Just found out Patten Caterpillar has been bought by Altorfer Cat. Patten used to have Chicagoland all to themselves. With Altorfer acquiring them , that gives them all of Illinois and a big chunk of Iowa with no competition. So much for not being able to monopolize a product. Oh well, not a fan of Scatterpillar anyway.
That's probably not the last time this year you will hear of larger Cat dealers "buying out" smaller dealers.
I'm hearing scuttlebutt that Caterpillar wants big fish to gobble all the little ones. International truck did that out here about 12-15 years ago. There are no independent dealers left to my knowledge. JMJ in Joliet was the last holdout iirc. All their dealers are corporate entities operating under Rush International. No competition, not cool. They can dictate everything, if you're invested in a product, you're stuck, and I don't think people will flood Ritchie bros with Cats to jump to another product like Deere or Komatsu
Its the same with all the Construction brands, farm machinery, cars, trucks, and most everything else to.
Yep. Local John Deere dealer at home was bought out by Sloan. They have a good chuck of the ag market here and Martin Sullivan has a good chunk of construction.
Well at least it is not like Cummins yet, they bought out all their dealers and now you have to deal with the mother ship for every little part, might as well talk to the wall.
I don't have any Cat equipment ...... I reckon if they wanted to take me over they better bring there lunch ..... LOL !
I think Finning's still got them beat. As far as I know they're Cat's largest dealer network right now.
So, when you look at it. Where do monopoly and antitrust laws come into place. "We're not saying you have to buy ours or theirs, but if you buy ours, it's gonna be from us." How is that free market? Oh well. It's a poop sandwich and everyone gets a bite.
Hard to argue when you consider Finning having all of Central/Western Canada, the UK, & all the bottom end of S. America (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, & Uruguay). The sticking point about "largest" was always how was it measured. Size of territory, number of employees, $ turnover ...? One of the biggest Cat dealers in the world has always been Trakindo who only have Indonesia as a territory.
Not here. If you don't like Cat you can go to Komatsu, Deere, etc. It is their prerogative to run their network however they want and trust me, it would be worse if it was all owned back in Illinois like Cummins in Indiana.
Actually the Cat dealers are already being run by the manufacturer. Cat comes in and tells them how they are going to do business.
That's every dealer though. Cat can't shut down their business, but they can lose their ability to be a Cat dealer. Personally, I think the dealer model is very out dated and broken. I live in the Cat motherland, and even here the dealer never has parts in stock. It's always a day or two away. If I have to order the part and wait for it to ship, what's the point of the dealer? I might as well order right from the mother ship. We have Altorfer here. They have a track shop, injection shop, truck shop, equipment shop, and a whole other facility for stationary power (generators). Then they also have a rental facility that rents out Cat and many other brands of equipment. The place is absolutely huge.
I've worked at five other major dealers in various capacities. The Cat model is truly unique in the amount of control Cat lays on its dealers and the directions if forces them to pursue. I'm quite sure that Patton Cat was at the least pressured into the sale if not directly forced into it. The odd part of the manufacturer/dealer model is that, in this state at least, the manufacturer is not allowed to sell direct to the public in most cases. You can't buy an auto, truck or a piece of equipment directly from the manufacturer. But in the case of Caterpillar it appears the owners of the dealerships are only proxies providing a pathway around a law.
In my experience with cat our dealer was awesome till about 2006 third generation took over completely hired accountants to run everything ousted most of the experienced sales guys parts went down hill big time That's about the time they started the attitude of were cat so you don't have a choice I was dealing with an engineer from the backhoe division recently and his attitude and everyone else that I talked to from the mother ship and high up at the dealer was you are so lucky you can pay us to run cat so we started looking at deere real hard I have learned with dealers it only matters how much the people care about you if your service is lacking its cause your not valued
Finning in Alberta tried to break the union and it backfired on them. They moved all their parts to a logistics company and then they couldn't even give you a time your parts might arrive. Before they could tell exactly what warehouse they were in, when they shipped and when they'll be there. Usually the next day if ordered in the morning. When they switched, it could be 3 or 4 days but we can't say for certain. Cost at least 1 of their biggest customers a lot of money and they went back to doing parts in-house. Oddly I don't think Finning is the biggest dealer in N. America but world wide they are. They don't even have a service counter here. I hate pricing parts at Finning. A new oil pressure gauge was close to $100 and didn't come with the rubber gasket where it goes in the dash. They wanted something like $4 just for that gasket. I went to an independent shop and got an IPD gauge with the gasket for under $20. Might not be as accurate but tells me I have oil pressure. The original gauge started leaking and getting worse.
I thought so too