JLG: Strong demand for access in foreseeable future

JLG has reported its full-year 2022 results with overall sales increasing year-over-year by 18.8% from $3.34 billion to $3.97 billion. For the fourth quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2022, overall sales increased 28.8% to $1.07 billion.

(Photo: JLG)

Looking at JLG’s aerial and telehandler sales for the full year, aerials were up 21% year-over-year at $1.95 billion while telehandler sales soared to $1.17 billion, an increase of 37% YoY. For its fourth quarter, aerial sales saw a 30% increase to $540.7 million while telehandlers were up 51.5% to $319.3 million.

The company’s backlog at the end of December 2022 remained at historical levels, sitting at $4.36 billion, up 22% YoY.

Speaking to investors on Jan. 31, Oshkosh President and CEO John Pfeifer said supply chain challenges limited JLG’s production output, but the company has seen improvements, particularly in December 2022 when supplier on-time delivery metrics climbed above 70% for the first time in several months.

Pfeifer went on to add, “While this is still well below our historical level of 90% plus on-time delivery, it represents improvement. The team at [JLG] made progress by qualifying additional suppliers, dual sourcing and leveraging alternate sourcing strategies. The team resourced more than $270 million of parts in the past year with plans to do more in 2023 to further improve supply chain performance. We also continue to implement changes to our products and processes to improve both output and manufacturing efficiencies.”

Pfeifer said demand remains “very strong” for JLG products and is being driven by “strong utilization rates, elevated fleet ages and the large number of mega projects underway across the United States. In fact, the percentage of access equipment in rental fleets deployed the mega projects, which are generally defined as projects with a value of $400 million or more has more than doubled over historical levels.

“We expect that mega projects, including factories for EVs, batteries and chips as well as non-residential projects such as data centers and healthcare facilities will continue to contribute to strong demand for our equipment for the foreseeable future. We ended the quarter with a record backlog of nearly $4.4 billion. Fourth quarter orders were strong once again at $1.55 billion, and we continue to have visibility to demand well beyond our current backlog.”

As a whole, Oshkosh reported net sales for fiscal 2022 of $8.28 billion and net income of $173.9 million.