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Business
February 15-28, 2019 • 17
ATA’s Truck Tonnage Index (Seasonally Adjusted; 2015=100)
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Klint Lowry
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klint.lowry@thetrucker.com
Lane
Departures
As avid readers of The Trucker, there’s no
need to tell you that we have been tinkering
quite a bit over the past year on our website,
or to tell you that we just recently launched a
new configuration of the site. We’ve also been
touting our Facebook page, as you also surely
have noticed.
It’s just our way of keeping in step with the
rest of the journalism industry on its long, often
staggering march into the digital future.
Maybe I should pause a moment to clarify
that I am not one of those stodgy old fogies
who bemoan the demise of print media and the
APR - 16
Navistar shows net income of $340 million
in 2018 compared with $30 million for 2017
THE TRUCKER NEWS SERVICES
LISLE, Ill. — Navistar International Corp.
had a fourth-quarter 2018 net income of $188
million, or $1.89 per diluted share, compared
with fourth-quarter 2017 net income of $135
million, or $1.36 per diluted share, company
officials have revealed.
Navistar reported net income of $340
million, or $3.41 per diluted share for fiscal
year 2018, versus net income of $30 million,
or $0.32 per diluted share, for fiscal
year 2017.
Navistar said it was the only OEM to show
growth in the Class 8 market during its fiscal
year which ended September 30, 2018.
Fourth-quarter 2018 adjusted earnings before
interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization
(EBITDA) increased 20 percent to $322
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million, versus $268 million one year ago.
Fiscal year 2018 adjusted EBITDA increased
42 percent to $826 million, versus
$582 million in 2017. Full-year adjusted EBIT-
DA margins increased to 8.1 percent, up from
6.8 percent for 2017. This marks the company’s
sixth consecutive year of annual growth in
adjusted EBITDA on both a dollar and percentage
basis.
Revenues in the fourth quarter increased 28
percent to $3.3 billion, compared with fourthquarter
2017.
The revenue increase was largely driven
by a 45 percent increase in the company’s core
volumes, which represent its sales of Class
6-8 trucks and buses in the United States and
Canada.
See Navistar on p18 m
ascendance of online media.
Nope, I’m a middle-aged fogey who scoffs
at an entire industry that’s been proclaiming
“print is dead” for the past 15 years but still
can’t figure out how to make the switch to digital.
I also recognize that change is inevitable,
and those who refuse to accept it will become
as obsolete as carbon paper.
True fact: In ancient Greece, Socrates went
on record to express his dismay over the reading
and writing fad that the young folks of his
day were into. He considered it a contributor
to the dumbing down of society. What would
become of memory if you can just write stuff
down?
Poor Socrates, he couldn’t see the writing
on the wall. But if he’d had today’s technology,
he might have been a social media influencer
instead of a philosopher. DaVinci may have figured
out how to make his corkscrew helicopter
work and Gutenberg could have self-published
December tonnage index slowing,
but yearly gain the best in 20 years
Cliff Abbott
cliffa@thetrucker.com
ARLINGTON, Va. — The American Trucking
Associations’ advanced seasonally adjusted
(SA) For-Hire Truck Tonnage Index fell by 4.3
percent in December. But despite the setback,
the index showed the largest annual gain since
1998.
The index fell to 111.9 in December to close
out the year, down from November’s revised
index of 116.9, but still 1.4 percent better than
his Bible on the world-wide Web.
There are a lot of advantages to the brave
not-exactly-new world of digital media. One
of them is news organizations that can keep
track of which stories their audience gravitates
to most. The working theory is if we look at
what clicked with you before, and we do more
stories like that, you’ll like us more.
Let me pause again, in case you caught a
whiff of cynicism on my part. The basic idea of
gauging reader response really isn’t anything
new, the only thing new is we can do it more
quickly and efficiently than before.
For example, we recently sifted through the
past month, identified the top-read stories, and
discovered that there were two kinds of stories
truckers just can’t seem to get enough of: carriers
announcing big pay increases and crashes
involving fellow truckers.
You don’t need 21st century technology to
understand the first one. Who wouldn’t want to
read about lucrative job opportunities?
the 110.3 posted for December 2017.
For the full year of 2018, the index increased
by 6.6 percent, the largest annual gain
since 1998 (10.1 percent) and significantly better
than the 3.8 percent increase in 2017.
The baseline for the ATA index is 2015,
meaning that the seasonally adjusted truck tonnage
index has risen 11.9 percent since 2015.
The results are mixed, according to ATA
Chief Economist Bob Costello. “The good
See Tonnage on p18 m
Courtesy: NAVISTAR
Navistar said it was the only OEM to show growth in the Class 8 market during its fiscal year
which ended September 30, 2018. Pictured is the International LT Series Class 8 tractor.
Crunching the numbers, large truck crashes get clicks; the question is why?
But that second one is a little more interesting.
Of course, unless we go out and cause
accidents so that we can report on them, it will
be hard to report more about crashes. But I suppose
it would be a good move to make those
stories more prominent.
I feel like I keep leaving the wrong impression.
There’s nothing cold and calculating
about this kind of thinking, or at least nothing
freshly cold and calculating about it. For
decades TV news has lived by the motto “if it
bleeds, it leads” — with the understanding that
they never actually show any blood.
I’ve always been a little uncomfortable
with this moral conflict in journalism. Truth
be told, bad news is good news for the news
business.
I think to be more comfortable about the
whole thing, it would help to go beyond the
numbers. There’s nothing unique about truckers’
fascination with crashes. The one differ-
See Lane on p18 m