Brian is pretty much on the money there, Cat have pursued vigorously to provide there dealers with a line of mining shovels to complement the big trucks. The original deal would have seen Cat giving Terex Mining all the proprietary info on the 5000 series (to satisfy US laws and not having a monopoly) in exchange for the O & K and Unit Rig ED trucks. When Terex figured they must have a pretty decent product in those 2 lines if Cat are knocking on there door about it the decimal point on the price moved to the right a little and the deal fell over. Cat stood by there word to there dealers by way of brockering a deal for Cat dealers to be O & K dealers in territories where no O & K dealer existed, Down here in Australia Terex have country wide coverage and no Cat dealer here is an agent. Part of that deal is also seeing Cat product on the shovel line as O & K can clearly see the advantages of the vast Cat dealer network providing a bigger footprint for them to market machines into so have greenlighted Cat product into there line with primarily engines but there is a host of other items for consideration, Hyd hoses, GET and U/C to name a few. If all these things eventually make there way on board the next thing i think you will see after that will be a colour change.
Now back to the Liebherr topic i think it is a big vote against that machine that it,s penetration into north America seems quite limited as compared to the Japanese and German machines, especially in the tar sands as the 996 is quite the performer down here and every body else has got a foot in the door. The reasons i guess may be many and varied and we see the same thing down here with O & K in the hunter valley coal fields where you can count on one hand the O & K,s. Hitachi seem to dominate with Liebherr and then Komatsu.
