All right, good stuff. Hope everyone had a good lunch. So just moving right along here, we're thrilled to have once again the team from Oshkosh, which has been great and loyal supporters to the conference over the years. So thank you guys for that. Directly to my left is CEO John Pfeifer, to his left Pat Davidson from Investor Relations. So I think John, we'll turn it to you for some opening remarks and then we'll get into Q&A.
Yeah, okay. Thanks Tim, and we're absolutely delighted to be here. We like coming to your conferences and so pleased to participate. Let me just kind of level set everybody on what we're all about as a company before we talk specifically about Q&A. So Oshkosh Corporation is a company that ostensibly we make purpose-built vehicles and equipment for unique end markets. But we are a company that has a very powerful why, and most of the time the why is a lot more interesting than the what. Our why is our purpose, and we're serving people in our communities all over the world who do the toughest work. We look at ourselves as having a purpose to serve people that are doing dangerous work, that are doing very strenuous work, that are doing work that demands ever-increasing productivity on the job site.
It's our job to give them that productivity, to give them intuitive use, and to give them by far and most importantly safety. You see some of those occupations on this page, from the firefighter to the soldier to the person working at great height to the environmental worker. This purpose that we have, this why, is a real unification for our culture. Our people really rally around it, and culture is so important in running a good organization where people really understand what's ultimately most important to focus on when I come in every day and we work together. We are in a unique point in time in our history. We're over 100 years old, but we're also a technology company.
We're very technologically capable, and we're always building on the technological capabilities that we have, whether it's autonomous functionality, full autonomy, electrification, intelligent products capabilities through the data that we're getting off machines and pairing that data with third-party data sets to deliver insights to drive productivity that weren't conceivable just a few years ago. So this technological capability that we have to drive the purpose of really improving productivity and improving safety on the most difficult job sites in our communities, that's a really compelling time for us in our history. And what it's doing is it's driving accelerated growth. And when I say accelerated growth, higher growth rates than we've experienced in previous periods as many of our customers want to upgrade their equipment, they want to upgrade their vehicles, they want new autonomous functionality, they want new electrification capabilities.
So that's a really strong focus inside the company, is that application of technology on our products to serve that purpose better than we've been able to do in the past. We also have good end-market dynamics in most of our segments. We've seen an enormous amount of infrastructure building going on with big bills that have been passed that spawn trillions of dollars of investment in infrastructure, and you need our access equipment to do almost every one of those projects. So that helps with demand creation, of course. In the U.S. market, we compete all over the world, but in the U.S. market, we're seeing a lot of reshoring activity continue due to geopolitical concerns and supply chain concerns. You see a lot of reinvestment here that's driving demand for primarily our access equipment.
In the fire and emergency space, municipalities are healthier than they've ever been, and the fleet is more aged than it's probably ever been. So the combination of an aged fleet with really healthy municipal budgets is continuing to create healthy, strong demand for our fire businesses. So we're seeing that across most of the end markets that we serve, that really healthy just drive for demand of refreshing and adding to equipment and vehicle fleets. So that combined with the allure of the new technology and what it can do for productivity, that's helping drive those accelerated growth rates that I referenced a little bit earlier. So that's kind of a general description of who we are and what we do. And Tim, I'll go back to you for Q&A.
Good. And as I go along the way, if anyone has a question, just feel free to raise your hand. I'll get to you. But maybe John, just kind of from a high-level perspective, we're coming up on the three-year mark in terms of your leadership at Oshkosh. As you look back relative to your initial expectations in coming to the company, what has surprised you most in terms of whether it's a facet of the business, an end market, a particular brand, whatever it is, what has been kind of the biggest surprise or two in terms of what you've learned through your time running Oshkosh?
Yeah, I think that so if I go back and my background, I've always been in industries that design, develop, and engineer and manufacture very sophisticated products. So I understand that and I appreciate that and how that's done. And when I decided to join Oshkosh, I knew that Oshkosh had a great history of designing and developing and manufacturing very, very sophisticated vehicles and equipment. That was alluring to me. I think it and I knew that Oshkosh had some technology, but when I joined the company, we hadn't done a whole lot in terms of bringing out electrified product or some of the autonomous functionality was there, but it wasn't quite so evident. And I think what I really noticed after joining the company was how deep the capability is at our company to do those things.
