Trucking Co's. Shane M. Yes, I forget LSTR is different from the others.
If you have access AAII materials, then you might want to review 5/04 AAII Journal article, "Keep on Trucking: Sunlight or Headlights at the End of the Tunnel?", by S. Kylander. He bifurcates (wow. can't believe I remember and get to use that one -gg-) the industry into private fleets and for-hire companies. He then separates the for-hire market into truckload carriers and LTL (less-than-truckload) carriers. (Truckloaders have their entire carrier dedicated to one customer from origination to destination.) The dynamics of the these latter two segments are different. For example, with LTL, labor accounts for a greater factor of revenues.
His belief is that the key factor for measuring performance is return on invested capital. I assume that's the same or comparably close to your ROTC. The truckload segment shows higher numbers generally. His ranking (five-year avg. as of '04 being HTLD, KNX JBHT, WERN and SWFT. I see Yahoo will give (using current ROA figures) a ranking now as JBHT, KNX, HTLD, and again WERN and SWFT lagging. Not sure what to make of all this, although it does look like KNX may have improved in business performance and that seems to be reflected in a better stock price performance than my erstwhile favorite, HTLD:
finance.yahoo.com
In the LTL, his top three by 5-year ROIC were ABFS, ODFL, YRCW. No change in that ranking when I just use Yahoo current ROA numbers. |
