Expert View – Inventory Finance: Addressing Challenges in Construction and Agricultural Finance

What are the trends and challenges you observe in the Construction and Agricultural Finance focusing on Inventory Finance or Stocking solutions?

Currently the demand for new construction equipment is somewhat cooled down, manufacturers report a decline in sales vs last year in major markets like Europe and Noth America due to market uncertainty, whilst China seems to be on an upwards trend due to government investment in the real-estate market.

At the time of writing this article, the European Commission has just struck a deal with the US which means that European exporters will pay a baseline tariff of 15% instead of the 4.8 average. The full effect of this deal on the economic instability remains to be seen.  

In Inventory Finance or Stock Finance, we notice a pressure between ‘lean’ inventory practices and stock piling to avoid shortages. Keeping a lot of assets in stock requires big investment in machines and parts for both the (independent) dealer network and manufacturers.

We have observed other challenges in the market surrounding geopolitical uncertainties, staff shortages and rising labor costs. Another trend is a movement to stronger local value chains as manufacturers source components locally instead of globally and by diversifying, they become less affected by global developments.

BPCE EQUIPMENT SOLUTIONS works directly with dealers and manufacturers to provide a comprehensive offering to include dedicated credit lines for new and used equipment as well as demonstration machines and dealer rental solutions via our own inventory finance platform.

For manufacturers it’s important there is steady customer demand to prevent temporary production disruptions and BPCE EQUIPMENT SOLUTIONS works closely together with many manufacturers to support the financing of stock through tailored promotions.

What can BPCE EQUIPMENT SOLUTIONS bring to this sector?

The BPCE EQUIPMENT SOLUTIONS vision is to be “The Worldwide partner for Integrated Equipment Solutions creating Sustainable and positive impact for the Planet”. For many decades BPCE EQUIPMENT SOLUTIONS has a leading position in Transport and Industrial markets like Construction, Agriculture but also Machine Tooling, the Printing Industry, Handling, and others. We take pride in financing the Real Economy and we focus on the sustainable use of resources, to name just a few dimensions of our sustainability ambition, we “Care and Dare about the future.”

With our Inventory Finance or Stock financing solution we support dealers and manufacturers to sell their assets via attractive financial solutions.  We work together with manufacturers on special promotions, and we offer flexible and consistent tools and solutions to dealers to provide a complete end to end solution. 

Our tool offers insight for the dealers on their stock financing via a banking calendar that shows exactly when which payments are due. It allows manufacturers to manage the stock levels of the dealers where they cooperate with. The process of adding assets on the facility is quick and easy and when the asset is sold you can move it into the retail programme by the click of a button.

Once the asset is sold by the dealer; how can BPCE EQUIPMENT SOLUTIONS help the end-customers with a financial solution?

BPCE EQUIPMENT SOLUTIONS has a highly experienced international salesforce with specialist knowledge of the markets they operate in. We offer a complete range of financial products and solutions for end-customers; on- and off-balance solutions, rental solutions and usage based financial products. We support dealers with the right tools whilst keeping the customer experience at the center of what we do.