When you develop an electric vehicle, we do 40,000 lbs electric fire trucks and 80,000 lbs electric airport rescue and firefighting vehicles, just as two specific examples. Understanding the mechanical part of it is one thing. Understanding the lithium-ion battery and how it has to come together and how it has to be packaged together with whether you're going to use a what we call an eIVT transmission or you're going to use eDrives and how it's going to come together, that's one thing. But when you have to stitch it all together with the software engineering that goes into making it function well and making it function intuitively for the operator, that's something that's even more sophisticated. And I was really surprised with our ability, in a good way, with that technological capability and our ability to apply it in a variety of end markets relatively seamlessly.
You've seen us in the past few years come out with the electric municipal fire truck, airport rescue and firefighting vehicles, electric refuse and recycling vehicles, the United States Postal Service Class 2 truck, electrified product. We've even done an electric defense vehicle. It's a prototype today for the Department of Defense. So we've got a unique ability in that technology to apply it across our end markets. That's been pleasantly surprising as to how well we were able to do it. The other thing is the strength you mentioned, our brands. I mean, the strength of our brands is fantastic. Pierce is an aspirational brand in the fire business. JLG is almost a household name in the construction world. We have really well-known in our end markets, really strong, strong brand recognition and very positive brand recognition.
Good. That's helpful. Given your background in M&A, perhaps not too surprising to see what all has taken place in terms of how you've kind of reshifted the portfolio as well as been active in M&A. With leverage now well below that 2x target, how should investors think about internal investment relative to M&A and maybe just speak to that?
So I'll just talk about our capital planning, and I'll talk specifically about M&A. So in our capital planning, we'll always return capital to shareholders annually. We'll do it with share buybacks, and we'll, of course, do it with consistent dividend payments. We think that's really important. I'm a shareholder and always expect companies to at least return something to shareholders. So that'll always be part of our capital plan. But with our capital plan, usually about 65% of it will go towards investing in the company and driving growth and development of the company. And that comes both internally, where we look at really driving investment in new product programs because new product innovations is really what drives margins, and it ultimately drives value for the company. And we also invest in our operating capability.
We're doing a lot of Industry 4.0 investment, becoming more efficient, putting autonomous functionality inside of our plants just like we put on our vehicles in terms of how we can automate things to be more efficient. In the M&A space, that's equally important to us because when you look at us, we're a unified portfolio of different vehicles and equipment that serve a lot of different end markets. I think we have to actively manage our portfolio. Actively managing our portfolio means we have to constantly be looking at our businesses and saying what businesses should we be in and what businesses should we not be in. Sometimes we make a divestment of a business if we think there's a better owner for it other than us.
We don't typically have any bad businesses, but sometimes we realize, hey, this is a business that's better somewhere else, and we're going to double down in another area. You've seen us do that. We've made some small divestments in the past with rear discharge concrete mixers and concrete batch plants, but we're also making acquisitions in areas where we really want to be. You saw us buy the Italian company Hinowa. That's a great market segment in Europe, and we believe it's going to become a growing market segment in the United States market. Really good synergies with the JLG brand to expand that type of equipment. That's kind of a new, let's call it a new category for us, a category we haven't been in in the past, but an attractive category. We recently did the AeroTech acquisition.
We've been active at airports for a long, long time. You find JLG equipment at airports all over the world. You see our airport rescue and firefighting vehicles. But we saw a much bigger number of categories in airports that we weren't serving that we believed were a perfect fit for our portfolio. Then we were very happy that we were able to go and acquire AeroTech. So that's ground service equipment when you see on that slide in front of you, that top picture, the vehicles that move jets around the runway, the jet bridges, the cargo loading equipment. We do all of that equipment, and it's all a perfect fit. It's purpose-built equipment at airports, which is a growing segment. If you go to any airport, you almost always see construction because they want to expand and add capacity.
You can't expand and add capacity without our equipment. And we are a market leader in most of those categories that you see on this slide. So we position ourselves now in a market that we believe is growing, where we can continue to apply our technology and continue to accelerate the growth of this business. Great people at AeroTech. We're really happy with it. So these are examples of we have a plan where we call it always on. We're always looking at where do we want to be, what are the potential targets that can take us there, and you'll continue to see us make moves as we go forward into the future that are similar to Hinowa and AeroTech.
