“The demand for new equipment, primarily cranes, was exceptionally strong,” said John Engquist, H&E Equipment Services’ president and chief executive officer.
The company posted sales of $216m for the last quarter of 2006, with net income to 20.5m. “Our record performance this quarter was driven by several segments of our business. Both equipment rentals and new equipment sales each grew approximately 20% and our combined parts and service revenues reflected growth in excess of 10%,” commented Leslie Magee, H&E Equipment Services’ chief financial officer. “Used equipment sales increased approximately 5%. As we saw in the third quarter of 2006, our customers’ purchasing trends continued to shift to new equipment versus used equipment as a result of improved availability from many of our manufacturers.”
“We are confident that the strong fundamental drivers of our business combined with our footprint, which is in many of the fastest growing regions of the U.S., will provide significant opportunity for growth in 2007,” said Engquist. “In addition, our exposure to the petrochemical sector, energy sector, mining industry, and the Gulf region hurricane protection and rebuilding efforts should drive increased demand for our products and services for some time to come. We also continue to explore accretive acquisitions and Greenfield opportunities as part of our growth strategy. We are, however, experiencing significant supply constraints from our crane suppliers which are hindering our ability to meet demand and impacting our first quarter expectations. Among other things, our 2007 outlook reflects these supply constraints, although we are hopeful that crane availability will improve throughout the year.”
H&E rents and sells National boom trucks, Manitowoc and Terex-American crawler cranes, Grove all-terrain and truck cranes, and Grove and Broderson industrial and rough-terrain cranes.
The company has 48 full-service facilities throughout the west coast, intermountain, southwest, gulf coast, and southeast regions of the United States.
