At the ARA Show in New Orleans in February, Equipment World caught up with Leandro Lecheta, CNH Industrial’s head of construction equipment for North America. Lecheta oversees both the Case Construction Equipment and New Holland Construction Equipment brands and the CNH Industrial Aftermarket Solutions business — the company’s parts and service organization.
Below he shares his thoughts on the state of the industry, the possible impact of the presidential election, if more heavy machine launches are on the horizon, and where the company is placing its technology bets.
CNH Industrial
Lecheta: We are technically defining it as a mixed bag. Residential is slowing down a little bit because of interest rates, except for some spots in Arizona and Texas that are still okay. Non-residential is also declining a little bit, especially because we built too many warehouses last year. Manufacturing is okay but not a major investment area.
Then, you have another bucket, which is all the infrastructure projects, which are moving at an attainable pace. When it was launched, we were concerned about, ‘Hey, it's going to happen too fast, and we're not going to have machines, operators, or anything ready.’ But at the end of the day, the speed of the execution was okay, and everybody's tracking.
But now, there is a big question mark about elections. Internally, if Biden gets reelected, we just get through. If Trump gets reelected, things can change overnight. I don't think he's going to stop everything, but to be honest, he’s probably going to say, ‘hey, you know what? We're not investing the money in the right spots, stop everything.’ And then a few months later, he's going to come out with a Trump program because infrastructure in the U.S. is much needed.”
The other big piece of it is just the talk of the recession. We started talking about the recession probably around July or August of last year. The problem with recession is that when you start talking about it, everybody can decide to push it back. So, the rental business has been really down over the last three to four months.
