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During the LA fires, dozens of fire trucks sat in the boneyard, waiting for repairs the city couldn't afford. Why? A private equity roll-up made replacing and repairing those trucks much pricier.
One of the reasons that the recent Los Angeles wildfires were so hard to contain, according to Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) Chief Kristin Crowley, is that more than half of the LAFD’s fire trucks have been out of service. It’s become a bit of a scandal; while fires burned through Palisades and Eaton neighborhoods, more than 100 of the LAFD’s 183 fire trucks were apparently sidelined.
Why couldn’t the LAFD keep its equipment in working order? A lot of people blame budget cuts, but there’s another root issue - increasing prices and metastasizing production delays for these vehicles. The cost of fire trucks has skyrocketed in recent years––going from around $300 -500,000 for a pumper truck and $750-900,000 for a ladder truck in the mid-2010s, to around $1 million for a pumper truck and $2 million for a ladder truck in the last couple years. Meanwhile, the time it takes to get a fire truck delivered has grown dramatically, from less than a year before the pandemic to anywhere between 2 and 4.5 years today. (It’s not just trucks, all fire equipment is increasing quickly in price, from air supply packs to maintenance contracts.)
The skyrocketing prices and longer delivery times have made it difficult for the LAFD to replace aging vehicles in its fleet, many of which have exceeded their service life. As the LAFD’s vehicles have gotten older, they’ve become prone to more frequent and serious breakdowns, leading to more costly repairs and prolonged downtime. And as the rising cost of fire-truck maintenance and replacement has squeezed the department’s budget, it has had fewer resources for recruiting and retaining firefighters. Against this backdrop, the LAFD wound up having to face some of the worst fires LA has seen in a century while both understaffed and under-equipped.
What I’ll show you in this piece is that the increasing price is a result of a private equity firm, American Industrial Partners, consolidating the fire truck industry and forcing up prices across the board. For decades before the 2010s, the fire apparatus industry was characterized by relatively stable (inflation-adjusted) prices and ample production capacity.
Then, however, AIP bought multiple fire-truck manufacturers and rolled them up into conglomerate called the REV Group. Although AIP initially made a show of allowing these manufacturers and their distributors to continue operating independently, under the surface it quickly moved to operate them as a single firm, like a food conglomerate selling a bunch of different brands that all appear to be different companies. As one industry executive has observed, “There are now times when all vendors at a bid table, each with a ‘different’ product, are all owned and managed by the same parent company. How is that competitive for the purchaser?” The answer, of course, is that it isn’t. And you don’t need to take my word for it. REV Fire Group Vice President of Sales Mike Virnig made it clear in 2020: “What I won’t tolerate is negative selling,” he said. “I won’t tolerate it with our competitors, and I won’t tolerate it within the group. If I even get a hint or see anything like a dealer taking a shot at another dealer, we step in and say, ‘Stop it.’”
Before getting to how AIP operates, I want to note that higher costs of trucks are not just an LA problem. The Seattle Fire Department is also struggling to replace and maintain an aging fire truck fleet. So is the Houston Fire Department, and the Atlanta Fire Department. Across the country, in communities large and small, headlines about fire departments struggling to cope with metastasizing fire-truck prices and bottlenecks in fire apparatus supply chain have become commonplace. “Waiting Lists and Higher Prices Add Up to Long Delays for New Fire Trucks,” says the Connecticut Examiner. “Why did that fire truck cost $1.9 million? Because it just does,” says a small-town news website in Kansas. "Despite FIRE Act grant,” the Tribune-Review of Pennsylvania reports, “Export, PA, fire department says rising fire apparatus costs a challenge.” Illustration by Daniel Medina
Even when fire departments can put together these large sums of money for new trucks, they can’t seem to get the dang things because of steep delays in production. Since 2019, “[T]he lead times for delivery from [the] date the order is placed [for a new a fire truck] to final inspection has gone from 10-12 months to greater than 2 years in many cases and in some cases approaching 3 years.” The Seattle Fire Department says it faces even longer wait times, with ladder trucks orders taking 54 months — 4.5 years — to be fulfilled. In an emergency, Evanston, Illinois, spent over $2.3 million to try to get a fire truck in a year and a half — and it was a demo vehicle previously ordered by a dealer and passed down to the city as a favor, without any of the customizations that fire departments typically require.
