John Garrison
Analyst · Goldman Sachs.
Yes. Thanks, Jerry. And there's really two avenues of information we gain. One is being very close with our customers and trying to understand what our customers are seeing in terms of their utilization. The next aspect, and this is newer, we have now a little over 20,000 machines with telematics information. And the combination of our telematics, the information our customers are sharing with us through the telematics, is giving us better insights. And over time, we think it's going to help us when it comes to forecasting and things like that. So if I just go around the world quickly, Jerry, first and foremost, China. China was closed as we talked early in the first quarter, but we've seen the China market recover. Their utilizations have increased dramatically, and we've actually seen sequential and year-over-year sales growth in China. So China is absolutely on the road to recovery in the China market. In North America, what customers have told us and what the publicly traded companies have said is they saw utilization and our telematics data confirm that -- or I should say, our customers' telematics data confirm that the low point really was somewhere in that April time frame. I will say, Jerry, it did vary slightly by region within the United States, i.e., the East was slower to start back up when we saw the utilization. Other parts of the country increased. We have seen a significant decline in Texas, not surprised based on both COVID but also the oil and gas market area. So we did see a decline in utilization in Texas. So what's happened is it's increased over the quarter and it's stabilized. In most cases, Jerry, slightly less or lower than pre-COVID levels. I don't want to give you a percentage, but we could say it has not recovered fully to pre-COVID levels. And then I would say in Europe, Jerry, a similar story with what customers are saying and then also what the telematics data is indicating. Similar story, again, varied in timing based on when the COVID crisis hit. So Southern Europe hit earlier, utilization was down and then recovered. Northern Europe, where the COVID hit a little bit later, several weeks later, you saw that in the utilization data. So that's how we've seen the markets unfold. So the good news is, is we've seen utilization increase over the course of the second quarter. We have seen it stabilized over the course of the quarter. And it is below COVID levels, but in some cases, they're getting close to pre-COVID levels in certain markets like China, in other parts in the U.S. and a few markets in Europe as well. So it has improved is what we've seen. And that's what customers are telling us, and that's what our telematics data is showing as well.