Caterpillar CEO: 'When It Rains, It Pours And This Is One Of Those Days'

Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) came out with its fourth-quarter results Tuesday and gave a disappointing outlook for 2015 on back of lower commodity prices. Doug Oberhelman, Caterpillar CEO, was on CNBC to discuss the quarterly results and how lower oil prices are having an impact.

“We are bringing our top-line down from a little over $55 billion in 2014 to around $50 and we are bringing our bottom-line down to $4.75 [per share] excluding restructuring, $4.60 [per share] if we put some restructuring charges in there we plan to take,” Oberhelman said. “But we are definitely looking at a soft year in 2015 and there are several reasons for that.”

He continued, “I talked about the impact of oil and it would hit us and it is. Oil is a piece of our energy and transportation business. It's worth about, oil and gas is about a third of that business. Actually, the natural gas piece of that business is doing pretty well and so far holding up. The oil piece though is what we are taking down and that’s the primary number for reduction in 2015.”

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“There are a lot of external winds buffering us and the one thing that our leadership team talks about all the time is to work on the things we can control and actually if you look at 2014, we did that,” Oberhelman said.

“We had a very solid year, albeit a soft fourth quarter. Most of the fourth quarter decline was due to an inventory reduction as we are taking inventories down, trying to improve our turnover and… the leaning out of our supply chain. So, in the short-term it was quite a hit to the fourth quarter, long-term it ought to help us, but yes it seems like when it rains it pours and this is one of those days.”