Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE:CAT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jamie Cook: I guess my question, can you talk for 2023 where’s your opportunity to put through incremental price and where you see deflation? And the question just comes from, Jim, just the incremental margins that you’ve put up in the fourth quarter were fairly impressive. So I’m just wondering how big sort of the price cost tailwind can be in 2023 with the strong pricing actions and supply chain easing and potentially deflation in some areas.

James Umpleby III: Well, Jamie, certainly, when we think about price actions, we take a number of things into account. Certainly, we take into account the increases from our suppliers in cost. We also, of course, pay very close attention to competitive market and always striving to provide more value to our customers. So it’s difficult for us to make a prediction as to what will happen. And we demonstrated the ability to pass along price when we need to because of inflationary factors. But again, we always keep competition in mind as well. So again, pleased at how we’re doing so far and the way we’re managing that balance.

Andrew Bonfield: As I think we’ve said from a planning assumptions perspective, obviously, there is some carryover price impacting us, in particular in the first half of the year. As we expect to go through the year, we expect that benefit of price to moderate in the second half. But also, we expect the increases in manufacturing costs to continue to moderate as we go through the year. But, obviously, that’s a planning assumption. And as always the case, that is predicated on the assumption that input inflation does moderate. And as Jim said, we’ll obviously keep an eye open on that and take pricing actions accordingly.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jerry Revich with Goldman Sachs.

Jerry Revich: I’m wondering if you’d just talk about your production plan in Construction Industries? What are you folks looking for in terms of decision to potentially curtail production if we do continue to see dealer inventory builds ahead of expectation? Just if you could just touch on the key indicators that you’re looking at and how can we gradually affect that production slowdown if that’s indeed what we need to do over the course of 2023?

James Umpleby III: Certainly, again, we obviously pay very close attention to what’s happening in the marketplace. We pay attention to STUs. Dealers or independent businesses make their own decisions about inventory. But, certainly, we do work with them. And the last thing we want to do is to have too much inventory in the channel. As it occurs today, as we mentioned earlier, we’re now back in our normal typical range. And still, we still have many dealers that would like more equipment from us to support customer orders. So we talked about the fact that non-resi is 75% of Construction Industries. And it is still quite robust and strong, and we expect it to grow. Yes, some moderation in residential. But, again, 75% is non-resi.

So, again, as we always do, we’ll pay close attention to the market and we’ll modify our production plans as appropriate. But there are still some products that we need to produce more of, quite frankly, and we’re still dealing with some supply chain issues in some areas. So it’s not a one size fits all answer. We talked about the fact that China is slow and we expect it to continue to be slow, below 2022 levels, but in many areas demand is still quite strong.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of David Raso with Evercore.