Got it. Got it. Okay. That's good. Maybe we can dig into some of the segments, and we can start naturally with access. We had one of your large customers here yesterday and certainly a bullish message in terms of their outlook and how they're viewing kind of the longevity of the cycle. But one of the things that they and the industry is wrestling with is this notion of as you recycle more of the fleet, you're getting to the point where the significant inflation that we've seen the past couple of years for a challenge is those companies replacing equipment that you're not getting any incremental rental revenue on, but it could cost 30%+ in terms of the fleet you're replacing.
And so I'm just curious in terms of, I mean, it may not be as much of an issue for the big national rental companies just given their scale, but for the rest of the industry that maybe doesn't have as much of that buying power, how are they responding in terms of, it's not one answer, but the age of their fleet? Do they experiment with maybe lower price options? Do they go to lower spec units? What are you seeing in terms of the customer behavior?
No, we're not seeing lower priced options. We're not seeing lower spec units. We're not seeing any of that. Tim, we have the largest backlog we've ever had in the history of JLG. We're booked completely through the current year and starting to get into 2025. In normal, if you go back to, say, pre-pandemic, we typically would have maybe six months of backlog. So that tells you the size of the backlog. You saw our orders in Q4, 1.7 billion. There is a lot of healthy demand for our equipment. There's healthy demand for our equipment because our customers, the big national rental companies, the small independent rental companies, of which there are thousands, they see demand. They've got really healthy utilization rates on the current fleets of equipment they have. They see continued opportunity to expand the fleet.
They're probably not expanding it quite as fast as they were, say, a year ago, but they're still expanding their fleet. Now they're starting to get into fleet replacement where they can take some equipment that they want to refresh. That's why you're seeing the used market see more equipment come into it, and you're seeing more activity in the used market because of that. That's not a bad thing. That's a healthy thing. But the underlying dynamic that's happening is there is a lot of demand for equipment in the market, and those fleet utilization rates are strong. I think the demand when you look at non-residential construction, sometimes you look at it and it doesn't look overly rosy right now, but you have to look beneath the surface. Certainly, office construction, warehouses, that's not very healthy right now.
But when you look at infrastructure spending, manufacturing with reshoring that's happening, chips plants, even EV plants, you hear some delays in EV plants, but still a lot of EV plants. Those are all really strong demand drivers for equipment. So there's some good healthy demand drivers that are masking some of the weaker demand that makes up the non-residential construction index. And ultimately, it means demand is really good across the North American continent. And quite frankly, every region of the world in 2023, our business for JLG grew. And there's a lot of profitable regions around the world for JLG equipment.
Speaking of profitability, the 15% operating margin that you're targeting for 2024 ahead of the target that you outlined back at the Investor Day a year or two ago, what do you think's the biggest actor or factors that have driven that margin?
Yeah, what have driven us at 15% operating margins? Well, certainly, number one, our plants are full, and our plants are more efficient. We were running at inefficient levels one and two years ago primarily because of supply chain constraint. When you have inconsistent supply, it causes your manufacturing operations to be inefficient. And so running at full production with much more reliable supply chains allows us to be more efficient in manufacturing. That helps our margins. We've been making investments in our aftermarket capabilities, making investments in our ability to distribute aftermarket within 24 hours of order reliably. And so that helps our margins because aftermarket, in almost any industry, is your most profitable business. I mentioned that regions around the world have been growing, and there's a lot of very... U.S. is our biggest market, but there's a lot of profitable regions around the world.
So the fact that we have global growth that happened in 2023, that also contributed to healthy margins for the business. So it's not one thing. It's a lot of things that have improved from the period of inflation and supply chain disruption.
Got it. In terms of the leadership of JLG historically, I think history would show that most of the leadership has been kind of homegrown and internal. And you brought someone in from Cummins running very much more of a global business and the components piece of Cummins. So what made him the right choice to lead JLG?
