Among the five brands of telehandlers with the highest brand premiums, Caterpillar had the highest overall brand premium in Q3 2021, while JLG had the lowest.
Key Takeaways for Decision Makers
RENTER/SELLER: If looking to secure the highest premium on the resale market, consider going with Caterpillar or Lull. Be aware, though, that Lull’s highest brand premiums are for 7 to 9-year-old assets whereas Caterpillar has consistently good brand premiums for assets up to 14-years-old.
FINANCE: The best telehandler brands to finance are the ones that have the longest useful life and garner the highest premiums, such as Lull, JCB, or JLG.
EQUIPMENT MANAGER: Owners of Terex or Gehl telehandlers might be better off holding onto them and seeing if they can rebound, while someone looking to purchase a telehandler should consider buying these brands due to their low premiums.
Why is Brand Premium Important for Telehandler Brands?
How important is a brand name in the telehandler market? Millions of dollars in advertising, marketing, and brand awareness are spent each year by major OEMs in this space, and they’re mostly geared towards the sale of new equipment. On the secondary market, the impact of the manufacturer on the fair market value can be harder to determine. At EquipmentWatch, we turn to a metric known as brand premium to better understand this topic.
In this article, our brand premiums are based off quarterly average asking prices on the resale channel for telehandlers within each brand. Average asking prices across the full resale channel are used as our baseline. The graphs within this article were created by isolating the impact of brand name by holding remaining factors such as age and equipment size constant across more than 260,000 telehandler observations. The brand premium is the percentage difference between the brand’s average asking price and the average for all telehandlers in our market data. We chose these ten brands because they make up over 96% of the used market for telehandlers. Brand premiums are important to understand because they provide insight as to which brands have the highest perceived value.
Best Telehandler Brands by Brand Premium
As can be seen in the first brand premium graph at the top of this page, Caterpillar has the highest brand premium in Q3 2021 and was the highest throughout the full three years analyzed. Lull and Manitou both saw impressive improvements to their brand premiums between Q3 2018 and Q3 2021, with Lull increasing from -3.7% to 7.1% and Manitou climbing from -10.1% to 2.9%.
Lower Brand Premiums for Telehandler Brands
Among the five brands of telehandlers with lower brand premiums, Sky Trak had the highest overall brand premium as of Q3 2021, while Terex had the lowest brand premium.
Looking at the second brand premium graph, we see that none of these five brands have a premium higher than the average as of Q3 2021, with Sky Trak having the highest of the brand premiums at -2.7%. Despite the fact that Skyjack ended up at -4.2% as of Q3 2021, its brand premium did peek above the 0% line in seven of the quarters. Terex was the only one of these five brands to see its brand premium improve over the three years, increasing from -14.5% in Q3 2018 to -12.4% in Q3 2021.
Telehandler Brand Market Share and Retained Value
In terms of popularity among the ten brands, JLG is the most popular capturing more than 20% of the overall resale channel market share, with Sky Trak a close second. Caterpillar, Genie, and JCB each accounted for about 15%, meaning that these top five brands captured more than 85% of the resale activity over the three years analyzed. In terms of retaining their value, telehandlers from JCB perform particularly well, winning the EquipmentWatch 2021 Highest Retained Value Award in the Telehandler Lift Truck category.
Average Ages for the Top 10 Telehandler Brands
The brand with the highest overall average age in the graph below is Lull and the brand with the lowest overall average age is Manitou.
Average age is important to understand because it details which brands are staying on the market the longest. When looking at the first age graph (above), we can see that Lull had the highest average age across the full three years, jumping to 14.4 years in Q3 2021. Manitou has the lowest average age of the five brands, coming in at just 5.4 years as of Q3 2021. Four of the five brands saw an increase in average age over the past three years, with only Manitou seeing a decrease of 1 year and JLG seeing the largest increase across the period of 1.7 years.
The brand with the highest overall average age in the below graph is Terex and the brand with the lowest overall average age is Skyjack.
In the second age graph, we see that Skyjack has the lowest average age of any brand, averaging just 3.8 years as of Q3 2021. Terex had by far the highest average age across the full three years, climbing from 12.5 years in Q3 2018 to 17.2 years in Q3 2021. While Terex had the biggest increase in average age, the other four brands also saw their ages increase over the time period.
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