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

Michael Feniger: Just following up on the solar comments in the oil and gas portfolio. E&T was a dominant driver of earnings seven to eight years ago with leading margins for Cat. It’s one of the only segments you’re not getting that double digit pricing right now. It’s lagged the others. Do you see room for that to pick up following this reversal of underinvestment the last few years? And is there anything structurally keeping Cat from returning to those prior peak margins in E&T?

James Umpleby III: You may recall that we put through price increases later in E&T than we did with machines just based on the market dynamics that existed at the time. So having said that, as I mentioned, particularly in oil and gas and power generation, market is quite strong. And we expect our volumes, certainly in oil and gas, to increase. And we’re dealing with in kind of oil and gas still some supply chain challenges. So we’re dealing with that. That factor was your ramp up. So, our, again, I mentioned earlier, very strong fourth quarter, but still very robust order rates coming in and a lot of quotation activity. So, again, we do expect that E&T to improve in 2023. And I won’t try to compare it to where they were a few years ago. I’m going to say that the business is strong and improving.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Nicole DeBlase with Deutsche Bank.

Nicole DeBlase: I just wanted to dig into the manufacturing cost side of the price cost equation. It sounds to me, reading through the comments you made in response to an earlier question, that you still expect manufacturing costs to be a headwind year-on-year in 2023. Can you just kind of talk through the big components of that, materials versus freight, and why we shouldn’t expect at some point in 2023 for manufacturing costs to become a tailwind?

Andrew Bonfield: There’s a couple of factors, obviously, that come into that. Material costs will still be a headwind, we expect. Some of that is material is cost inflation that we’re still seeing through this year. Some of that material cost inflation is not just necessarily commodity costs. Some of it will be labor cost and some of it will include energy costs. So, all of those factors we are anticipating will moderate as we go through the year. We are starting to see signs of lower levels of requests for price increases coming from suppliers. So that’s a positive sign. And hopefully, as things unwind through the year, some of that will moderate. Again, we have not €“ in our planning assumptions, we base our pricing actions on what we’re assuming from a manufacturing cost perspective. And obviously, we’ll take action as appropriate if we need to, if there are greater increases than we’re currently expecting in manufacturing costs in 2023.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Chad Dillard with Bernstein.

Chad Dillard: In China, I know you mentioned that you’re expecting levels to be below 2022, at least on the end market perspective, but maybe you could talk about just what you’re seeing in your €“ in the channel from an inventory perspective relative to, I guess, normalized levels? And then, how should we think about the business, now that you have the GX series for a full China’s cycle.

James Umpleby III: Again, just to reiterate, we had a couple of really strong years in China in 2020, 2021. And we had saw softening in 2022. And again, we don’t see signs of improvement at this point. We continue to invest in new products to try to maintain our competitiveness with new products. So that’s continuing. And we’ve been pleased with the response to those new products, including the GX. But that above 10 ton excavator market, we do expect to be weaker in 2023 than it was in 2022. And the inventory in the fourth quarter versus the build in the prior year is lower.