we've designed a crane for that market, whether it be in Asia Pac or the Middle East, and we're very focused at the moment on the growth of Saudi Arabia.
Quotes have never been higher, and even though I know there's been a lot of discussions about slowdowns in Saudi, they've also announced and launched several huge projects that have to be completed in order to meet the needs of some of the international sporting events that they've launched. So a good example is Qiddiya, where we've been a major player. This is where their Six Flags Park is, but I recently visited, and it's one road in and one road out with a rollercoaster at this point.
But they've got to build all the roads and hotels, accommodations, and then they have larger plans for Formula One as well as a World Cup soccer stadium. So in order for them to execute the World Cup that's coming in 2034, they've got to build, I think, nine or 10 different stadiums. So we strongly believe that even though things may slow down on projects like The Line, there are different projects, huge projects that have to be completed in order to execute those big sporting events. Thirdly is to expand our aftermarket in North America, which I have a slide on.
This has been primarily driven through our recent acquisitions. And then lastly is how do we leverage our all-terrain crane business through new product development to grow our aftermarket. So when we started this initiative, we had a few gaps, and we've invested roughly $5 million per year into our R&D to get our portfolio where it needed to be. Today, we're pretty close to that, and on the back of that, it's how do we work more closely with the depots.
Historically, we would call on customers, for instance, in Europe, very focused on elephant hunting and getting the new machine sale, where today I would say as much of that is how do we work with the local depot managers that are actually using and operating the cranes to make sure that we get all the aftermarket that we deserve after we've entered into the machines. The last thing I would comment on that is these are global products, and all-terrain market in Europe is heavily driven by trade-ins, so this gives us an opportunity to do a trade-in to help drive, I call it the grand slam.
The first step is to sell a new crane and take our margin. We take in a trade-in, but then we'll take that crane if it needs to be remanufactured or upgraded, we'll do so, ship it off to a place like South America, where we're competing aggressively with the Chinese. Those folks would actually prefer a used crane out of Europe, and then once we get the used sale, it also gives us the opportunity to drive our parts and service work. Lots of different revenue streams. As I say to our folks all the time, "Our cranes are like bonds, and we need to clip the coupons."
Long term, our aspirations are to grow the business to $3 billion in revenue, one-third of that being our non-new machine sales or aftermarket. We expect that, roughly half of that growth will come from organic growth, which I'll get into because of the market, and then half of that coming through acquisitions. We execute on those two first points, the following two, and getting our EBITDA above north of 10% and driving our ROIC to 15% is very doable. So the next two slides are just quick comments in terms of our strategies in North America for the mobile business and tower cranes in Europe.
So the first here is our footprint to how we've grown our aftermarket. As I say, we made two big acquisitions in 2021 of our dealers. We spent $180 million to get $30 million in EBITDA, so it's less than 6x. So nice, attractive, accretive business for us, increased our aftermarket, higher margin, highly accretive, and reduced our cyclicality.
As you can see, we've got lots of dots on this slide now with our service locations, and we've got well over 150 service techs supporting the United States. So again, it's how do we really get closer to our customers and service them in the aftermarket after they own it. One question on that?
Yeah. When you're buying out the dealers, are they staying involved in the business somehow?
Yeah, so this is the interesting thing with the dealer world, to get into the sort of the nuts and bolts of the business. Typically, what happens is you have an owner who you have a succession planning, where their family doesn't want to own it. But normally those family members aren't heavily involved in the business either.
So you have someone that's gonna exit the business one way or another. In the crane business, typically, folks work till the day they die, unfortunately, and so that's what we're trying to manage. In terms of the regular employees, I mean, we know all these folks. We work with them on a daily basis. Those folks never leave. So we may lose one or two people at the top, but everyone else sticks around.
What is the avenue where you keep the dealers differently than many different?
The dealers make significantly higher margin than we do, and their business is far less cyclical. So it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me that we would continue to let that business grow. If you can imagine, for instance, Aspen, we had a dealer that wanted to retire, and they had options on where they could sell it, but it didn't.
Number one, it doesn't make much sense to let dealers get bigger. That would be complicated for us. But number two, we're doing all the engineering and manufacturing and all the risk in terms of building the crane, and then we're taking the lowest margin portion of the business. So to me, it's about how do we capture all the hard work we've put in from an engineering perspective to get the margin that we deserve.
