Among the five top skid steer brands with the highest brand premiums, JCB had the highest overall brand premium in Q3 2021, while Deere had the lowest.
Key Takeaways for Decision Makers
RENTER/SELLER: If looking to secure the highest premium on the resale market, consider going with JCB or Mustang. Be aware, though, that Mustang’s highest brand premiums are for 5 to 10-year-old assets whereas JCB’s best brand premiums are for 2 to 8-year-old assets.
FINANCE: The best skid steer brands to finance are the ones that have the longest useful life and garner the highest premiums, such as Mustang or Bobcat.
EQUIPMENT MANAGER: Owners of New Holland or Gehl skid steer loaders might be better off holding onto them and seeing if they can rebound, while someone looking to purchase a skid steer loader should consider buying these brands due to their low premiums.
Why is Brand Premium Important for Skid Steer Brands?
How important is a brand name in the skid steer loader 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 skid steer loaders 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 340,000 skid steer loader observations. The brand premium is the percentage difference between the brand’s average asking price and the average for all skid steer loaders in our market data. We chose these ten brands because they make up over 98% of the used market for skid steer loaders. Brand premiums are important to understand because they provide insight as to which brands have the highest perceived value.
Best Skid Steer Brands by Brand Premium
As can be seen in the first brand premium graph at the top of this page, JCB has the highest brand premium in Q3 2021, with Mustang a distant second. We can see that prior to Q2 2020, Caterpillar’s brand premium was much closer to JCB’s, but from there JCB truly pulls ahead of the other brands. Two of the five brands had an overall increase in their brand premium over the past three years. Mustang increased from -2.0% in Q3 2018 to 1.6% in Q3 2021 and Deere increased from -6.4% to 0.4%.
Lower Brand Premiums for Skid Steer Brands
Among the five brands of skid steer loaders with lower brand premiums, Volvo had the highest overall brand premium as of Q3 2021, while New Holland and Gehl were tied with 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 Volvo having the highest of the brand premiums at -1.2%. Despite being above the other brands in this section, Volvo also had the largest decrease in brand premium, dropping from 3.3% to -1.2% across the period. Kubota saw the biggest improvement in its brand premium across the three years, increasing from -10.6% to -4.5%.
Skid Steer Brand Market Share and Retained Value
In terms of popularity among the ten brands, Bobcat is the most popular capturing more than 30% of the overall resale channel market share, with Caterpillar and Deere rounding out the top three. These three brands alone accounted for two-thirds of the resale skid steer loader observations across the three years analyzed. In terms of retaining their value, skid steer loaders from Bobcat and Kubota in particular do quite well, winning the EquipmentWatch 2021 Highest Retained Value Awards for Small Skid Steer Loaders and Large Skid Steer Loaders, respectively.
Average Ages for the Top 10 Skid Steer Brands
The brand with the highest overall average age in the graph below is Mustang and the brand with the lowest overall average age is JCB.
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 Mustang had the highest average age across the full three years, jumping to 9.3 years in Q3 2021. JCB has the lowest average age of the five brands, coming in at just 4.6 years as of Q3 2021. This very low average age is mainly due to JCB only offering skid steers specifically designed for the U.S. since 2012. Four of the five brands saw an increase in average age over the past three years, with only Deere seeing a slight decrease of 0.4 years and Caterpillar seeing the largest increase across the period of 1.7 years.
In the second age graph, we see that Kubota has the lowest average age of any brand, averaging just 3.2 years as of Q3 2021. This is likely due to the fact that Kubota has only offered this type of equipment since 2014. New Holland and Volvo tied for the highest average age at 8.4 years as of Q3 2021. All five of these brands saw their average age increase over the past three years, with Volvo seeing the largest overall increase of 2.9 years.
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