Germany Chancellor plans lithium deal with Serbia after Rio ruling
Olaf Scholz plans to visit Serbia this week to secure supplies of lithium that are critical for the nation’s energy transition and auto industry.
The head of the world’s largest manufacturer of mining equipment says he does not see a return to recession in the United States.
“I don’t see a return to high growth, but I think we’re going to bump along,” Doug Oberhelman, CEO of Caterpillar Inc., told the FT at the company’s headquarters in Peoria, Illinois, this week.
Oberhelman said Caterpillar is forecasting the United States economy to grow by 2.5% this year, based on conversations with companies that buy Caterpillar equipment. The FT reports: “I’ve been meeting a customer a day for months,” he says. “I haven’t found one this year that hasn’t said business is getting better, even if it’s a long way from what it was.”
Caterpillar closed its $8.8 billion acquisition of Bucyrus back in July, and despite taking on $4.5 billion in new debt, has hired thousands of new workers in the US and elsewhere. The company is also planning to build new factories in Thailand, Singapore, China and Brazil, expanding factories in North Dakota and Kansas, and constructing a new distribution centre in Washington State.
MINING.com quoted Oberhelman saying earlier this month that despite the high unemployment rate in the United States, there is a desperate shortage of skilled workers, and many job vacancies are going unfilled in some of the most depressed regions of the country.
“I talked to one of our great customers in Detroit. I spent some time with our distributors. They have 50 job openings today that they cannot fill, and guess what they are. They are service technician jobs,” Oberhelman said in an interview with CNBC.
10 Comments
Lutymech
No one saw the bubble burst until it was to late. And no one saw the bottom until the recovery was under way. 50 years of growth and decline, have yet to see an accurate prediction by general consensus of economists and other academics.
The “baby-boom” is retiring over the next 15 years. All needed to be said.
Rhall
Keep building them off shore factories and tell me how great the US, and Canada for that matter are doing with the economies. And more crap built in Brazil? I was a field guy for a major dealer when a batch of 140Gs came flooding in. One of the crazy times in my long career as a Cat tec.
The Mafiaman.
We have to have the parts Ect and if they were not made abrod by Cat. some other would fill the void. At least the profits go back to the USA> in Peroria, Ill!!!
Rhall
We have run foundries here in North America (I’m from Canada), still do and have what it takes to run many more. No doubt other countries have the hold on assembling electronics but again more of that is robots and robots don’t need to be in cheap labor markets like China.
Jimmy2trees
It’s the greed of the Americans, is the reason why economy is gone fir a ***. Look at super stores like walmart, low wages, don’t buy anything made in north America, just Chinese junk. But the “business” man makes millions, while good manufacturing jobs are lost. Just the same idea as cat us doing by building factories outside of north America. So keep driving your suv and living on a house you can’t afford, don’t wry about your national debt. Btw is new Orleans rebuilt? Or the current earthquake destruction being tended? Well as long as oil is cheap than it’s ok. Looks like the big war machine is getting humbled.
The Mafiaman.
You are “SOOOO” right Jimmy, I could have not said it better. Wally World is the worse, I will not go anywhere near their stores…..Mafiaman Dav.
TheEngineer
If the baby boomers are going to retire during the next 15 yrs, what do you need ANY economic growth for? If your population is diminishing, your economy should diminish. Also, just because the boomers are reaching retirement age does not mean they will retire – MOST have no savings to retire with!!! Keep listening to the soundbites from the intellectually-challenged from Harvard and Yale who admittedly (see GWBush) are very good at misunderestimating and misunderintepretating and misundecalulating, heh, heh, heh, and you’ll do real well, sure you will. And if your beloved non-gorverning government is going to allow millions of workers from other countries to come to the USA, then where is the smaller workforce? The half-brains of Harvard, etc., misundercalculated that women were now entering the workforce and immigrants were coming here and that meant we needed MORE jobs, not fewer jobs. Yeah, that was hard to calculate. We’d be better off with a 6th grader who can actually perform 6th grade arithmetic in government than these mental-midgets from the Ivy League.
Awudu Zakari
Caterpillar has taking lead in tyhe mining industries but yet you needs to strategies in the excavators side
Awudu Zakari
I love cat in general
The Mafiaman.
The CEO> bosted many new jobs, but just look at just where the new plant openings are?? The USA> not hardley.