While it is true that the industrial sector relies upon the transports to get their products to market, and that a recovery in the economy should be good for transports, that story has not played out so well in the trucking space. Although railroads like Union Pacific (NYSE:UNP) and Canadian National (NYSE:CNI) have shot up, many of the truckers are still down on a multi-year basis.
With very disappointing first quarter earnings, leading less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier Arkansas Best (Nasdaq:ABFS) is offering some evidence as to why that is. While demand for transport is definitely getting better, there is not much pricing power in the market and rising costs are becoming a larger problem. Of course, those investors with a contrarian streak might see this as an opportunity to pick up shares of a company that has generally been one of the better operators within its group. (For more, see Transport Stocks Ready To Roll.)
Q1 Was Supposed to Be Bad, but Not This Bad
It says something about the operating environment in the trucking space that Arkansas Best missed what were already pretty uninspiring estimates. Oddly enough, the company did fine on the revenue line - revenue jumped almost 21% from last year and surpassed the average estimate. Even here, though, are signs of some of the challenges in the business - tonnage per day was up over 17% and there was a nearly 16% jump in shipments, but weight per shipment increased just 3% and revenue per hundredweight was up just a bit over 2%.
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