Among the five brands of wheel loaders with the highest brand premiums, Caterpillar had the highest overall brand premium in Q3 2021, while JCB 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 Deere. Be aware, though, that Deere’s highest brand premiums are primarily for assets that are 14 years old or older, whereas Caterpillar has consistently good brand premiums for assets of nearly every age.
FINANCE: The best wheel loader brands to finance are the ones that have the longest useful life and garner the highest premiums, such as Caterpillar or New Holland.
EQUIPMENT MANAGER: Owners of Hyundai or Kawasaki wheel loaders might be better off holding onto them and seeing if they can rebound, while someone looking to purchase a wheel loader should consider buying these brands due to their low premiums.
Why is Brand Premium Important for Wheel Loader Brands?
How important is a brand name in the wheel 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 wheel 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 415,000 wheel loader observations. The brand premium is the percentage difference between the brand’s average asking price and the average for all wheel loaders in our market data. We chose these ten brands because they make up over 95% of the used market for wheel loaders. Brand premiums are important to understand because they provide insight as to which brands have the highest perceived value.
Best Wheel Loader 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, with Deere a close second. These two brands were the only two with brand premiums above the average for the full three years analyzed. New Holland saw the greatest improvement in its brand premium, climbing from -16.0% in Q3 2018 to -6.7% in Q3 2021.
Lower Brand Premiums for Wheel Loader Brands
Among the five brands of wheel loaders with lower brand premiums, Volvo had the highest overall brand premium as of Q3 2021, while Hyundai 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 Volvo having the highest of the brand premiums at -11.2%. Of these five brands, Doosan was the only to see its brand premium improve over the three years, increasing from -17.9% in Q3 2018 to -15.0% in Q3 2021.
Wheel Loader Brand Market Share and Retained Value
In terms of popularity among the ten brands, Caterpillar is the most popular capturing more than 40% of the overall resale channel market share, with Deere and Volvo rounding out the top three. These three brands alone accounted for more than 70% of the resale wheel loader observations across the three years analyzed. In terms of retaining their value, wheel loaders from Caterpillar and Volvo perform particularly well, winning the EquipmenwWatch 2021 Highest Retained Value Awards for small, medium, and large wheel loaders.
Average Ages for the Top 10 Wheel Loader Brands
The brand with the highest overall average age in the graph below is New Holland 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 New Holland had the highest average age across most of the three years and that its average age increased from 9.5 years in Q3 2018 to 10.3 years in Q3 2021. JCB has the lowest average age of these five brands, at just 6.8 years as of Q3 2021, but Deere is quite close at 7.0 years.
The brand with the highest overall average age in the below graph is Kawasaki and the brand with the lowest overall average age is Doosan.
In the second age graph, we see that Kawasaki has the highest average age at 10.3 years as of Q3 2021, overtaking Komatsu who had a higher average age in seven of the thirteen quarters analyzed. Doosan maintained the lowest average age throughout the full three years, despite the fact that it also rose from 4.6 years in Q3 2018 to 6.3 years in Q3 2021—a 1.7 year increase.
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