How many other dealers are there?
Yeah, so we've said globally that there's more than 20 targets worth $1 billion in enterprise value. From a global perspective, most of that's in Europe and North America, but in North America, there's probably 5 to 10 really core different dealers. And we're not in the business of trying to push dealers out. I mean, we've been partners with these folks for 30-50 years. Some of them do a great job. When we get into a situation where they don't have succession planning or they no longer are interested in investing in their inventory, then we have to take action, so.
They have to trust you, but you have-
Yeah, we have rights, but they would have to get us to approve if they were to sell to somebody else.
It's a very related question to that. Does it get any risk of channel conflicts where a dealer in neighboring-
Yeah.
Have now to deal with-
So because we've had dealers for a long time, and we have strong rules where dealers don't compete with other dealers, we've based on the way that we run the contracts, and I think everyone respects each other in terms of managing customers, we've not had any dealer conflict. I mean, essentially, when we bought the H&E crane business, we set up MGX because we needed a new brand, but we continued to run it exactly the way that H&E was running it in terms of the separation. So there's a couple of points there.
One, it's important for us to maintain our margins and not just give it away, which would be something the sales folks would be happy to do in order to get more commissions and sales. And the other side of this is we need to respect our territories and each other. We've not had any issues with that. Next, in terms of the European tower crane business, we do use dealers throughout Europe. There are some certain territories, particularly in France, so we use the brand Potain in Europe. We bought Potain back in 2001. Potain is a French company, which is why there's so many Potains in France.
We do have two large dealers that have done a fantastic job for us over the years, but there are territories that are open to us that we actually manage, as well as there's some large national accounts. Again, back to the history of, I think the business was formed in the nineteen forty-five or nineteen forty-six, so there's some large accounts that we've always taken directly, and we need to support, folks like Bouygues and Vinci, these large construction companies, which is why we already had a pretty decent footprint in France, and our market share is great.
Our real strategy here is how do we grow our market share and diversify our geographic reach, particularly in Germany and in the U.K.? We're working hard to add more field service techs. The, the rental business gives us the opportunity to really get into the business, particularly in Germany. And our goal is to continue to add locations and add field service techs to help support the rental. But at the end of the day, we're really trying to grow our market share in places like Germany, where historically, being the French entity, we wouldn't have had the highest market share.
But as you can see, there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow here, just as much in Europe for tower cranes as there is in mobiles in the U.S., and a pretty similar story for the mobile crane business in Europe. I was hoping that Alex Jones would be in the room, 'cause this is a slide that we built with him. He's asked me, I think, every time I see him, for a little more details on non-new machine sales and what our breakdown is. So for folks that are live streaming, this is something that's new that we put into our deck.
Just wanted to give everyone a feel of what sort of the breakdown is. As you can imagine, historically, we've been primarily parts. So in 2021, this would include a couple of months of the acquisitions. But, again, having, supporting our dealers, large part of our aftermarket historically was parts. And so as we move forward, we'll, I think, have sort of linear growth for parts, 'cause of course, as we buy dealers, there's an elimination of the intercompany transfers. But really focused on how do we grow our service business as well as the used and the rental piece.
But, what's most important is that our gross margins in this business are approximately 35%. Of course, it, the, you know, the mix varies. Something like a used piece of equipment is not going to have the same margin as parts, and it also has significantly higher value. But this gives you a flavor of the different aftermarket avenues that we have. So since we launched the program at Cranes Plus Fifty, we've grown our non-new machine sales from $450 million to just over $600 million.
We call it Cranes Plus Fifty because when we launched it back in 2021, the goal was to increase our non-new machine sales by 50%, which would have been $675 million. Given the quick progress that we made early on, we've increased that target to a billion dollars. And as I say, while we've made acquisitions in 2021 , I would say right now we've been very focused on filling in geographic gaps and adding organic growth, whether it be through our rental fleet, as you see in our CapEx growth.
