i was curious whether the pcar earnings conf call on 10/25/2012 would say anything about ng trucks or ng engines. i found the transcript (which by the way is done usually by a non-native english speaker to save money by seekingalpha.com) and pulled the only Q&A about it (below). the paccar ceo does not sound excited to me from what i read. i am somewhat dubious that kenworth and peterbilt are the market leaders in ng trucks, bwdik.
i do have a question, and that is does pcar design and mfg. its own ng engines? if not, does pcar buy them from cummins engine, cmi? do any of you know?
Jeffrey A. Kauffman - Sterne Agee & Leach Inc., Research Division And we're talking about evolution in the truck market, and you were talking about the 13- versus 15-liter. Can I get your thoughts on the adoption rate of natural gas engines?
Mark C. Pigott - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Executive Committee
Sure. There's been several very well-attended and I think excellent speakers at a number of natural gas conferences over the last few months, and we've been involved with a number of them. This is a great industry because, in many ways, we're really a leader and on particularly a lot of the environmental aspects. If you go back a number of years and start with hybrids. And I think on the car side, probably the Toyota Prius gets most of the credit for pioneering that, and I think they're still the largest seller of hybrid cars I think worldwide. There are a lot of discussion about how fast would hybrids take over, and you could read lots of different press and they throw a lot of numbers out. At the end of the day, it's still only 1% to 2% at that. And there's a lot of reasons why it's not higher, but that's what it is. It's an interesting statistic, and I think it's accurate, but you can never tell that. Less than 25% of all hybrid owners buy another one. Okay, what does that mean? I think if you look at, say, Apple computers, probably something over 90% buy another Apple computer. So the whole press got excited about it, and it's still good, and we still sell hybrid. And a number of our customers have great benefit from it, then it goes into the electric introduction. And whether it's our government or other groups saying you're going to pour billions of dollars into electric cars -- and there are certainly some real benefits to it. But the early projections of strong growth, it have not materialized, and there've been obviously a lot of -- more challenges. A number of companies have gone out of business, and the demand has not been there. Natural gas, 5 years ago, there was not a lot of discussion about it. And now I think, particularly for the United States, there's a great discussion about being energy-independent, which is wonderful, but you didn't see too many articles about the U.S. being energy-independent 5 or 10 years ago. But now we're talking about it, which is great. Natural gas, I'm very proud that particularly the Kenworth and Peterbilt teams are the market leaders. 40% of all natural gas heavy trucks are Kenworth or Peterbilt. We're a real leader in things like the waste haulage industry, but other industries. Certainly, lots of press, lots of investment, lots of states have benefited from it. What is the long-term benefit or what's the long-term growth in natural gas? I think like these other 2, the hybrid, the electric, there's numbers of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% of the market will have it at some time period. We're not seeing it now. Maybe we'll see it in the future. Irregardless of what the market share is, I would expect that PACCAR will be one of the leaders in that marketplace. |
