In this article, I describe E.a.a.S and Pay-per-use, two new business concepts increasingly explored by equipment manufacturers as a way to boost their sales and capture new revenue streams. I then review the risks involved, especially financially related, and in a second post I will propose ways to tackle those risks.
E.a.a.S is an attractive concept for OEMs and their customers
Equipment Manufacturers (also referred to as OEMs) have so far extensively used equipment leasing to promote their sales by offering vendor financing, and many are now looking at Equipment-as-a-Service (E.a.a.S) as a new sales concept. Under the E.a.a.S scheme, an equipment manufacturer, or its dealer, packages the sale of a piece of equipment, its installation, servicing and maintenance at the customer’s premises, and its financing into a single, all-inclusive offering.
The benefits for the OEM are many. In addition to being a competitive sales argument, it allows them to combine a sale with a service contract covering the lifecycle of the equipment, including in some cases its after-market. By doing that, they tie-in their customers with a subscription-like agreement and move further from one-time sales towards recurring revenues.
For the end-user of the equipment, it is a way to switch from upfront capital expenditures (capex) that need to be financed, to recurring operational expenditures (opex) which are a cost item in their profit and loss statement. Instead of buying a machine, they buy its availability. They outsource the asset ownership and financing as well as its servicing and maintenance, and in some cases even the operation of the equipment.
Pay-per-Use goes one step further
The next step is to move to a Pay-per-Use model where payments are calculated according to the usage of the equipment. A higher use generally means additional maintenance and service costs whilst the residual value goes down faster, which justifies a higher rental or subscription fee, and vice versa.
End-customers are also interested in aligning their production costs with the production output. When they can’t or don’t want to produce as much as planned and therefore to use the machinery equipment accordingly, they don’t want to pay the full price for it either. Many prefer flexible costs corresponding to the usage of the machine, i.e. costs for the number of hours the machine is in operation or for the outcome, like tons excavated in the quarry or litres of liquid pumped.
The Pay-per-Use concept has been made possible by the advance of so called “Industry 4.0” technologies, like IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), 5G communication and Cloud. Nowadays, larger pieces of equipment are riddled with tens if not hundreds of sensors which can send data (IIoT) in real time (5G) that can be processed efficiently (Cloud). This data can relate to a wide range of parameters, like location, pressure, temperature, rotation times, electricity consumption or load.
Examples of use cases are many. It can be the manufacturer of elevators which, instead of selling them, is charging their customers according to the number of people who use the lifts, the producer of trucks utilised in mines which is billing according to the load of rocks that those trucks are carrying, or the maker of industrial pumps getting its revenues on the volume of liquid being pumped.
There is no free lunch
So far, this looks like a win-win situation, but also in this case there is no “free lunch”. So, where is the catch?
The catch is mostly about two types of new risks: the technical availability and performance risk of the equipment, and the financial risks. OEMs, or their dealers, can usually cover the first type of risk through extensive service and maintenance contracts. They are the best to evaluate the performance risk of the machines they produce and the best to provide a mitigant to it.
On the other hand, the financial risks, related to the ownership of the equipment, to its utilisation level by the equipment user, and to the credit risk exposure on that customer, are new to them.
Let’s zoom-in on those financial risks
The ownership and financing of the equipment is the first and usually the biggest challenge to overcome. A legal entity needs to carry this asset on its balance sheet, meaning that it also needs to finance it, then to absorb its depreciation during the lifetime of the contract, and finally to handle its residual value at the end of it. Some OEMs have decided to carry this risk during the experimental phase of a new E.a.a.S or Pay-per-Use business model in order to test the technical feasibility and the attractiveness to their customers. However, as soon as the concept will scale up, other solutions will be needed.
Indeed, keeping a large volume of produced equipment on their balance sheet would mean that the asset side is swollen, requiring the liability side to be adjusted accordingly. Additional financing, mostly long term to reflect the maturity of the E.a.a.S or Pay-per-Use contracts, will have to be sourced, straining the credit lines at their banks, but also new capital will need to be raised in order to keep an acceptable equity ratio, a key element of their credit rating. It also means that, instead of being booked upfront like in a true sale, revenues are generated over the life of the contract. In addition, the depreciation of the asset has to be taken into account for the years to come in the P&L and balance sheet, and the ways to benefit from it tax-wise need to be secured, which i.a. requires a profitable business.
The utilisation risk of the equipment by the end customer is also a new concept that OEMs are not used to facing. In a Pay-per-Use scheme, the equipment user pays according to how much they utilise the machine or for the machine’s output. It is naturally their interest to optimise this utilisation whilst the OEM has no control on this parameter. In particular, if a customer decides to keep a piece of equipment idle for a prolonged period, this will negatively affect the revenues for the OEM. It is all the more problematic that predicting the average usage level that a customer will apply is very difficult.
The third financial risk relates to the counter-party risk on the customer. When the OEM is just selling a machine, the payment risk on the buyer is limited in time and can be covered with a simple Trade Finance product, for instance a guarantee or a Letter of Credit. However, when a contract is established for five or seven years, the OEM is taking the risk that their customer will run into financial difficulties during that period and default on their recurring payment obligations. Assessing the credit risk of customers and handling payment default situations is not the core business of OEMs and needs to be approached in a careful way.
In my next blog post on this topic, I will propose ways to mitigate or even outsource those three financial risks.
Jean-Francois Tapprest
Lightbound Consulting
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