Today we have a Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week (HDAW) centric recap, focusing on the presentation of our Distributor of the Year Award to Truck Equipment, industry recognition for Bill Nolan and Shelley Sheagley, and everything else that was launched or discussed during the aftermarket's biggest week. We also touch on a 2026 aftermarket forecast from MacKay & Company, the general sentiment from Heavy Duty Aftermarket Dialogue, the weak fourth quarter sales totals for Daimler and International and, finally, good news for freight.
Lucas: Hi, everyone. Lucas here back in the office after Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week, and excited for today’s weekly news roundup.
I think HDAW is where we have to start. If you’re in the aftermarket, that’s where you've been all week. You’re either on your way home now, or you just got home in the last day or so. A lot of really great stuff coming out of Dallas this week. I’m going to start on our side. The Distributor of the Year Award was announced on Tuesday. Truck Equipment Inc., of Green Bay, Wis., was the winner. Huge congratulations to the team at Truck Equipment. Huge thank you to our sponsors, the Commercial Vehicle Solutions Network, Cummins, High Bar Brands, Interstate Billing Service and Procede Software. Also, a huge congratulations to our other finalists. Another great program for Distributor of the Year. Really excited to recognize Truck Equipment and our other finalists.
Other news happening at HDAW This week, Bill Nolan of PBS Truck Parts was inducted into the Heavy Duty Aftermarket Hall of Fame. Congratulations, Bill. Shelly Sheagley of Aurora Parts & Accessories was given the Women in Leadership Award, the second annual Women in Leadership Award. So congratulations to Shelly. What else did we have? We had a great keynote speech by Noelle Russell about AI and how it works in your business. We’ll have a story on TPS about that in the coming days. Be sure to look for that. Also some really, good stuff, posted later in the week on managing your business through change. Editorially, you can check that out. But also there were 2,200 one-on-one meetings, a wonderful product expo, lots of new products and solutions were released. If you haven’t checked those out, go to the website, check that out.
Also before HDAW on Monday was Heavy Duty Aftermarket Dialogue presented by MEMA and MacKay & Company. Some really great stuff there. The MacKay team gave their 2026 aftermarket forecast. They are predicting 3.9% growth for the U.S. aftermarket 3.5% for Canada; about a little bit more than half of that, 2.5%, is price. So some hope and expectation that the aftermarket will have a little bit of a better year. Not a great year, but a little bit of a better year. A lot of the other sessions at Dialogue kind of focused in that same area. What do we have to do to make 2026 better than 2025? And what would it take for it to go from just barely a little bit better to really seeing a market turnaround? So, check all those stories out.
A couple other things I want to point out. We got some Q4 sales totals from Trayton Group, which is the parent company of International and, Daimler Truck, both of them reporting in Q4 some really, really unfortunate sales totals. Daimler sales in North America were down 27% in Q4; International was down 34%. I haven’t seen anything from Paccar or Volvo Group yet. I think they will be similar, which is not really any news. I think we all kind of expected that, but to really to see it on paper, how bad it really was for the truck dealers or for the OEMs, it’s a little bit alarming.
Also this week we had a little bit of information on freight rates. Freight rates were a little bit better, spot rates have been a little bit better recently, so that’s hopefully a good sign. Freight volume was up just a little bit in December, so that’s hopefully a good sign after some weakness in Q3 and Q4, September and October. hopefully that market is turning around.
Again, a ton of stuff from Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week this week. Make sure you’ve gone on the website, you’ve checked it all out. We’ll send out a Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week email probably in the next week or so with every single story we posted so you don’t miss anything. But in the meantime, go to the website, check us out on social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever you use. Be sure to like and subscribe to these videos so you can get everything from us.
We did have videos from Shelly, Bill and the Truck Equipment Distributor of the Year Award announcement on our YouTube channel. So if you haven’t seen those yet, check those out after this. Have a great weekend, everybody. Be safe. I know it’s cold this weekend. Be safe. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you next week. Thanks. Bye.