The Economic Termite That Ate Up the Fire Apparatus Industry
The modern fire apparatus and emergency vehicle manufacturing industry came into its own in the post-war decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Aided by antitrust enforcement actions that protected small manufacturers from exclusionary practices and ensured they could source necessary supplies (like steel) at the same discounts as large firms, small and midsized fire apparatus manufacturers––typically family-owned operations––appeared in every region of the country to produce emergency vehicles tailored to the needs of local fire department. Competition among these smaller firms served to keep fire truck prices near costs, and the existence of a large number of manufacturers ensured there was always plenty of redundant manufacturing capacity to meet demand.
This remained the case well into the 2000s. Then, the Great Financial Crisis decimated municipal budgets, which in turn decimated demand for new fire trucks. The number of fire truck’s ordered plummeted from 5,000-6,000 a year to around 3,000 a year. At the same time, many of the manufacturers in the industry began facing leadership succession questions, as founders were aging and considering their options for retirement. That’s when a private equity group, American Industrial Partners (AIP), took an interest in rolling up the industry.
AIP’s initial theory was that, with sales depressed and succession issues on the horizon, the owners of fire apparatus manufacturers could be convinced to sell on the cheap. That theory turned out to be mostly wrong––the family-owned players in the industry were resilient. The only fire apparatus company that AIP was able to nab at the bottom of the market was a large, investor-owned manufacturer of fire trucks and ambulances, Federal Signal/E-ONE. As late as 2015, there were still “approximately two-dozen companies producing motorized fire apparatus in the United States,” including “nine full-line manufacturers producing their own chassis for pumper and ladder trucks,” and “fifteen limited-line manufacturers producing only pumpers based on purchased chassis.” All twenty-four manufacturers were either independent or owned by a separate parent company.
Nonetheless, AIP’s acquisition of E-ONE gave it a beachhead in the fire apparatus industry — one on which it would build as demand returned. By 2016, state and local budgets had mostly recovered from the Great Recession. Demand for fire trucks went up, reaching 4,000-5,000 orders annually. That’s when AIP’s offers became too good to refuse. One by one, leading fire apparatus manufacturers around the country fell under AIP’s control: KME, a large, 70-year-old manufacturer in the Mid-Atlantic region that supplied engines to the Los Angeles Fire Department, was acquired in 2016. Ferrara, E-ONE’s direct competitor in the South, was acquired in 2017. Spartan and Smeal, two Midwest stalwarts, came into AIP’s fold in 2019. Ladder Tower, based out of Pennsylvania, was bought in 2020. Over the same decade, these were paired with acquisitions of a large portfolio of ambulance, bus, recreational, and other specialty vehicle manufacturers, which AIP ultimately bundled into a conglomerate holding company called the “REV Group.”
These acquisitions quickly transformed REV Group into one of — if not the — dominant manufacturer of fire trucks and ambulances in the United States. In 2017, even before its acquisitions of Spartan, Smeal, and Ladder Tower, REV Group told investors it controlled approximately 44% of annual fire trucks and ambulance sale. The first thing REV Group appears to have done with its newfound power is tamp down competition in the industry. Although REV Group executives initially made a show of preserving the independence of the Group’s subsidiary manufacturers and their dealers, they simultaneously disseminated unsubtle signals that aggressive — or “negative” — competition among subsidiaries would be frowned upon.
By 2021, REV Group stopped even pretending to support subsidiary independence. In September of that year, KME’s plants — which were important suppliers of fire trucks to California municipalities before KME’s acquisition in 2016 — were shut down pursuant to a new “platforming” and “channel management” strategy. A REV Group investor presentation around the same time showed that strategy called for REV Group’s subsidiaries to “[c]onverge on common designs that can be shared across brands,” and to use Spartan’s Metro Star chassis/cab as the “platform” for their offerings. It also called for the elimination of geographic overlaps between the marketing of its different fire-truck brands and dealers. The mask was officially off: REV Group’s fire apparatus operations were now officially “center-led,” with REV Group dictating and managing the execution of “margin improvement actions” across its subsidiaries.
The Aftermath
As a result of AIPs roll-up of fire truck and emergency vehicle manufacturers into the REV Group over the past decade, the overwhelming majority of the industry’s sales and capacity are now concentrated among three dominant manufacturers: REV Group, Oshkosh, and Rosenbauer. Out of roughly $3 billion in fire truck sales made in the United States annually, the available data suggests that REV Group captures around $1 billion (or 33%), Oshkosh takes around $750 million (or 25%), and Rosenbauer takes “only” $250 million (or 8%) — giving these dominant firms two-thirds of the national market, and undoubtedly even more market share in some regions of the country where fewer manufacturers operate. And the acquisition sprees do not appear to be slowing down: in 2021 and 2022, Oshkosh responded to REV Group’s roll-up by making acquisitions of its own, including Maxi-Metal in Canada and Boise Mobile Equipment in Idaho –– the latter being an important supplier of wildland firefighting apparatus to the California, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana markets.
