Cold storage facility operator Lineage said customer inventories have stabilized, though some accounts are holding lower stock levels. The Novi, Michigan-based company said Tuesday on its third-quarter call that it continues to shutter underutilized facilities in efforts to tighten supply and reduce debt leverage.
Lineage (NASDAQ: LINE) noted that it and Americold (NYSE: COLD), the top two operators in the space, have reduced overall capacity by 4% (9 million square feet) over the past two years. Lineage has idled 16 locations since the start of 2025, representing 2.6 million square feet and 212,000 pallet positions.
The company reported a third-quarter net loss of $173 million, or 68 cents per share. Adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) were 73 cents per share, down 12 cents year over year. (AFFO excludes depreciation, acquisition costs, restructuring expenses and other non-recurring items.)
Consolidated net revenue of $1.36 billion was down 1% y/y and just shy of the $1.37-billion consensus estimate.
An 8% y/y decline in food-related container volumes dragged revenue lower. The company pointed to weakness in the seafood sector as higher fuel costs forced fishermen to curtail their trips. Elevated diesel prices also pushed Lineage’s third-party transportation costs higher in the quarter.
However, facility occupancy is improving across the portfolio.
On a same-warehouse comparison, Lineage’s physical occupancy was 76.2% in the quarter, 110 basis points higher y/y, and 40 bps better than the second quarter. (Physical occupancy was 76.4% in the first quarter.)
Pallet throughput declined 1% y/y, with storage revenue per pallet down 2%. Both metrics were up less than 1% sequentially.
“Our core business trends continued to stabilize in the third quarter, with same-store occupancy growing year-over-year for the second consecutive quarter, further confirmation that customer inventory levels have normalized,” said Lineage President and CEO Greg Lehmkuhl in a news release.
Adjusted EBITDA of $317 million was 7% lower y/y, with the adjusted EBITDA margin falling 150 bps to 23.3%.
The company lowered its full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance by 1% at the midpoint of the new range of $1.25 billion to $1.27 billion. A fire at a California facility is expected to be a $20-million headwind. (Lineage reported $1.3 billion in adjusted EBITDA in 2025.)
The AFFO guidance range was tightened to $2.86 to $2.98 per share.
It has 17 facilities currently under construction, which will add $141 million in net operating income, $11 million of which has already been achieved.
Lineage ended the third quarter with net leverage at 6.4 times last 12 months’ adjusted EBITDA. It said that proceeds from asset dispositions and insurance recoveries should lower its leverage to a target range of 5 to 5.5x, with meaningful progress occurring in the 2027 first half.
Lineage manages 497 facilities with 3.1 billion cubic feet of space across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. It also provides freight forwarding, customs brokerage, drayage and truck transportation.
Shares of LINE were down 9.6% in early trading on Tuesday compared to the S&P 500, which was off 0.6%.
Why it matters? Lineage is one of only two publicly traded cold storage providers. Its quarterly results provide a look at macro trends across the temperature-controlled warehousing and transportation markets.
More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:
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The post Lineage sees cold storage inventories stabilize after capacity reductions appeared first on FreightWaves.
Sportswear company ASICS is recovering misplaced products nearly 60% faster at its Byhalia, Mississippi, distribution center since it began conducting nightly flights of high-risk storage areas with autonomous inventory drones.
The drones, manufactured by Corvus Robotics, have increased counting frequency six-fold compared to the normal practice of counting inventory twice a year. The data collected each night is aggregated and now analyzed on a monthly basis, allowing orders to ship on time and at full price. The new system has saved about 200 hours of monthly counting labor, which ASICS has redirected into inventory research and exception management, the companies said Tuesday.
The ASICS facility holds close to 3 million units — 2.3 million pairs of footwear and 700,000 pieces of apparel and accessories — across roughly 44,000 stock keeping units, all managed in a Manhattan Associates warehouse management system. It fills e-commerce orders and ships to wholesale accounts, along with ASICS full price and outlet retail stores.
Corvus drones provide surveillance in the areas that tend to produce the most discrepancies — the singles area, where returned and single pair products get stored and picked, and case reserve. Both were counted twice a year under ASICS cycle count policy.
In one three-month stretch the drones surfaced 26 misplaced cases holding more than 200 pairs of shoes, products that would otherwise have stayed unavailable to customers until the next scheduled physical count.
“If a unit went missing, we might not find it for six months,” said Kyle Koestler, senior director of distribution and transportation at ASICS America Corp., in a news release. “That could be the last pair in the building for an order we’ve already taken, and then the customer gets a cancellation. With Corvus One, we’re cycle counting on a monthly basis so we can surface any errors sooner and ensure customer orders are delivered on time.”
The inventory control team is putting the 200 hours in time savings towards inventory reconciliation in the packing operation, root cause research and special projects for the wholesale business.
In both areas the drone does two jobs on the same pass, reading every Universal Product Code and counting the boxes in each location. In the singles area, returns mean the same SKU can show up several times in one location, so a UPC read on its own can get attached to the wrong box. Counting the boxes gives ASICS a physical total to check the scans against. If the drone counts 10 boxes, it should come back with 10 UPC reads, according to Corvus.
