The leaders of Traton SE, the owner of the International truck brand, Scania, and others, are forecasting that North American sales could fall up to 10% this year as fleet executives pull back on spending in the face of economic uncertainty.
Speaking to analysts and investors after reporting fourth-quarter results, Chairman and CEO Christian Levin said his team thinks 2025 North American sales of Class 6-8 trucks will be flat to down 10% compared to 2024, when they slipped 4% to 427,000. That forecast puts the region between Europe, where the Traton team sees sales slipping 5% to 15%, and South America, where sales are expected to be down 5% to up 5%.
“It’s never been more difficult to make an outlook for the North American total market,” Levin said on a March 10 conference call. He pointed to economic uncertainty as the biggest reason for that cloudy picture.
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Levin and CFO Michael Jackstein said their global outlook for 2025 is a tale of two halves. The second half (hopefully) will bring some clarity about the economic outlook, geopolitical uncertainties, and a possible rise in U.S. orders as fleets begin prebuying ahead of the 2027 Environmental Protection Agency emissions rule changes.
Levin said he’s not counting on a big jump this year from prebuy activity. It’s possible, he said, that the calendar will read 2026 before a notable lift shows up.
“If at all this year, I believe that one might come a bit later than what we had planned given all this uncertainty,” he added. “We are now, I wouldn’t say pessimistic, but we are a bit more cautious on the outlook.”
Many customers, Levin said, are waiting to see how things shake out in the coming months with interest rates, inflation and the Trump administration’s tariff push. And bigger U.S. fleets—to which Traton is more exposed than its peers—are better equipped to push out purchasing decisions a month or two, meaning International’s order book isn’t seeing the activity it could be.
In the last three months of 2024, International booked about $3.1 billion in revenues, an increase of 7% year over year, and an operating margin of 7.9% that was up nearly a percentage point from late 2023. Those numbers were helped by a prebuy push in Mexico because of the January 1 introduction of the Euro VI/EPA 10 emission standard. For the year, International sold 79,300 trucks, up from about 75,500 in 2023; orders slipped to about 56,600 from nearly 61,000 the year before.
Levin said his team isn’t yet planning changes at its North American plants because it’s working down lead times on past orders. But should the economic environment deteriorate, he said Traton will “have to be very swift.”
Asked about the potential impact of tariffs on Traton’s manufacturing footprint, Jackstein said Traton can mitigate any short-term impact involving its plant in Escobedo, Mexico. But, as have several other manufacturing leaders lately, Jackstein passed on providing a longer-term outlook around tariffs. There are, he said, simply too many possible scenarios to account for.
Around the world, Traton in 2024 booked an operating profit of roughly $4.7 billion on revenue of about $51.4 billion. The company’s operating margin ticked up to 9.2% from 8.6% in 2023.
Shares of Traton slipped nearly 3% in European trading March 10. Over the past six months, however, they are still up more than 35%, helped by an overall rush from investors to buy European companies since early this year.
