Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are navigating a period of rapid change, marked by workforce volatility, shifting customer expectations and rising performance demands. Yet they continue to demonstrate strong fundamentals: U.S. OEMs report a mean EBITDA of 21.5% and an average 16% revenue growth, with more than a quarter achieving 30%+ growth over the past year. These results reflect the same patterns identified in The OEM Advantage Playbook, where top performers win by building resilience and designing for speed, adaptability and long-term customer value.
A central theme connecting both the U.S. data and the Playbook is the growing emphasis on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). For OEMs and their customers, improving TCO now hinges on one critical factor: recovery speed. U.S. OEMs experience an average of 23.6 hours to resolve unplanned downtime, yet 45% can restore operations within 1-8 hours, a meaningful advantage when every hour impacts production and profitability. The Playbook reinforces that global leaders differentiate not by preventing every failure, but by restoring operations in under 24 hours consistently - turning speed of recovery into a powerful TCO lever.
“The OEMs that lead the next decade will be the ones who engineer lower TCO into every machine they build.”
Workforce turnover poses another TCO pressure point. 47% of U.S. OEMs cite employee turnover as their top barrier to achieving strategic goals, the highest in the global sample. The Playbook’s workforce strategy emphasizes embedding expertise into machines and workflows rather than individuals, reducing variability, shortening training time and stabilizing lifecycle performance - all essential to lowering the long-term cost of ownership for end users.
Technology investments also reflect a shift toward TCO-driven design. U.S. OEMs overwhelmingly identify machine vision, QMS, advanced motion and production monitoring, each cited by 69-70%, as key enablers for improving machine performance and reducing lifecycle costs by enhancing quality, diagnostics and predictive capabilities. This aligns with the Playbook’s call to use technology as a force multiplier, engineering resilience and quality into equipment before it reaches the customer.
As U.S. OEMs evolve their KPIs, shifting from production metrics alone to workforce, customer and performance indicators tied to margin, they are reinforcing the Playbook’s core message: the OEMs that lead the next decade will be those who lower total cost of ownership through faster recovery, embedded intelligence and more intentional design.
The OEM Advantage Playbook, the research is based on insights gained from 500 OEM leaders across 17 countries. It highlights that while OEMs continue to navigate workforce instability, supply chain volatility, cost pressure and rising customer expectations, many are adapting how they operate to perform more consistently when conditions are less predictable. Rather than relying solely on machine performance, leading OEMs are focusing on faster recovery, operational consistency and decision-making grounded in data.
To learn more, the full findings of the OEM Advantage Playbook can be found here.