Financial performance of Caterpillar
In its latest fiscal year, the manufacturing giant reported global sales and revenue streams of 41.75 billion U.S. dollars. Along with reaching peak sales in 2012, the company’s workforce increased to almost 128,000 employees worldwide in that same year. However, since then the company has downsized its workforce, which stood at around 99,100 employees in 2020. Sales have sharply declined during that same period with a slight resurgence in the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years.Competitive forces in the global equipment market
Some of Caterpillar's competitors in the global equipment market are Japan's Komatsu and Hitachi, U.S.' John Deere, and Switzerland-based Liebherr. Due to the company’s vast global distribution, Komatsu’s global net sales amounted to around 2.44 trillion Japanese yen in the fiscal year ended March 2020. Hitachi Ltd. is a multinational engineering and electronics conglomerate. The industrial giant is active in many fields, including external disk storage systems, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, transportation equipment, construction equipment, thermal power generation systems and nuclear reactors.
