While orders have been extremely strong, the industry’s long string of year over year net order gains came to an end in June. According to this month’s issue of ACT Research’s State of the Industry: U.S. Trailer Report, net orders of 20,048 trailers were down 1.3 percent Y/Y and 13 percent off month over month.

“Dry vans were the driving force in the last two months’ performances and solid volume kept that year-over-year improvement streak alive in May,” said Frank Maly, Director–CV Transportation Analysis and Research at ACT Research. “It was dry van weakness in June that was responsible for the total industry’s negative Y/Y posting, while the other nine trailer categories were all in the black year-over year.

“Production surged sequentially in June. While build usually increases in an end-of-quarter month, there were also extenuating circumstances last month,” he said. “Reports of red-tagged units being moved to completion were heard and that shift from work-in-progress to completion artificially increases calculated build rates.”

Additionally, the report noted that fleets are experiencing a catch-22 in that they are too busy to retrieve completed units, but having those trailers could help ease their capacity challenges, a trend ACT Research has noted for the past several months.