Despite persistent media reports about a shaky U.S. economy, the service truck industry in America is humming along just fine, according to interviews with industry insiders at the annual Work Truck Show in Indianapolis.
“I think we’re doing pretty good,” said Brett Collins, president of Venco Venturo Industries LLC, which is based in Cincinnati, Ohio. “If you look at the world economies, you look at the United States economy, we’re at the top right now.”
Collins said his company has experienced 45 per cent growth in the last two and half years.
“For the companies that are focused and targeted on the capital goods industry, there’s a lot of good business out there, and it’s not just in trucks,” Collins said. “So try not to watch CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, or Fox, right.”
Bob Hews
Bob Hews, president of equipment distributor Hews Co. LLC, stops by the Maintainer Corporation of Iowa Inc. stand at the 2016 Work Truck Show in Indianapolis.
Bob Hews, president of Hews Company LLC, said that “2015 was really a pretty good year for pretty much almost everybody in the industry.”
He speaks as someone well-connected with industry players. His company, based in Portland, Maine, is a distributor for service truck manufacturers like Reading Truck Body LLC, and Maintainer Corporation of Iowa Inc.
“Right now you’ve got some head winds with the oil market and energy and elections and people are little bit, not unsettled but cautious,” Hews said. “But still there’s a demand out there and there’s still a need for trucks. And we’re concerned about availability of some models.”
His sense of late is that supply has been getting ahead of the demand for a brief period when last year the opposite was the case.
At the Altec Industries booth, market manager Andy Price said, in general he agreed that the economy is showing more positive signs than negative ones.
“Hot spots right now are definitely the utility industry in general,” Price said, adding that “oil and gas has definitely dropped off a little bit right now.”