But again, we see lots more opportunity in this space and getting closer to our customer and generating more revenue that's less cyclical and higher margin. Now, sort of turning to the overall crane business. So as we've been saying the last couple of years, although it's been slow on the come, is there's a lot of different changes happening that I think really benefit our overall business. And I'll talk about the refresh in the next slide, but in order to drive a refresh, we really need to drive confidence in the industry.
Lots of different things happening globally, even though some of it has been slowed by geopolitical issues we've had. But if you look at, for instance, Saudi Vision 2030, I think I've been there three or four times in the last 18-24 months. You have a very wealthy country that's trying to transform its local culture. You know, if you look, oil. Saudi has always historically been focused on oil. In the future, they see the growth of tourism as their number two industry, and number three is mining, both of which are great for the crane business. They've launched huge projects.
I know everyone always reads The Wall Street Journal and talks about The Line, which is absolutely enormous project that continues, and we'll participate in that project. But there's a lot of other projects, whether it be building houses or these folks like Qiddiya, building out Trojana on the Red Sea, so to help support tourism. This has been a great opportunity for us, and even though it's called Saudi Vision 2030, most of these projects I expect will continue into the 2040s. So I think that's a great opportunity in the Middle East. It drives overall demand, not just in Saudi.
It also sucks up all the cranes in the space, which we've seen help drive some of the business in folks like places like Qatar. Moving on to Europe, I think there's really two elements there. One is there's a huge housing shortage, whether it be Germany, U.K., or France. They all have hundreds of thousands of shortages of houses, which is great for our tower crane business. In the short term, there's been some election challenges in those countries, or at least their coalition governments have been weak, and they haven't been able to push through policies to drive that.
Eventually, they have to do something. Again, this is a good opportunity. In the slow period in the tower crane business, we are seeing our dealers, our partners, renew the age of their fleet, mostly by getting rid of some of their old cranes, which I'll get into in the next slide, but a big part of that is gonna be adding new cranes to offset those older cranes. And then in the United States, you see the U.S. infrastructure bills and the CHIPS semiconductor initiative that was launched, even though, again, those have been slowly coming.
So we've had a lot of questions of folks say, "Oh, well, commercial real estate's down and the commercial construction's down." Well, if you go back to 2016 and 2017, when it was booming in the United States, we really didn't benefit from that because these are typically smaller projects that use telehandlers and don't use a whole lot of cranes, or they're skyscrapers, where if you look around you... Chicago, I know a lot of times I get the questions, "Oh, it's pretty interesting to see four or five cranes." But four or five cranes doesn't really drive demand.
If you go to Paris or even a small city like Lyon, where I used to live, you'll see tens and twenties and fifties of these types of cranes. So, I think that there's not a huge impact from the commercial real estate, and the real benefit for us would be the big infrastructure projects like semiconductors. How do we improve our... And sort of moving up the slide here to the energy discussion, if we're going to support EV and AI, those are huge consumers of electricity, and the United States isn't producing enough electricity at this point to meet those strategic interests.
So whether it be adding more wind or nuclear, and we're sorta agnostic, those are all huge consumers of cranes. And then just building out the power generation, the power transmission, is another opportunity for some of our smaller cranes. So overall, when we look at the landscape and the things that all the countries around the world are trying to do, it's very friendly to the crane business. We view this as really an impetus of dealing with the aged fleets that are in there. So this slide here shows you what our revenue has been for the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years. It really reflects the overall crane business.
So you can imagine this is not adjusted for inflation. A lot of cranes were put in place back in the early 2000s to meet the boom period, but really, since that time, it's been pretty flat. In fact, if you look at the last 10 years, the overall business has been relatively flat if you adjust for inflation, even think about it on a units level. The result of this has been that most of the crane rental houses, their average age of their fleet is somewhere around the mid-teens. Useful life for a crane is, I would say, a high-value crane, is less than 10 years.
Crawler crane sure can work in Wisconsin for 30 years on a bridge where maybe it does 1 lift a week, but that's not gonna work in terms of some of these big semiconductor project or even a nuclear project in, in the U.K. or France. So this is why we say at some point, when you look at our crane rental houses, I mean, the value of their business entirely relies on the value of their assets. There's not a whole lot of value in an asset that's 30 years old, and if you consider an average fleet of being 15 years, that means there's some cranes that are one or two years old, but you got a lot of cranes that are 20-30 years old.
