This holiday week was dominated mostly by M&A news, with Rush announcing its second purchase in two weeks, PHINIA and ASE making tactical purchases and Four Star Freightliner widening its reach. Also we share an update on the Eaton/Dana sale, touch on the news that Cummins is delaying two engines, analyze recent ATA truck tonnage data and tease our upcoming Mapping the Market, MarketPulse and dealer and aftermarket award program finalist announcements.
Lucas: Hey everybody. Happy Fourth of July! Lucas here for today’s TPS weekly news roundup. Short roundup this week. I know it’s a holiday week. A lot of people are out, you’re probably in the car, you’re heading to a party. Happy Fourth of July. Enjoy it.
Just a couple quick things I want hit before you scuffle out the door. This was the biggest M&A week we’ve had in the parts, service, dealer, aftermarket channels in probably three or four years. I had, Rush announced another acquisition, Four Star Freightliner announced an acquisition. ASE announced the acquisition of WrenchWay. PHINIA announced the acquisition of stoba Group. All that happened in a three-day span. Also I had an update on Eaton’s sale of its Mobility group to Dana so that story came out earlier this week. Our June M&A roundup [also] came out on Wednesday. If you didn’t see that, check that out. It had everything from the month. The stuff that happened here in July, all that stuff’s also available on the website, so check that out.
Couple other things. Cummins is going to be delaying two engines, the X10 and the B7.2 Series. Those were both intended to be released in January of 2027 and CCJ, our sister publication, is announcing they’re not going to be, both will be delayed. The X10 is going to be delayed from January of 2027 into July and the B7.2 is going to be delayed from January of 2027 to January of 2028. If we get more information on that, if CCJ gets more information on that, we will update you. But what we’re hearing and what CCJ is reporting is that those two engines are going to be delayed.
A couple other things. ATA released its truck tonnage report for May earlier this week. Tonnage was down 2% in May, disappointing, but tonnage is up 2% year over year through May, so really we’re doing well. We were up almost 5% in the first quarter of the year, slipped a little bit in April and May, but there is optimism from ATA and really from the entirety of the industry that tonnage is doing a lot better and we’ve sort of finally come out of the freight recession.
On that topic, I am working on our Mapping the Market quarterly report, which takes data from RigDig — which is another Fusable sister brand — and looks at changes in the U.S. carrier population quarter over quarter. I can tell you in the carrier population that we added a ton of vehicles in Q2, a lot more trucks on the road now than there were three months ago. So, that should be a good sign for freight moving forward. I’m also going to be doing our quarterly MarketPulse survey of dealers and aftermarket operations. That survey will go out on Monday and we’ll have those results later this month so you can look for that.
And then one last thing, we will be announcing the finalists for our Successful Dealer Award, Trailblazer Award and Distributor of the Year awards later this month. Successful Dealer probably first, you should have those finalists next week and then Trailblazer and Distributor of the Year later this month, but we’re excited to learn more about all those businesses.
Again, have a great Fourth of July. Have a great 250th. Enjoy your weekend, do something fun outside and we will see you next week. Thanks everybody. Bye.
