Electric GSE Buying Trends Report

About 10 percent of all ground support equipment is currently electric, and while the e-GSE share holds steadily across all types of ramp equipment, that share isn’t likely to go up dramatically without a guarantee of better battery performance or an increase in funding to purchase the equipment.

That’s what we learned after sending out a survey to a select group of Ground Support Worldwide readers last February.

Our reasons for conducting the survey were simple:

• To judge the current market for e-GSE,
• To see what future buying trends might be.

CURRENT MARKET

Our survey went out to a broad group of Ground Support Worldwide readers that included service providers, airlines, FBOs and airports. The majority (41 percent) were “ground handlers/service providers” and 82 percent indicated that they had direct or supervisory influence over purchasing new or used e-GSE.

Most of our respondents had less than $100,000 as their 2013 budget to buy new or used e-GSE, with the rest ranging from $101,000 to past $1 million. The majority of respondents (65 percent) indicated they were not able to spend all of their e-GSE budget last year either because of outright budget cuts or that the money might be carried over to this year.

Question: Taking your current total GSE inventory into account, what is the percentage represented by e-GSE?

10 percent or less 57 percent

Between 11-25 percent 23 percent

Between 26-50 percent 6 percent

Between 51-75 percent 6 percent

Between 76-100 percent 6 percent

We wanted to judge when some of the first e-GSE was purchased, and we heard from readers who said they may have seen their first piece of e-GSE at some point in the late-1980s.

For our part, we dug up a news story that indicated American Airlines was the first carrier in the United States to replace all its fossil-fueled equipment with electric models at the El Paso International Airport. The story was dated 2001, but said that the airline started the push for electric equipment in 1996 and gave priority to airports in cities with severe air quality issues deemed “serious” non-attainment designations by the EPA. (Such designations later became one of the main reasons the FAA started the Voluntary Airport Low Emissions Program in 2004.)

We chose to go back 20 years, since 20 years ago readers would have been paging through the second issue of GSE Today (the former name of our publication.)

Question: Has this overall percentage of e-GSE changed in the past 20 years?

Yes, by at least 10 percentage points. 32 percent

Yes, but by less than 10 percent points. 21 percent

No. The percentage has remained the same. 46 percent

We also asked about product categories for e-GSE and received a fairly steady, equivalent 10 percent use of electric equipment for cargo, belt loaders, pushbacks/tugs and other service vehicles.

Finally, we asked readers to rank the importance of the following attributes when it came time to deicing which brand of new or used e-GSE to purchase. (We’ve only listed the “most important” tallies for this question.)

Battery performance 78 percent

Reliability 78 percent

Support 61 percent

Price 59 percent

Maintenance 59 percent

Total cost of ownership 52 percent

Availability 43 percent

FUTURE MARKET

If by the “future” we just measure the rest of 2013, the buying power for equipment seems to be there. When asked about budgets, most of the respondents (57 percent) said they had either “the same as 2012” or “more than 2012” to spend on purchasing new or used e-GSE.

If by the “future” we mean the next 10 years, the results are a mixed blessing. Yes, readers do anticipate purchasing more e-GSE across all product categories, but those yes votes don’t reach much past the 50 percent mark, with the votes for “less” or “the same,” of course, filling out practically an equal share.

Question:Over the next 10 years, do you anticipate that you will purchase more, less or the same amount of new or used e-GSE for the following product categories?