So this will need to be addressed at some point, and we have seen major players trying to address this, the last couple of years. So with the combination of the different projects that have been launched and the issues that needed to be dealt with, whether it's housing or these big infrastructure projects, for us, that really drives confidence with our customers. Please remember that we're not selling typically to engineering houses or big, large firms like BP. We're selling to individuals who are writing checks out of their own accounts to pay for these cranes. Those folks really are driven by confidence.
Seeing long-term projects, like a big semiconductor project, where they're going to have thirty or fifty cranes for two or three years, that helps drive confidence and puts them in a spot where they can really start to invest in their fleet. I'm very optimistic as we see interest rates go down, that we see them engaged to deal with the ages of their fleets. Go ahead.
Can you talk a little bit about your competitive position, and are your cranes better than the others in some ways, or the value proposition?
Yeah. So we have two large competitors, Liebherr and Tadano. Both are great competitors, have good products. I would say that really depends on new models. This is why the crane business is so aggressive in terms of engineering and new product development. We're all launching new cranes all the time. At the end of the day, the business is built on confidence, so it's the quality of your machines, meeting certain specifications, which we all do. But the game changer is going to come in the aftermarket and how we really support our customers.
Quite frankly, a big part of our success historically in the United States was the fact that we had such strong dealers and so many field service techs in the United States, where you had some of the international players that were trying to go direct. Of course, now that's starting to change, but service and support is as important as the spec, and I would say that from a specification standpoint, everybody's pretty equal. I'd say in the short term, the biggest challenge we have is the strong dollar. I mean, you had the yen almost. I think it actually hit 160.
That would have put Tadano in a much more competitive position than we were in, having manufactured in the United States, and likewise with the euro. So it's another reason that we cheer to see interest rates go down and the dollar to weaken some, because it definitely. That's probably the biggest issue that we have with some of our competitors, particularly in the United States. Of course, we manufacture different products globally, so, I mean, we've been able to be very competitive.
Turning to our capital allocation, as you can imagine, the last couple of years, we've been very focused on investing, not only in the acquisitions, but organic growth where it makes sense. I'll get on to a future slide. Very focused on driving our return on invested capital. I will say, we see a lot of value in our stock at the current values. We historically have bought back our shares, which we did in the second quarter for the most part. We still have $29 million worth of our share buyback opportunities approved. I think that's a good use of our cash. So for us, it's really a juggling act of maintaining our leverage below three.
At the moment, we're sort of in the high peak of our sort of seasonality for inventory, so a lot of work for us to do to reduce our inventory and working capital for the rest of the year. But, as we do that, we'll manage that, relative to the opportunities we see there. And as I said, I think in the short term, when we look at acquisitions and even organic growth, we think that there's a lot of opportunity in just doing some stock buybacks, but we've got to get ourselves in a cash position to execute that, to manage our leverage.
Yeah, so when I joined the company in 2016, while we struggled to be break even, we didn't have a whole heck of a lot of return on invested capital. So this is something we've been working hard at for the last eight, nine years. Early on, it was really driven by how we could reduce our costs, and we did a pretty good job of getting that in the right spot. And now the next phase of how we drive that is, how do we increase our revenue and our portfolio to be more aftermarket-driven? Given you saw those gross margins of 35%, getting more of that high-margin business is going to play a key role.
So for me, it's sort of mathematical back to our aspirations of getting to $3 billion, getting our non-new machine sales to $1 billion, that 35% is going to help drive not only our profitability, but also our return on invested capital. This is really the emphasis that we have throughout the company, whether we're on a rental project or an RPO or investing in machine. It constantly comes back to: how do we get the returns that we can get up above our WACC?
And so, to be brutally honest, I spent a lot of my time when I first joined the company, fixing some of the errors that were made in the past, which you don't drive to a negative ROIC by accident. There's some bad investments that we made. So I've felt the pains and learned the pains, as well as our entire team. So we're ruthlessly focused on when we spend a dollar, that we get the returns that we expect. It's too much work in the crane business not to.
