The Evolving Forklift Market: Electrification, Tariffs, and Remarketing Insights

Forklifts.

As Kelly mentioned, the Momentum Monitor, which the ELFA publishes, um, tracks equipment by, um, categories, right? And for the purpose of sort of rolling up, uh, forklifts roll into the, uh, construction bucket, right? And the construction bucket is probably about 4%, maybe, uh, of, of, of equipment that's financed in the US, which when I see that number, shocks me, because I think of it as such a large industry.

Um, I know that c- forklifts are 100% of your business.

So let's kind of dive into this and say, what's covered under the umbrella of forklifts? W- what can you tell us about that?

Sure, yeah.

Um, well, forklifts kind of roll up into material handling, which then rolls into construction.

Um, typically, you know, we, we use the general reference for forklifts, uh, as material handling equipment, uh, which includes traditional forklifts, large and small, reach trucks, order pickers, three-wheelers, turret trucks, scissor lifts, personnel carriers, golf carts.

Really anything that moves something from point A to point B, um, that is not yellow iron.

So, um, a, a lot of other things in- including, you know, pallet jacks, smaller electric items, um, even some manual assets as well, manual pallet jacks.

Um, but, but most of it is either gas or electric powered.

So can we put some sort of a, a number or a value, um, on how large that market is or how it's measured?

Sure, yeah.

I mean, there's no accurate, completely accurate way to measure the North American forklift market.

Um, but we have found using ITA, um, their reports, um, they measure all the new sales reporting and sales and leased assets in the, in North American market.

Uh, the problem is not all f- mainstream forklift manufacturers do report into ITA.

Um, so we use the data that I'm sure you see as well.

Um, estimates are at about in the $10 billion range for new sales in the United States for 2024.

Um, and we estimate that to, you know, 4 to 6% increase year over year.

Okay.

And so wh- when you put that $10 billion number out there, and that is a huge number, um, the fact that it's underreported probably means that it's, it's even larger, right?

Most likely it's, it's gonna be a little bit larger than that, um, yeah, considering, um, you know, not all forklift brands do report into those reports.

From the perspective of publishing data, um, we're in the process of updating our industry market sizing data, and we'll have that ready to publish later this fall.

This is where we get our $1 trillion number that estimates the size of the equipment finance market.

And there are a bunch of breakouts, um, that come through that.

So I encourage everyone to stay tuned for the breakouts of that data as, as that data comes out too.