No double dip, says Cat CEO

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.

 

 

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