So just to conclude, the value proposition that we see, long term, we feel very strongly about our strategy in terms of growing our aftermarket. As I say, we've done a lot of self-help to get our ROIC to something respectable that we can present and talk about. We've got a good track record in terms of acquisitions, and given that we're focused on vertically integrating with our dealers, when we know all of our dealers, and as those assets become available, we have those discussions.
And long term, we're very focused on how do we grow our aftermarket because we know that's going to reduce our cyclicality. And the ultimate incentive that we have from a company perspective is we've been very cyclical for a hundred years, so our entire team would be happy. It's awfully difficult to manage a large factory in a cyclical world. So our team's super excited to how do we reduce that cyclicality from a profitability standpoint. Makes it a lot easier to manage the business. So we have the ultimate incentive to grow our aftermarket, and when we see the results that we have from our recent acquisitions.
It's a bit of a no-brainer. In the short period, it's really about getting back on our feet, getting through the election, getting interest rates down, getting the dollar at a more reasonable value to some of these other currencies. I think that things are moving in the right direction. If I look at the tower crane business, it's been at 2009 levels for the last couple of quarters. That business is somewhere at the bottom. Eventually, it will return. As I tell our team all the time, "In the crane business, we're never flat. We're either down or we're up."
So now that we've started to flatten out, I feel that next year we should start to see some rebound. I don't fully anticipate a big bounce just because of the government situations that we see in France and Germany, and hopefully the U.K., we start to see some gains. But I think we start to see easy comps here in the second half and into 2025. I think that's a good place to start with our tower crane business.
And as a reminder to folks, our tower crane business is our highest margin businesses, and we've really challenged to manage our absorption in those factories because we have two large factories in France, which is hard to manage in a downturn. So we see a lot of upside there coming. In terms of the mobile crane business, very confident in terms of the products that we've launched recently, as well as this dynamic between large infrastructure projects and folks that need to renew their fleet. So long term, we're very positive. I always refer to it as the crane renaissance.
The last couple of years, it seems like just about the time we've gained momentum, we've been hit with the, you know, either Ukrainian situation, then it was inflation, which took its time to work its way out, and I'm very hopeful in the next couple of years, the infrastructure money starts to come. In fact, we held a Crane Days event at our Shady Grove facility, where we brought in 800-850 customers and dealers back in May, and the sentiment at that point was extremely positive. A lot of folks, very, very optimistic.
When you look at the AI boom happening, those are big usages of cranes, and everyone knows at some point we're gonna have to do something about our electricity production as well as the power transmission, all of which is good for our business. But those folks are also seeing money start to come and things like rail projects as well, which are great for the crane business. So we're... When it's light, it's hard to see the dark, and when it's dark, it's hard to see the light.
And at the moment, it's been pretty dark in terms of leading up to the election, as we've talked about our orders in July on our earnings call, but it would feel that we're somewhere near the bottom in some of those markets. So we think with the backdrop of some of these longer-term infrastructure initiatives, that we're in a good spot and very pleased with where we stand in terms of aftermarket and the opportunities to grow there. So with that, thank you very much, and I'd be happy to take any questions you might have.
Can you talk more about this, crane refresh, that if you have an old crane off because of servicing and parts replacement, are they really truly aging or is it that actually an old crane is refurbished to the point where it's functional?
Yeah, so some cranes can be refurbished, which is a good thing, but, I mean, a thirty-year-old crane typically goes to retire in Wisconsin and work on a bridge project, which really doesn't drive utilization, so one of the biggest challenges we've had over the last sort of 10 or 15 years is when we've moved from the engine emission standards, from Tier 3 to Tier 4 to Tier 4 Final. In the old days, a lot of cranes would come off. They would go to 7, 8 years old, and then they would start to move to South America.
But unfortunately, in those markets, they didn't have Tier 4, they didn't have gas or diesel fuel that you could put in a Tier 4 engine, so that was sort of the first strike that sort of messed up the normal balance of flow where assets have gone. I think that's pretty much what put us on the path of where we are today for a lot of the mobile cranes in North America. But, I mean, the reality is, if you're on a big nuclear project or semiconductor project, they're never gonna let you on there with an old crane. It'll never meet the demands.
