Among the five brands of electric scissor lifts, MEC has the highest overall brand premium based on the past three years of data, while Snorkel has the lowest overall brand premium.
Key Takeaways for Decision Makers
RENTER/SELLER: If looking to secure the highest premium on the resale market, considering going with MEC or JLG. Be aware, though, that MEC’s highest brand premiums are primarily for 6 to 9-year-old assets, whereas JLG has consistently good brand premiums for assets of nearly every age.
FINANCE: The best electric scissor lift brands to finance are the ones that have the longest useful life and garner the highest premiums, such as JLG.
EQUIPMENT MANAGER: Owners of Snorkel or Skyjack electric scissor lifts might be better off holding onto them and seeing if they can rebound, while someone looking to purchase an electric scissor lift should consider buying these brands due to their low premiums.
Why is Brand Premium Important for Electric Scissor Lift Brands?
How important is a brand name in the electric scissor lift 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 electric scissor lifts 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 300,000 electric scissor lift 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 five brands because they make up over 98% of the used market for electric scissor lifts. Brand premiums are important to understand because they provide insight as to which brands have the highest perceived value.
Best Electric Scissor Lift Brands by Brand Premium
As can be seen in the brand premium graph at the top of this page, MEC has the highest brand premium in Q3 2021, with JLG a distant second. Snorkel has the lowest brand premium at -15.9% as of Q3 2021. MEC and Snorkel both stand out not just because they have the highest and lowest brand premiums, but also due to the volatility of their brand premiums from quarter to quarter. This volatility is due to the lower market share for these brands, making up just under 2% of the resale observations combined. Looking beyond MEC and Snorkel, we can see that JLG has shown steady and significant improvement in its brand premium, rising from -1.0% in Q3 2018 to 13.9% in Q3 2021. Over the same period Skyjack’s brand premium moved in the opposite direction, from 8.3% to -5.3%.
In terms of average prices, MEC had the highest average asking pricings. This was due partly to the brand offering some larger electric scissor lift options, but higher average prices were not isolated to just their larger equipment. MEC is also known to retain its value quite well, winning the EquipmentWatch 2021 Highest Retained Value Award in the Electric Scissor Lift category.
Average Ages for the Top 5 Electric Scissor Lift Brands
The brand with the highest overall average age is Snorkel and the brand with the lowest overall average age is Genie.
Average age is important to understand because it details which brands are staying on the market the longest. From reviewing the chart above, we see that Snorkel has the highest average age by far, surging to 12.5 years as of Q3 2021. The remaining brands are closer in age to one another, ranging from Genie’s 6.6 years on the low end to JLG’s 7.6 years on the higher end.
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