Fleetowner 7097 Mele121415
Fleetowner 7097 Mele121415
Fleetowner 7097 Mele121415
Fleetowner 7097 Mele121415
Fleetowner 7097 Mele121415

Numbers don't lie

Feb. 2, 2017
Even if they only tell part of the story

Anecdote and impressions are tough to beat when it comes to perception.  We humans are just intuitively drawn to stories and images.  But sometimes they don’t tell the whole story, and on occasion can even be downright misleading.

Take the sense of economic unease that was quite apparent last year. While not limited to trucking, it held strong sway there as freight fell a bit and rates softened from their strong 2015 levels. For-hire carriers subsequently pulled back on their equipment buying, leading to a significant drop in Class 8 sales after earlier forecasts of steady volumes equaling strong 2015 activity.

Uneven freight demand, lower (or at least not rising) rates, and fewer truck sales combined to create what felt like an ominous environment for the industry.  Maybe it was a long-lasting hangover from the recession, or the relatively slow and uneven pace of recovery that made people receptive to overestimating the magnitude of what was really just minor bad news. 

While perceptions, especially negative ones for some reason, can be tough to refute, let me spin a different story, one that offers some counter­balance.  And this one is not based on anecdote, but on numbers, numbers from a segment of trucking where activity is often hard to quantify.

This month we publish our 14th Fleet Owner 500, a report that ranks the 500 largest private fleets in America based on the number of power units they operate.  These are the trucking operations that provide essential support to the broadest array of businesses, from manufacturing and retailing to construction and utilities.  They cross all segments of our economy, not just the movement of goods as paying freight, and their parent companies’ investment in those fleets says a lot about the health of that economy.

Compared to our previous Fleet Owner 500, this year’s numbers offer a welcome corrective to stories that sometimes made 2016 seem like the start of another downturn.  By almost every measure, the companies in our report held steady with the path they charted for their fleets in 2015, a year that recorded the largest growth in power units we’ve seen since we started tracking that number in 2002.

The highlights? While the total number of power units rose only slightly by 20,000 to 1.38 million, almost every fleet returning to the 500 ranks held steady with their equipment investments.  And where there was growth, it was in two economic areas that had been among the last to recover from the recession, construction and gas/petroleum services.

In the past days of economic upheaval, we’ve reported large changes in our annual rankings as companies were acquired, ceased business entirely, or abandoned their private fleet operations as part of broader cost-cutting efforts.  This year, the rankings reflect what I can only call our economic stability. 

Among the largest 50, only four saw their ranking change, and in every case just swapped position with the fleet that was behind them last year.  You’ll only find one new name in the top 50, a fleet that was at number 52 last year.  Among the entire 500 in the report, there are only 10 new names, and one of those was simply a name change from last year.  

Yes, if your fleet is tied to freight volumes and rates, the last year has had its challenges, and that can unwittingly color expectations about future prospects.

If so, I urge you to take a close look at the numbers reported by our Top 500 private fleets.  When you add them all up, it seems like a vote of confidence in our economy from a broad spectrum of participants. More importantly, it’s a story told from those who balance common perception with experiences closest to the real action.   

About the Author

Jim Mele

Nationally recognized journalist, author and editor, Jim Mele joined Fleet Owner in 1986 with over a dozen years’ experience covering transportation as a newspaper reporter and magazine staff writer. Fleet Owner Magazine has won over 45 national editorial awards since his appointment as editor-in-chief in 1999.

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