Heavy-duty truck sales trends in 2025 could be the inverse of those from this year, Paccar CEO Preston Feight says: Start somewhat weakly and then build momentum as the calendar progresses.
Speaking to analysts after Washington-based Paccar reported third-quarter profits of $972 million on sales of $8.24 billion, Feight said his team is forecasting that Class 8 sales in the U.S. and Canada would be between 250,000 and 280,000 vehicles in 2025 compared to an estimated 260,000 this year.
“Maybe what you’d expect to see in 2025 is a mirror image of [2024], where the year starts a little bit like [this year is] finishing and then accelerates,” Feight said on a conference call October 22. “I don’t know that, but it does feel like that’s where we’re starting.”
That growth will be a welcome reversal from recent months when several carriers pulled back on purchases as they managed their spending in the face of a weak freight market that may finally be trending up again. Paccar’s global operations delivered about 44,900 trucks in the third quarter, which was down from 48,400 in the prior three months.
President and CFO Harrie Schippers said that number will drop further to about 42,000 in Q4, partly because of several extra holidays in Paccar’s U.S. operations. Paccar delivered more than 51,000 vehicles in the last three months of both 2022 and 2023.
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The preliminary 2025 forecast from Feight and Schippers is in line with those of their peers at Volvo Group, who last week said they think North American buyers (which for Volvo Trucks also includes Mexico) will need 300,000 vehicles in 2025, up slightly from this year’s volume. CEO Martin Lundstedt last week told analysts his team also expects “a gradual lift” in volumes for its Volvo and Mack trucks during the year.
“We need to make sure that [a] balance is in place, but we foresee […] with a decreased interest rate, consumption, et cetera, [that the] pattern will move up,” Lundstedt said, adding that moving past next month’s presidential election also will reduce uncertainty in the market.
On the conference call, Feight said the expected tailwind from a recovering truckload market—the less-than-truckload and vocational segments of Paccar’s remain in good health, he said—should also help Paccar’s price-cost equation. In the three months that ended September 30, the company’s average price was flat year over year. Still, its expenses rose 3%, contributing to pretax profits from the company’s truck division falling to $631 million from $961 million in 2023 Q3.
The Paccar team is nevertheless sticking to its longer-term investment plans: Schippers said capital spending in 2025 will be between $700 million and $800 million—it’s on pace to be about $780 million this year—while research and development spending will be $480 million to $530 million, up slightly from an estimated $460 million this year.
Shares of Paccar (Ticker: PCAR) fell roughly 4% to about $105 following the earnings report. Over the past six months, they have lost about 6% of their value, trimming the company’s market capitalization to about $55 billion.
