Highest Retained Value Award Winners
EquipmentWatch is pleased to announce the 2021 Highest Retained Value Award (HRVA) winners. The awards are a culmination of more than 100 analyst hours reviewing and ranking more than 25,000 models to decide on this year’s 30 award categories covering construction, lift/access, and agricultural equipment, all powered by EquipmentWatch’s industry-leading database and more than 8.5 million market observations. In addition to announcing the 2021 winners, we’ve put together a primer on what these retained values mean and how to integrate them into your buying decisions. Read on to learn more about retained values or to skip to the list of winners.
Retained value
Simply put, retained values are what you can anticipate a piece of equipment to be worth after a given period of time. For EquipmentWatch’s HRVAs the time horizon we have chosen is five years, so the retained values shown here are the anticipated values for a piece of equipment five years from now.
Retained values are inseparable from the concept of depreciation, which is a measure of how far a piece of equipment’s value decreases over time. Retained values are an integral part of equipment purchase and maintenance. At every step, from the rent/buy decisions to leasing operations and fleet management, knowing and understanding retained values can provide powerful insights into the optimal choice.
EquipmentWatch’s retained values are calculated using market data, depreciation standards, and our proprietary algorithm. For more information on our methodology, click here.
Percentage vs. Dollar value
Depreciation and retained values are inherently reliant upon purchase price. With so many ways to adjust the value of a piece of equipment, which varies based on utilization, region, condition, components, and more, it would be difficult to estimate exact dollar values in this analysis to cover every possible variation. Instead, we measure retained values as the average percentage of initial value retained after five years for equipment purchased new or on the used market. For the HRVAs specifically, we based our analysis on newly purchased, current model year equipment.
This approach provides you with an apples-to-apples way to compare equipment brands and provides us with a clear and unbiased way to choose winners for the HRVAs. Using percentages eliminates confusion when comparing brands that may have materially different purchase prices and an asset with a higher dollar value at the end of the 5-year-period may have simply started out with a higher original cost.
Award categories
The EquipmentWatch HRVAs cover 30 categories across construction, lift/access, and agricultural equipment. The categories capture the most popular types of equipment based on annual observed market activity1. Within each award category, our analysis focused on the most popular brands, again based on observed market activity, and we limited any model level analysis to models still being produced in 2021 to ensure these results can be applied to buying decisions today and throughout the year.
In addition to EquipmentWatch’s HRVAs, our sister brand Price Digests has also announced the winners of their Highest Retained Value Awards for nine categories of commercial trucks. Read more about the commercial truck winners.
EquipmentWatch HRVA Winner Profiles
This year, 13 unique manufacturers claimed the top spots across the 30 award categories. The winners include; Bobcat, Case IH, Caterpillar, Deere, Genie, Hagie, JCB, Komatsu, Kubota, MEC, New Holland, Toyota, and Volvo. Several winners, such as Caterpillar, Deere, and Genie have secured HRVA victories previously, but some, such MEC and Hagie were new to the awards.
What each winner had in common was that their equipment had the highest retained value. To illustrate this further and give you a better sense of retained value differences in the equipment landscape, we have showcased a few winning manufacturers below.
Award Category: Loaders Wheel Medium
Winner: Volvo
Within the Medium Wheel Loaders award category, Volvo’s 5-year retained value was nearly 15 percentage points higher than the average for the category. In terms of market share1, Volvo was not the highest at 8.11%, but their 5-year retained value was 53.65% compared to a category average of 39.09%.
Award Category: Lift Trucks Warehouse Narrow Aisle
Winner: Toyota
Toyota is a familiar name in the Narrow Aisle Warehouse Lift Trucks award category, with the brand making up 41.56% of the used market observations1. Toyota was a clear winner in this category, with a 5-year retained value nearly 23 percentage points higher than the category average.
Award Category: Tractors Track
Winner: Case IH
Case IH is obviously a well-known name within agricultural equipment overall, although the brand had a relatively modest market share1 of 4.88% for the Track Tractors award category. Case IH easily secured the HRVA victory for this category, though, with its 5-year residual value of 54.61% – substantially higher than the award category average of 37.79%.
View the full list of EquipmentWatch’s Highest Retained Value Awards.
In addition to EquipmentWatch’s 2021 Highest Retained Value Awards, we are also excited to share with you the 2021 Lowest Cost of Ownership award winners! View our LCO award winners.
EquipmentWatch produces the leading database information products for the construction equipment industry and is the world leader in heavy construction research and intelligence, serving more than 15,000 professional, high-volume contractors, equipment manufacturers, dealers, rental companies, lenders and insurers, and government agencies involved in heavy civil and commercial construction. You can request a custom analysis from our seasoned EquipmentWatch consulting team.
[1] Market share calculations based on observed resale channel activity throughout 2020.