CVSN broke the news cycle this week, announcing it is has made the upcoming Distributor Training Expo an all-inclusive, no-cost event. That means free! All you have to do is register your people and get them there! We also touch on the American Truck Dealers’ first-quarter sales and market share report, big acquisitions by High Bar Brands and Work Truck Solutions, the latest First Brands news and workforce cut at Dana.
Lucas: Hey everybody. Lucas here. Excited to run through this week’s news with you. And the big news this week is the Distributor Trading Expo. It is free in 2026. It’s coming next month, May 12-15, in Indianapolis and CVSN announcing this week they are making it complimentary. Registration is complimentary for anybody that’s interested in attending the Distributor Training Expo. If you haven’t been there before, you’re never going to have a better chance. CVSN is retooling the DTE after 2026. So if you want to go, you have to sign up now. All you have to do is register. All you have to do is get your people there. CVSN will cover the hotels, the food, all the onsite training, all the materials to and from the airport if your people need to fly in. They just have to get registered. They just have to get to Indianapolis. So, if you’re considering, you’re interested, do it now.
Some other news this week, ATD announced, or released, Q1 sales data. Some interesting market share data on who really performed well in Q1, maybe who struggled. As you can expect, Q1 sales were not great. Medium-duty was off 15%. Heavy-duty was off 20%. But ATD is much more confident for the rest of the year. Based on what we’ve seen on truck orders, changes in freight, ATD amended its Class 8 forecast up 31% for the rest of the year. So despite a bad Q1, a lot of positivity for the rest of the year.
Some other huge acquisitions this week. Work Truck Solutions has purchased Arcadium technologies, so they are adding a heavy-duty CRM system to the light- and medium-duty [dealer] CRM systems they introduced last month at the Work Truck Show. Interesting story there. Check that out on the website.
Highbar Brands expanding its portfolio of products and solutions by purchasing Globetech. This adds new OEM and aftermarket product lines to the High Bar Brands portfolio. Good move there. Check that story out.
Also, PremiumGuard announced this week they have closed on the purchase of a variety of First Brands product lines, including Fram, Luber-finer, Autolite, Trico and Anco wiper blades. A bunch of stuff. We’ve been reporting on that the last couple weeks, but it finally closed this week, so check that story out.
And then one last thing, Dana is closing a Victor facility, a Victor Reinz facility in Southern Illinois. I reached out to Dana for more information about what that actually entails. It looks like about 80 people are going to be laid off as part of the sort of restructuring of the Dana manufacturing and distribution channel. That’s one thing to check out on the website.
A lot of other great stuff on the website. Be sure to check it out, run through your newsletters. Like and subscribe to these to these videos so you can get them every week. Make sure you’re on our email newsletter so you can get that every week or every day. Have a great weekend. We will see you next week. Thanks everybody. Bye.
