Industrial Machinery, Heavy Equipment and Trucks

The machines that build roads, dig mines, plant and harvest crops and haul freight are made by a small group of companies, most of them American, European or Japanese, and increasingly Chinese. Caterpillar, Deere, Paccar and Cummins in the US; Daimler Truck, Volvo Group, Traton, CNH and Liebherr in Europe; Komatsu, Kubota and Hitachi in Japan; and Sany, XCMG and Zoomlion in China. They share a production model that differs from cars in four ways: low volume and high mix (a mining truck or a combine harvester is built in hundreds or a few thousand a year, often to order), a dealer network that sells, finances and services the machine for twenty years or more, a parts and service business on the installed base that is often more profitable than the machine itself, and deep cycles driven by commodity prices, farm incomes, construction activity and, for trucks, freight rates and emissions deadlines. In 2025–26 three forces hit the industry at once: tariffs (Section 232 steel and aluminium at 50% from 4 Jun 2025, then the 6 Apr 2026 metals overhaul; Section 232 on medium and heavy trucks at 25% and buses at 10% from 1 Nov 2025), a farm-equipment downturn, and uncertainty over the EPA's 2027 heavy-duty NOx standard, which pulled truck orders forward. Caterpillar expected ~$2.2bn of tariff costs in 2026 before ~$520m of IEEPA refunds (10-Q, Q3 2026); Deere expected ~$1.1bn of direct tariff expense in fiscal 2026 before refunds, ~$750m net (fiscal Q3 call, Aug 2026, reported). In July 2026 the FTC and five states settled their right-to-repair suit against Deere (reported). This section explains how heavy equipment and trucks are made and sold, why the cycle dominates the economics, what the dealer and aftermarket models do, how emissions rules and tariffs reshape plants and prices, and how China's export push is changing the competitive map.