First are the overall numbers for OshKosh ($OSK), which weren’t great. Revenue for the quarter was $2.3 billion, down 9.1 percent from the year-earlier period. Meanwhile operating expenses rose 6.7 percent, primarily due to a jump in sales, general & administrative costs. That and other various items resulted in net income at $112.2 million, down 37.5 percent.

Then we dug further into OshKosh’s operating segments, because that’s what senior management talked about in its earnings release:

• An Access segment, which manufactures “mobile aerial work platforms and telehandlers” which “position workers and materials at elevated heights.” 

• A Vocational segment, which makes trucks, cranes, command cars, and other heavy-duty vehicles for fire departments, airports, recycling businesses, and so forth.

• A Defense segment, which makes tactical vehicles for militaries around the world, as well as U.S. Post Office trucks. 

At the top of the earnings release, management reports that revenue and operating income for the Access segment declined 22.7 percent and 50.5 percent, respectively, primarily due to reduced sales volume in North America and higher sales discounts. 

Meanwhile, revenue and operating income for the Vocational segment went up, by 12.2 percent and 47.1 percent respectively, primarily due to better sales of garbage and recycling trucks. Yay for refuse removal!

In the Defense segment, sales decreased by 9.1 percent and operating income plummeted by 95.5 percent. That was largely due to lower sales of military vehicles to the U.S. Defense Department, partly offset by “next-generation vehicle” production for the Post Office. 

OK, that’s the snapshot — but how does that segment performance look like over time? 

To answer that question, we first scrolled down the earnings release to the non-GAAP disclosures that OshKosh makes about operating income per segment. See Figure 1, below, neatly providing a period-over-period comparison.

You might notice that the above table does not include the Defense segment. That’s because operating income for the Defense segment is pretty much immaterial to total operating income; it was only $600,000 in this previous quarter, and rarely exceeded $10 million or so in the last 13 quarters. 

Still, using our Search Tag History capability, you can dig up segment-level operating income for all three segments, even though OshKosh didn’t present Defense in the table above. Figure 2, below, shows the quarterly operating income for all three. 

As one can see, operating income is declining in the Access unit — and while operating income is rising in the Vocational unit, right now it doesn’t seem to be rising fast enough to offset the Access unit’s decline. Meanwhile, operating income from the Defense unit is at best nothing special. 

All that said, there’s more to the story. OshKosh has also been restructuring its operating segments lately. That’s a routine thing at large companies, but for astute financial analysis you need to know such restructuring has happened. 

For example, right after OshKosh presents operating income for its various segments, it includes this footnote disclosure:

In July 2024, the Company moved the reporting responsibility for Pratt Miller from its Defense segment to the Chief Technology and Strategic Sourcing Officer to better utilize Pratt Miller’s expertise across the entire Oshkosh Corporation enterprise. Pratt Miller results are now reported within "Corporate and other" and historical information has been recast to reflect the change.

Pratt Miller is a defense-related business that OshKosh acquired back in 2020. OshKosh had been including Pratt Miller’s results in its defense segment, but those results weren’t terribly good (management described them as “unfavorable” in this quarter’s press release). Now they’ve been moved to the company’s “corporate” segment, which companies often use as a catch-all for other business operations that don’t naturally fit with any larger operating segment. 

We also decided to look at OshKosh’s segment operating income on an annual basis, to smooth out any seasonal quirks that might distort quarterly analysis. Those results are in Figure 2, below.

Annual data shows a somewhat different picture. Clearly the Access unit saw good operating income growth in the last several years, and to a smaller extent the Vocational unit has too. On the other hand, when you look at the quarter-by-quarter operating income numbers, you can’t help but wonder whether operating income declines in the Access unit in latter 2024 and early 2025 might be the start of a trend.

We at Calcbench don’t know the answer to that question. We simply provide the data and tools to let you examine a company’s disclosures from multiple angles and across multiple periods. Sometimes complicated pictures emerge — and then you can approach management prepared to ask the best questions, to get the answers you need.