So first of all, I want to make sure it's clear. We have incredible people at JLG, and we've got incredible leadership at JLG. Some of the people from Tim Morris and other parts of the business are just really, really brilliant leaders. What we saw in Mahesh Narang, who we pulled in to lead that segment for us, was his diverse global background in running global businesses. So we know how to run our North American business really well. We have opportunities to improve our business, our footprint, our participation in different global markets around the world. That's really where Mahesh has deep, deep experience as an industrial leader and business manager. And that made him a really nice fit for where we see some good opportunities for our access equipment segment. And you saw recently, we bought the Hinowa business, an Italian company.
When we look at our M&A portfolio, we look at it as a global opportunity list when we look at where we want to move next. And so that global nature is a really important aspect for Mahesh to have as he's come in. And he's fit in. It's been three months. He's fit in extremely well. He's got that great kind of humble but confident style that works well with us. And we're really optimistic about it.
Got it. In terms of the internal investment within Access, you announced that sizable increase in telehandler capacity in Tennessee that we're aware of, not so much in that category, but other parts of aerial where there's more investment coming in North America. How do you, as you think about the ag market as one that you've identified as being a big target market, and certainly that category has pretty well penetrated in Europe, but my understanding is that the dynamics of the machines are a bit different in terms of how they're utilized? And so what makes the how transferable is it, I guess, and what kind of confidence do you have that that market can penetrate in ag like it has in Europe?
Well, we have enough confidence to put that manufacturing capacity in Jefferson City, Tennessee. So we have a lot of confidence in it. We have a lot of confidence in it. We do a lot of research on these topics. So we take the Jefferson City, Tennessee plant. First of all, that's not new bricks and mortar. That was a defense operation. Our defense business was able to consolidate that operation into other plants in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It freed up all that entire facility where our JLG business could move in and expand tool up for telehandler production. And that also gives us the benefit of it frees up capacity in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania to do more booms because we still have constraints on our boom capacity. So it does two things for us. It lifts telehandler output, and it lifts boom output. And our customers need both.
We do a lot of research with our customers on brand preference, product preference. If it's going into ag, what's the product preference? We've done a lot of product development to do that to make sure that those products are going to deliver productivity. If it doesn't deliver productivity and safety, of course, customers are not going to adapt to it. But it will deliver productivity improvement in agriculture, and it'll deliver safety improvement. We're already delivering these units into the ag market in the U.S. We understand the demand that we see. We always look at this long-term as well. We look at what do we see between now and 10 years from now? We don't necessarily take a view of what do we see between now and three years from now.
We have to take a 10+ year view when we put new manufacturing capacity in place. So we are absolutely confident this is the right thing to do and that the demand for our product is there to support it.
Got it. Before we go further and see if from the audience if there's any questions, you got one over there.
You talked about on the last earnings call that finally your engineers, after having to deal with all the supply chain constraints over the past few years, they're finally freed up to focus more on product development specifically in access. So I'm curious now that they have more free time, where are they focusing their efforts in product innovation?
So you're absolutely right. So a lot of, we've got incredible engineering in our company, 1,700 engineers that work in product development alone across the enterprise. We were consuming a lot of that capacity. These are brilliant people. They were being consumed in the supply chain disruption period in resourcing activities. If we had a supplier that didn't have enough capacity, we'd have to add a second supplier. That takes a lot of engineering. When you're dealing with sophisticated components, engineered components, it takes a lot of engineering horsepower to make that happen. So they got consumed in that activity, and it's benefited us greatly. You see the results over the past year have been very, very good. A lot of that has to do with much of that work that was done. Now they're back doing product development work.
I think they're delighted to be because engineers love to work on new innovations and new product. We love our engineers to work on that stuff. That's the lifeblood of our company. But they're working on autonomous functionality. They're working on new Intelligent Products or digital products capabilities. We just introduced at Access Equipment ClearSky 2.0. This is a digital product or an Intelligent Products program where we do analytics on a real-time basis on data coming off of our machines. We're talking about thousands and thousands of machines and curating that data to deliver our customers with insights that help them be more productive. That's a new frontier for us, but it's going really well. The uptake on these products is phenomenal on our ClearSky 2.0 product. Because it's a new frontier, our engineers love to work on that type of a program.
