Dive Brief:
- Wabash’s backlog grew 14% sequentially to $956 million — the first Q2 backlog growth in company history — as customers began committing to replacement purchases, executives said during a July 29 earnings call.
- Executives said the company opened its 2027 order book earlier than its traditional sales cycle after customers requested earlier visibility into pricing and production slots.
- Wabash reported $417 million in Q2 revenue, exceeding its expectations. CFO Patrick Keslin said the quarter showed meaningful financial improvement and “represented an important step forward off the bottom.”
Dive Insight:
Wabash executives said they are seeing fleets shift from delaying trailer purchases to committing to replacement orders as freight market fundamentals recover.
CEO Brent Yeagy said customers have already been locking in production slots after the company opened its 2027 order book in late June, giving Wabash greater confidence in future orders.
“The response we've gotten is the follow-through on those requests for active quoting and, we'll call it, early-cycle negotiations and closing of deals so that they can have certainty in terms of allocated capacity and slot timing,” Yeagy said.
Yeagy said in an email to Trucking Dive that the company has dry van production capacity for 10,000 more units at its expanded South Plant in Lafayette, Indiana, to serve increasing demand. He added the company’s recently closed facilities in Goshen, Indiana, and Little Falls, Minnesota, are not related to the company’s dry van business, and idling those sites reflected a rightsizing of capacity of the company’s truck body business.
“We have more than adequate capacity to serve the truck body market today and into the future,” Yeagy said. “There are no immediate plans to reopen either of these facilities at this time.”
Meanwhile, as demand has improved, Wabash has begun to implement “substantial pricing increases” on new orders to recover higher material costs that it had previously absorbed during the prolonged freight recession. However, those higher-priced orders have yet to show up in margins, resulting in a 5.6% operating margin loss in Q2.
Keslin expects Q3 margins to remain similar to Q2 before getting incrementally better going into the last quarter of the year. The current backlog supports a 200- to 300-basis-point improvement in material margins by Q4, he said.
“There is still work ahead, but as we evaluate the growing backlog and improving sentiment in the marketplace, we remain cautiously confident in the outlook,” Keslin said.