In conjunction with this consolidation, we’ve also seen a reduction in industry capacity from actions like REV Group’s shutdown of its KME plants. What is curious about that shutdown in particular is that it came in the face of rapidly increasing demand: As federal COVID-19 assistance filled state and local government coffers, fire truck orders grew approximately 50% from 2020 to 2022, reaching roughly 6,000 for the first time since 2008. Since then, order activity has remained strong, hovering between 5,500 and 6,500. As a result, both REV Group and Oshkosh have seen their backlogs skyrocket over the last two years. The latest available data shows that REV Group had a $4.2 billion backlog on fire and emergency vehicle orders in the United States as of October 2024, while Oshkosh had a $5.3 billion backlog on fire apparatus orders globally as of June 2024. And yet, neither company appears to be making significant investments in additional manufacturing capacity to rapidly cut down its backlog — or even concerned that multi-year delays in delivery might lead customers to bail on their orders.
Indeed, it appears that the dominant manufacturers have managed to turn their delivery failures into financial advantage. Using the purported difficulty of projecting material costs over a 2-3-year lead time as an excuse, they have imposed “floating” price clauses onto their customers — allowing them to increase the final price of a rig when it finally goes into production. In effect, the bottleneck in fire truck production that REV Group, Oshkosh, and to a lesser extent, Rosenbauer created with their M&A and operating strategies are giving them even more bargaining power vis-à-vis fire departments. Not only that but, according to REV Group’s SEC reports, the twenty-four-month backlog it is running is literally enhancing its value to shareholders — AIP being the largest among them — by giving the company “strong visibility into future net sales.”
Altogether, these facts paint an alarming picture. A handful of financiers have been allowed to transform a critical, once-vibrant industry into a rent-extracting racket. By consolidating the fire-apparatus industry through serial acquisitions, REV Group and Oshkosh appear to have consolidated the power to raise prices and throttle output of lifesaving equipment with impunity. Using that power, they have imposed years-long delays in delivery on their customers and exorbitant payment terms that will enable them to pass on production costs almost at will — leaving them little incentive to invest in new capacity or greater efficiency to relieve the bottleneck in the fire truck supply chain. They can reap rising stock prices and “attractive levels of return on invested capital” for their shareholders just by sitting pretty — all while fire departments across the country struggle to replace aging fire trucks, have to spend more on maintenance for older vehicles, and are forced to shirk on other budget items, like firefighter salaries, to get what equipment they can. But the ultimate harm of AIP’s monopolization of the fire apparatus industry, of course, is not something that can be measured on a spreadsheet. It’s a hundred fire trucks sitting out of commission while a disastrous wildfire burns whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles to the ground. It’s lives lost, homes destroyed, communities gutted.
Where Do We Go From Here
While AIP’s consolidation of economic power over fire truck manufacturing is appalling, it is not some unsolvable, intractable problem we just have to live with. State and federal antitrust laws already prohibit the kind of monopolistic roll-up that AIP perpetrated — they just need to be enforced. State AGs can bring lawsuits to force REV Group to divest the manufacturers it illegally acquired and to pay damages to fire departments for the harm that its (attempted) monopolization of the fire-truck industry has caused. Fire departments and other fire-apparatus purchasers can bring their own lawsuits to do the same. So can the FTC and the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. If state legislators or members of Congress want to pave the way for such lawsuits, they can launch their own investigations into the fire apparatus industry. And if anyone wants guidance on what a lawsuit against AIP could look like, Lina Khan left us a roadmap just before she stepped down from the FTC last week — when she sued private-equity giant Welsh Carson for rolling up Texas anesthesiology practices to drive up the price of anesthesia services to Texas patients.
We have all the tools we need to check AIP’s greed and abuse and restructure the fire-truck industry so it serves the public interest. The only question is whether our political leaders have the will.
Thanks for reading. Send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or comments by clicking on the title of this newsletter. Or if you work for or adjacent to a monopoly and have interesting confidential stuff to share, go ahead and do that. If you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues of BIG, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
cheers,
Matt Stoller