ASICS schedules seven flights a night, starting around 7 p.m. The aisles the drones fly in are less than six feet wide. The Corvus One drone flies using onboard computer vision and spatial reasoning, with no additional infrastructure anywhere in the building. Each morning an inventory associate reviews each flight and resolves most discrepancies from a desk, working off the video and images the drones capture of every location.
The accuracy provides a revenue benefit too. ASICS publishes availability feeds to online marketplaces. Before inventory management by drone the team held back 12 to 15 units out of every 100 to make sure it could deliver on what it promised. Product at the bottom of the lot never shows up on the marketplace, leaving ASICS having to liquidate the goods at a steep discount. ASICS now publishes the full feed and sells that product at full price, according to the announcement.
ASICS says using drones to count inventory also saves energy because employees are operating lift equipment through the aisles less frequently.
Corvus is based in Mountain View, California. Other companies offering warehouse inventory drones include Gather AI and Verity.
Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.
Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.
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How much trucking capacity is on the road right now depends almost entirely on which carriers you are counting, because the national fleet is really several different markets stacked together, the owner-operators running a truck or two, the mid-sized fleets, and the largest carriers, and each of those groups is in a different place heading into year-end, which is why a single top-line number tends to hide more than it shows. Break the tractor counts out by fleet size and the gaps between those segments become the real capacity story.
The Top-Line Signals Are Mixed
Before going tier by tier, it helps to set the backdrop, and the backdrop is not sending one clean signal. The SONAR Truckload Rejection Index, which tracks how often carriers turn down the freight shippers tender to them, sits at 12.95 percent. That is above its trailing 12-month average of 8.18 percent, so capacity is tighter than it was a year ago, but it has also eased down from the mid-teens readings it hit over the summer, so the tightening has lost some momentum rather than accelerating.
Volume tells a similarly flat story. The SONAR Truckload Volume Index, a measure of accepted electronic tender volume, sits at 11,636.92, essentially flat on the day and only marginally above its 12-month average of 11,489.59. Freight is moving at a steady clip, neither falling off nor breaking out. Put those two together and the national picture is a standoff, demand holding, capacity a little tighter than last year but no longer tightening hard. That is exactly why the more useful read right now is underneath the top line, in how capacity is distributed by fleet size.
The Owner-Operator Segment Has Round-Tripped Its Boom
Start with the smallest carriers, because they have moved the most. SONAR’s count of tractors run by fleets with one to six power units stands at 362,033, and the five-year view is the one that matters. This segment sat near 362,000 tractors in early 2022, surged to a peak close to 398,000 in the first half of 2023 as pandemic-era freight and easy authority pulled a wave of new entrants into the market, and has declined almost without interruption ever since. It is now back to roughly where it started, below its five-year average of about 378,800 and below its 12-month average of about 364,960.
That is close to 36,000 tractors, on the order of nine percent of the segment, pulled back out of the most fragile tier of the market over three and a half years. These are the operators most exposed to the spot market, with the least cost advantage on fuel, insurance, and maintenance, and the thinnest cushion to ride out weak rates, so when conditions soften they are the first to park a truck or let an authority lapse. The entire pandemic-era surge in small-carrier capacity has effectively been unwound, which is a very different starting point than the market had a couple of years ago, whichever way demand breaks from here.
The Mid-Market Is Setting Records
The mid-sized fleet is the counterweight. SONAR’s count of tractors run by carriers with 20 to 100 power units sits at 470,402, a fresh high, up about a half percent in its latest monthly reading and comfortably above its trailing 12-month average of roughly 451,600. Over five years this band has climbed steadily from about 420,000 tractors to this new record, and unlike the other two tiers it has barely paused.
This is the segment built to absorb. These carriers are big enough to hold real contract freight, run drop-and-hook programs, and operate the lease-on fleets that owner-operators sign onto when running their own authority stops penciling out. When a driver gives up a one-truck operation and leases onto a larger carrier, that tractor does not leave the road, it moves from being counted in the one-to-six tier into a mid-sized fleet. Part of what the record in this band likely reflects is that migration, capacity shifting from the bottom of the market into its middle rather than exiting the industry altogether. One caveat belongs here, because these counts are built from carriers’ MCS-150 filings, so some of the apparent movement into the 20-to-100 band can be carriers updating their paperwork rather than trucks physically changing fleets, which is a reason to read the multi-year trend rather than lean on any single month.
The Biggest Fleets Are Running Lean
The largest carriers round out the picture, and they are not expanding. SONAR’s count of tractors run by fleets with 1,000 or more power units sits at 440,430, down a sharp 2.23 percent in its latest monthly reading, a drop of more than 10,000 tractors, leaving it below its trailing 12-month average of about 452,800. The five-year line for this group is the choppiest of the three, swinging from near 485,000 tractors in early 2022 down into the 430,000s, back toward 475,000 in late 2024, then grinding lower through 2025 and 2026 with a sharp dip toward 418,000 over the summer before a partial bounce.