They like to work on autonomous. They like to work on the electrification front. Those are the three primary areas I'd say it's going to: autonomy, electrification, and intelligent products programs.
That's good, John. Maybe just on vocational, one of the feedback I've heard a lot from investors is that it seems like maybe the guide for vocational from a top-line perspective maybe looked a little conservative. What do you say to that? And given the pricing momentum you have in fire and the tailwinds you noted earlier for AeroTech and certainly on the waste side, it seems like a pretty robust CapEx environment. Is this more a function of?
It's more a function of our capacity. So we're putting more capacity into Appleton, Wisconsin, where we make municipal fire trucks. We're putting now fire truck cabs into a new plant in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, along with electric zero-emission refuse and recycling collection vehicles. So that will help add capacity to that segment. AeroTech has also got capacity constraints. So we were really guided by the capacity that we have when we gave the guidance for vocational. Now, we will do everything we can to continue to move more throughput through our manufacturing plants. And we absolutely will get more throughput as we get into 2025 because some of the investments we're making in, say, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, really start to pay off with better production output. So that's the best way that I can describe it. It's really paced by our capacity.
Got it. And for Pierce, you mentioned here that the elevated fleet age. Can you just remind us in terms of the market size in North America? It used to be kind of a 5,000-unit market.
The market size is about 5,500 units today. These are very expensive vehicles, very complicated. Fire trucks are the most complicated vehicle we make. About 5,500 units. If you go all the way back to the Great Recession, the market dropped to, I think, 3,000 or 3,500 units. It really dropped that far because that was a real estate-driven collapse. We all lived through it. When real estate collapses, municipal budgets dry up because you don't have as much property tax receipt. Well, now municipal budgets are very, very healthy because property tax receipts are really strong. Now we're dealing with a situation where you have a lot of fire trucks which are 15-20 years old. That's when we say there's an aged fleet.
So municipalities are starting to say, "Hey, we can afford now to start to upgrade our fleets with new fire trucks." The other thing that's happening in that segment is we've got the Pierce Volterra electric municipal fire truck. We've had them in use now for almost three years. Phenomenal performance, performance benefits for the vehicle, cost savings in terms of operating costs on diesel, fuel, and maintenance. And a lot of municipalities love it just because of the sustainability of it. There's no emissions, and it's perfectly quiet. So we think that that's going to be a long-term demand driver, those electric municipal fire trucks. Fire trucks typically last 15 years. So the new technology and electric will continue to drive demand for many years in the future. And we expect it to just be steadily increasing over time. But that's a good driver for our business.
What about the upcoming EPA emissions in 2027? Does that apply to?
I think it's going to accelerate the demand towards our electric vehicles. Because in 2027, those emissions requirements get significantly more difficult to meet and therefore more costly to meet. So I think what you're going to see is municipalities saying, "Well, we can go to a more expensive diesel option that can meet those emissions, or maybe now's the time to just go electric." And so we think that it may just drive that demand faster.
Yeah. Is there any sense for what's in the backlog in terms of the stale or old pricing relative to how much of the kind of current pricing levels have you been able to flow through the P&L within?
Within fire numbers. Well, it's just starting to happen now. In 2024, we'll see a significant step change. That's a tough business to take through an inflationary period like we've been through because you can't do any repricing of the backlog. For example, in some markets, you can add a surcharge for a specific cost. These are bonded orders with municipalities. So you really just have to burn through the backlog before the new price takes effect. So the realization is a little bit longer. Good news is 2024 is where we really get to the latest price on those products.
Yeah. And then AeroTech, you showed a good market from a new commercial deliveries just given what Boeing and Airbus are scheduling. You mentioned the funding. I saw something this morning in the FAA. I mean, it's recently announced like $1 billion of airport funding. How does those funding dollars where does AeroTech's business fit into that in terms of a typical investment in new runways, etc.? Does that automatically drive kind of a replenishment of the fleet, or how does that work in terms of?
