Caterpillar shifts its focus after commodity collapse

New York

CATERPILLAR Inc, convinced that a commodity recovery is at least a year away, is shifting focus from selling more machines to helping its mining and energy customers better use the ones they have.

The world's biggest maker of mining and construction machinery says helping end users do more with less will let it sell more replacement parts and win loyalty for the long term.

"It's very important to us to have machines out in the dirt working," Caterpillar chief financial officer Brad Halverson said in an interview. "To have a field population that generates parts…