CNH Industrial N.V. (NYSE:CNHI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: And our next question comes from Marta Bruska from Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Marta Bruska: Hi, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. And if you don’t mind, please, it would be helpful to hear your thoughts on the pricing environment so, specifically, given the industry, in the past, some of your competitors would hand out a steel discount where the raw had to start to normalize a little bit. But to my understanding, this haven’t been the case in 2022. At this price, they’re already positive . I was just wondering whether you see anything at all that would suggest that this would change in 2023 or with the risk of some of your competitors giving — or starting handing out steel discounts with the dealer, and how would you react to that? And then I had one more, please.

Scott Wine: So, we are still expecting inflation to impact our business, and therefore our supply chain in 2023 to a lesser extent than it did in 2022, so a declining rate of inflation, but still seeing inflation. So, we’ve seen a decrease in some areas, but overall the cost that we’re paying is not coming down. So, we don’t intend and in fact, we’re still going to have to price, going into 2023, again, at lower levels because of the lower increases. But we don’t see a decrease in pricing. And that, again, that the quality and innovation that we’re putting in our products would suggest that we don’t need to go start competing on price. And I think the industry, overall, is likely going to take that approach.

Marta Bruska: Perfect. Thank you. And then I was just wondering with all the big tech cutting the workforce, were you able to benefit from the opportunity to cut into the tech talent pool for your Precision AG, kind of hiring from the pool, please?

Scott Wine: That’s actually something I have been pushing the team on for quite some time. I mean, we’ve — we have done a significant hiring with our technical team, Precision and Autonomy. But many of the layoffs are not actually the programmers and engineers. So, we don’t really see that as an opportunity. And we did most of our hiring in ’22. We’ll probably slow down a little bit. But to the extent that we can bring on great talent at more reasonable prices because of what others are doing. But certainly our commitment to accelerating value that our customers get from Precision and Autonomy is there. And we’ll — we are continuing to hire in ’23. So, but no, there’s not a significant opportunity for us there just because of where we’re hiring and where those — most of those employees are located.

Marta Bruska: Very clear, thank you.

Scott Wine: Thank you.

Operator: Now our next question comes from Nicole Deblase from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Nicole Deblase: Yes, thanks. Good morning, guys.

Scott Wine: Morning.

Nicole Deblase: Can we just start by talking a little bit about what you’re seeing with respect to used equipment values, any signs of moderation at all from such high levels, in ’22, within AG or Construction?

Scott Wine: Used values are still hanging in there, just again because availability. And I’m not talking about low horsepower tractors because that’s a different scenario, and we’ve seen that market stabilize at a lower. But at the high horsepower side and large AG, we’re still not seeing large fleets anywhere in the OEM side or in the used side. So, prices are staying reasonably high.