And if you look at the technology that's in a crane today versus fifteen years ago, it's dramatically different, whether it be the load chart or just the ability to move that crane around. In some of these large crawler cranes, it can take well over a hundred trucks just to move the crane from one place to another.
To take a building on the crane.
Yeah, and I mean, the reality, if you're a crane rental house, you're not gonna get much of a rental rate on a thirty-year-old crane. So if you really want to compete on these big projects, you need to have new cranes to get to get the best rental rates. Go ahead.
What it's like in terms of like materials that, you know, at all?
No, I mean, the question's around the recycling of cranes. We're not involved in a crane at that, at that life. I mean, typically what would happen is you'd see those cranes go to some place like South America, but we've never owned a crane that we've sent to the scrapyard.
Yeah.
There's plenty of steel, though, that would go to a mini mill on an old crawler crane, and this is where you see some of these cranes survive for so long because they go to a place like Wisconsin, where, hey, if I have a depreciated thirty-year-old asset and I need to do a lift, I don't mind letting the asset sit on the side of the road, not utilized for most of the summer. Go ahead.
It seems like your business would be attractive to a larger acquirer in the construction space. You talked about the benefits of remaining independent, and you could talk about the-
Yeah, this, the question's around: where does the crane world fit in the rest of the construction business? So we get similar questions a lot of time. I think what's unique about the crane industry, it's a very niche business. So if you look at sort of... And I'll go sort of downstream to the customers. I mean, if you look at, like, a United Rentals, they historically have never been in the crane business. I would be surprised if they would get in, because not only is it very expensive assets to build your fleet, but also, it comes with a crane operator, which most companies aren't interested in actually providing the operators.
So from my point of view, it's pretty unique when you think about a crane rental house. They're not like a typical rental house. They're not just running a machine that, quote, unquote, "anyone can run." I mean, and not only that, but typically when you start to do larger lifts, you have to actually engineer the lifts... So if you want to go put the dome on top of a nuclear project, that's not the same as running an AWP. So if I go look at the construction companies, we don't fit very well in terms of the way that they do business, whether it be through the rental channel or the support.
I can tell you that a crane service tech is not highly motivated to touch another piece of equipment because these are so complicated and sophisticated. So we're happy to be independent. And if you look at our major competitors, even when they have different product lines like Liebherr, but their crane business runs completely separate from their traditional construction equipment.
Can you say a little bit about the vertical integration? Because I know you're buying them at fixed times, for recent acquisition. Are there synergies in there, like, optimize inventory or other things that add value?
Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So long term, as we get scale, I think there's a big synergy around inventory, because if you added up all of our dealers today and you looked at how much inventory they independently hold as a group, it'd be significantly higher than what one entity would need. So to me, that's the probably number one biggest opportunity. Long term, we see a lot of opportunity around how you really run service, manage assets. As you can imagine, having gone through dealers, we don't always know where our cranes are or what the service they've received, 'cause the dealers handle that.
So we see huge opportunity, and that's one of the things that we'll be working on the next couple of years, is really building that, pseudo MRP backbone. I say MRP, it's almost like a CRM for cranes to track where all the assets are. Then it's a lot easier to drive maintenance contracts, to do preventative maintenance, to offer up kits and service, and really knowing when that crane leaves the United States and goes to South America, we'll be able to track it.
So I think there's a big synergy there as well. And frankly, typically, a lot of our dealers, when you look at how dealers operate, not just in our business, but other industries, industrial markets, typically a dealer is really good where their home base is, and the further you get away, the less effective they are. If you look at a lot of our dealerships, I mean, because they've grown over time and taken on, whether it be through acquisitions or through organic growth, there's some markets and territories we think are underserved and have more opportunity. Other questions? Okay. Oh, one more question.
Has the market share in the U.S. and Europe changed much over the last 20 years?
Over the last 20 years, for sure, in the United States, our market share has changed because of where the yen and where the dollar have been. In Europe, I would say it's been pretty consistent. If I look over the last five years, we've grown our market share in the majority of our product lines. So this was a big part of when I joined in 2016 and why we launched new product development.
It was, one, how do we improve our quality? So reengineering the crane is number one, and then number two is getting ourselves back in a position to be competitive with our portfolio. Other questions? Okay. Well, thank you very much. Have a great day.