Analysis of the Offering and Resale Prices on the Second-Hand Skidders Market

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper deals with the admittedly rarely addressed issues of the use of skidding equipment for forestry needs - special forestry wheeled tractors.

The Authors have correctly pointed out the structure.

Based on the presented literature, the economic life cycle of skidding machines, their annual use, the value offered for sale, their exploitation prospects after the period of primary use were made.

Row 93 The assumption was to present the type and size of the machine, their age, annual use and the price of the machine offered for sale in Europe. However, the authors referred only to secondary market prices? Why was no reference made to the prices of new equipment available on the market in order to assess the decrease in value? Reference was made to sales of new equipment in line 280.

Line 101 Verified for Croatia and other countries the transformation of state-owned companies to private companies buying up used forestry equipment. No description of which countries this applies to and what period it was in various regions of central and eastern Europe.

Line 110 What were the criteria for selecting the ten forest machinery sales advertisement portals?

Table 2. Why were no other companies offering skidding machines besides the leading ones indicated? The share of these machines in the group was not indicated?

Line 243 The information that only the specialty machinery market was studied to the exclusion of farm tractors should be in the methodology and not in the discussion.

Row 256: The opinion that there is an increase in interest in larger machinery is not reflected in the evaluation of a single bid period. The authors presented information on price bids and not current sales.  This is confirmed by the description in line 268.

Line 281 The conclusion lacks a succinct conclusion, even though the paper and discussion point to the research findings. Reference was made to performing work in accordance with FSC, where the requirements of these certificates were not mentioned before.

Author Response

We corrected the manuscript according to your suggestions. All answers and comments are in the response letter. Also, all changes are noted in the manuscript.
Kind regards,
Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Because of the main goal of the manuscript, the "Introduction" can be started at the line 75

Due to the fact that some websites offer the possibility of select the country, which were the countries selected by the Authors that represent the European market (see line 114)?

The data on the skidders' age must be restricted (e.g. 20 years); older machines are probably not fulfilling the present safety legislation or are prone to to end up in non-specialized professional use

A part from the engine power classification is there any further technical feature that is worthwhile to be considered in grouping the machines? For example distinguishing "cable skidder" from "clamp skidder", machines that offer different approach to skidding operation

How many skidders were analyzed? 163 (see line 238)? 121 (see line 150)? If "selling price, year of production and work hours were not given for 39 machines" it means that at least one of the considered features should have been available for at least 124 skidders

Since the term "skidder" refers to a well-defined forest machine statement from line 243 to line 247 has no meaning and can be removed

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

We corrected the manuscript according to your suggestions. All answers and comments are in the response letter. Also, all changes are noted in the manuscript.
Kind regards,
Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx