Interesting article Kenny R, thanks for posting.
For almost a year now, I've had a mechanic (who owns his own truck) working as a sub on the project I'm on, maintaining my scrapers. He's spent the last nine years working for Rentrac, Sukut, Signs & Pinnick, Desilva Gates, etc. He also told me about the 80% of the world population of scrapers were in California. He may have gotten that statistic from the article.
I know I was blown away when he was telling me the number of scrapers some of the California contractors own. The fleet of 150 that Sukut has (or at least had at one point). The tremendous number of 657's that Pinnick and Desilva Gates run, etc.
On an interesting note, I'm curious to see how that's going to change in the upcoming future though. With the tremendous growth in China, and the overall hilly topography of much of that country, its going to be interesting to watch Chinese mass grading contractors figure out the big dirt game.
I know that China Communications Construction Co.
www.ccccltd.com has a pretty decent spread, and I'm sure that will only grow in the near future.
One of the best equipment managers I ever worked with took a job a couple years ago for an oil drilling company that has him working in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. He told me that KBR has been importing scrapers from all over the world for the last couple years for their infrastructure projects and new highway development projects they're doing. They've built up a fleet that's numbering around 300 according to his estimates. They're mostly E's, but they've also got D's and G's in the fleet.
He said that one of KBR's current highway projects in Afghanistan is doing a new stretch of highway, 600 miles in length that has over 125 scrapers on it.
I'd sure like to be on a project like that. Just like the good old days, to be moving dirt like that. Minus the safe place to go home and sleep at every night.