Well, what I can tell you, I'm not sure exactly how that funding that you just referred to, $1 billion, translates specifically to our product. But here's what I can tell you. Every time they want to expand capacity at an airline or an airport, they have to expand our equipment as part of that capacity expansion. So if United Airlines or Delta Air Lines or Southwest Airlines says they're going to add new airplanes, which they all want to do, every time you add an airplane, you have to add ground service equipment because that's what it takes to run an airplane efficiently. You need jet bridges. You need tractors to move jets around a runway. You need cargo loading equipment. You even need, in northern climates, de-icing equipment. That's our sweet spot. So this business also has a very healthy backlog. It's continuing to grow.
Everywhere you go, you see investments around the world, really. You see investments in airport expansions. One of the reasons we wanted to be more penetrated in the airport market is because we see this as a secular growth market for the foreseeable future.
I think I read somewhere recently there are more airports in the U.S. than McDonald's. Is that right?
Yeah.
There you go.
That's a good statistic.
Yeah. Yeah. Use that one. Yeah. So maybe just on the and then rounding out vocational on the commercial side, one of your big waste management customers is presenting nearby. And I think the messaging from the large national guys is their fleet ages have been elevated. They're starting to see some pickup in R&M expenses. Where are you in terms of going back to the point about getting stuff out and converting that backlog? How is that?
So the biggest constraint that we have had and what our customers have had, Waste Connections, who's in the adjacent room, WM, Republic, is there's been constraints on the chassis manufacturing industry. And today, all refuse and recycling collection vehicles are built on the back of a third-party chassis. And because the chassis industry has been dramatically constrained, our customers, we and our customers have not been able to put enough new vehicles into their fleets. And so that's easing up a little bit, but it's been slower than I think all of us would like. But it's starting to ease up. We're starting to get more chassis. So we'll make some nice progress in 2024. But that's also the reason that we developed our zero-emission side loader because this is not a third-party chassis. This is an Oshkosh developed, fully integrated refuse and recycling collection vehicle.
So number 1, it's electric, zero-emission, highly efficient. That's only the starting point. The better part of it is the cab is fully integrated with the functionality of the vehicle. In other words, it's not just a body put on the back of another chassis. Everything's integrated together. So the driver that's in the vehicle, the operator, can be ultimately productive. They can know exactly what's going on with the vehicle. We've automated functions that make it more intuitive for them to manage as they're doing everything else. Makes every stop quicker. And when every stop gets quicker, productivity goes up. And that's what our fleet customers love to see. And that's why we developed that vehicle. Now, that's in its infancy. We're just starting to manufacture it now in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. But that'll be, I believe, a big part of the future of the industry.
Consumers like you and I will love it because it'll be silent when it comes by our house.
That's good. In the remaining time, John, let's hit on the defense segment, kind of hopefully at the low point from a profitability perspective. Now, you got some big new programs starting up. Just maybe spend a minute or two on what you're seeing there.
Yeah. So our defense business is going through a big transformation. And it's going towards so we're seeing the wind down at the end of 2024 of the primary JLTV. That's Joint Light Tactical Vehicle contract. We'll still make JLTVs. We'll make them for international customers. And we'll make them for specialty applications for the Department of Defense. But we'll make a lot fewer of them because the primary contract winds up at the end of the year. But we start the postal service. The first unit goes into production next week. And the postal service will ramp in. It will do low-rate production in 2024. We'll start to really ramp up in 2025 and have a first full year of production in 2026. So that's a really good it's a government program. It's not defense, but it's a government vehicle.
So that's a really nice program to be taking off as JLTV is winding down. In addition to that, we still have very valuable portfolio of core defense businesses from our FHTV. That's the heavy vehicles to the FMTV, the medium vehicles to various trailers. You see one on this slide to the Stryker MCWS combat vehicle. We're doing prototypes of fully autonomous vehicles, the Robotic Combat Vehicle. This is a good portfolio of businesses. So our defense business in the future is going to be a bit smaller because we don't have that primary JLTV contract. But we've still got a good portfolio of businesses of over $1 billion. And we have the opportunity to reprice those products in 2025, 2026, which will start to bring the margins back to where they should be.
Currently, they're still suffering from inflation and not being able to get realized price from inflation. We'll correct that over the next couple of years. The portfolio is going to look different in the future. It's going to be just as much delivery vehicles as it is core defense vehicles.
Excellent. Good stuff, John. Thank you. And, Pat, as well, thank you guys for being here as always. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Tim.
Thank you.
Thank you.