Typically, I spend the first quarter of the year attending a variety of conferences and trade shows such as HDAD, HDAW, TMC and NTEA. Not this year. While MacKay & Company and HDMA completed our annual conference virtually (which went well), it just didn’t offer the added benefit of bumping into folks in hallways, trade floors or maybe at the bar to discuss all things aftermarket, in particular the outlook.
So, consider this column your random bumping into me at a virtual bar — no mask required.
From a reporting perspective on the aftermarket, the last eight to nine months have actually been fairly positive as the biggest negative impact to the aftermarket and economy occurred in the second quarter of 2020. It appears the worst months of this recession will be the first few months of 2021, which is very unusual, and will resemble the impact of an earthquake or a Katrina — on a national and global level.
We certainly have a ways to go to get everyone (who wants) back to work, and obviously many states still don’t have restaurants, malls and schools open full time with full capacity. The vaccine rollout is helping to get life’s normalcy back in the foreseeable future. Eventually, you got to hope folks will follow the science.
I live in Illinois and am writing this column from Florida. It’s hard to believe both states are in the same country, and I don’t mean the differences in weather. The difference is that retail activity, restaurants, malls, etc., are open in Florida at what appear to be full capacity. Yesterday afternoon I got caught behind a parade of school buses by a school that was letting out, something that doesn’t happen in Illinois.
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We track a number of things at MacKay & Company to measure the performance and attempt to predict the outlook for the aftermarket. All of these measurements have been trending positively, including fleet utilization, fleet miles, trucking freight prices, trucking employment, component manufacturers aftermarket parts sales, truck dealers and independent parts distributors parts and service labor sales.
