May 1, 2017

The recent announcement that Knight Transportation and Swift Transportation are merging is a much bigger and industry-changing event than realized. It comes on the heels of another major development: the public offering by Schneider. In three years, these two deals will be viewed as having set in motion a number of mergers and acquisitions at a pace never witnessed before in the truckload and intermodal industry.

To understand the reasoning for this forecast, one needs to put these transactions in context of the structure of this segment of the trucking industry. Even though trucking was deregulated 36 years ago, there still are more than 100,000 truckload carriers, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. While most of these carriers have fewer than 10 trucks and drivers, there are just 50 truckload carriers with annual revenues in excess of $100 million…