The behavior here looks like discipline. The largest fleets can right-size faster than anyone, declining to renew leases, parking underutilized tractors, and trimming fleets that are not earning within a quarter, and the volatility in this line is the fingerprint of exactly that. For now they are holding their counts lean and below their own average, which means the tier most capable of adding a lot of capacity quickly is choosing not to.
Both Ends Are Thin, The Middle Is Full
Line the three tiers up and a clear shape appears. The smallest one-to-six band has round-tripped its boom and sits below its averages. The largest 1,000-plus band is running lean and below its average. Only the mid-sized 20-to-100 band is at a record. Capacity is concentrating in the middle of the market, pulled up from the bottom by owner-operators who lease on or fold, and kept in check at the top by giants who are not re-expanding.
What that might signal is worth thinking through carefully rather than forcing into a forecast. On one hand, the capacity base at the bottom is structurally thinner than it has been in years, and thin, exited small-carrier capacity does not come back on a dime, so if freight demand firms, the market could tighten faster than the flat rejection reading suggests today. On the other hand, with rejections already easing off their summer highs and volumes holding flat, there is no demand pull right now forcing that to happen. The honest read is a loaded-but-quiet setup, a capacity base that has quietly thinned at both ends while the top-line waits for a catalyst. That is a lens on the months ahead, not a prediction of them.
The Churn Beneath The Net Numbers
The net figures sit on top of constant churn in the federal authority rolls. In a single day’s file of FMCSA Motus carrier changes dated November 9, there were 367 operating-authority updates across 362 individual carriers, of which 199 were in active status, 103 were inactive, 57 were pending, and 8 were formally withdrawn, and more than 90 percent were motor carriers of property carrying the familiar 750,000 dollar insurance requirement. That file comes with a real caveat right now, because the Motus system rollout has paused certain USDOT deactivations tied to biannual update requirements while pushing a backlog of reinstatements through at the same time, which distorts the active and inactive tallies and makes any single day a poor read on true entry and exit. It is a reminder that the authority rolls are in constant motion rather than a clean count of who is coming and going, and because the file carries no fleet-size information, it cannot on its own say which size of carrier is lapsing. The fleet-size picture has to come from the SONAR tractor counts above, not from the authority file.
The Takeaway For The Small Carrier
For the owner-operator reading their own segment in that long decline, the point is not that the small carrier is finished, it is to understand what the last three and a half years selected for. The operators still standing are the ones who know their true cost per mile, who built direct relationships with local shippers instead of living and dying by spot postings, and who ran the business like a business rather than a truck payment. In a market that is tighter than last year but not yet pulling hard in anyone’s favor, that structure is what separates the carriers positioned to benefit if the market firms from the ones who keep showing up in the inactive column no matter what rates do.
Why It Matters
Capacity is not a single number that is cleanly rising or falling right now, it is splitting by fleet size, with the smallest operators having unwound their entire pandemic boom, the largest carriers running deliberately lean, and the mid-sized fleets at a record as they absorb what the bottom lets go. For carriers, brokers, and shippers, the value in that split is as a current lens rather than a forecast, because it shows a capacity base that has quietly thinned at both ends while demand holds flat, and that is the kind of setup that decides how fast the market can move whenever the next real catalyst, up or down, finally arrives.
This analysis draws on FreightWaves SONAR data as of early November 2026: tractor counts by fleet size for the 1-to-6 power-unit segment (TCTCO.USA) at 362,033, the 20-to-100 segment (TCTCM.USA) at 470,402, and the 1,000-plus segment (TCTCE.USA) at 440,430, the SONAR Truckload Rejection Index (STRI.USA) at 12.95 percent, and the SONAR Truckload Volume Index (STVI.USA) at 11,636.92.
The post Where Trucking Capacity Sits Right Now, And What The Fleet-Size Split Might Be Signaling appeared first on FreightWaves.
SONAR expands National Insights to flatbed and LTL
SONAR has updated the Truckload National Insights dashboard. It now runs on SONAR’s new blended datasets and adds two new tabs: Flatbed and LTL. Users get a pre-built national view across modes, with no tickers to enter.
Key takeaways
- Truckload National Insights now uses SONAR’s new blended datasets.
- New Flatbed tab: rejections, volumes, fuel, spot rates, Weekly Top Moving Markets and the TRAC Spot Market Conditions Map.
- New LTL tab: rates by region, length of haul and freight class, plus regional comparisons, top rate movers and historical trends.
- Actionable Insights still gives a plain-language summary of what the data means.
What’s new in National Insights
The Truckload National Insights dashboard gets three upgrades: new blended datasets and two new tabs.
Blended datasets
- Dashboard metrics now draw on SONAR’s new blended datasets
Flatbed tab
- Tender rejections and volumes
- Fuel
- Spot rates
- Weekly Top Moving Markets
- TRAC Spot Market Conditions Map
LTL tab
- LTL rates by region, length of haul and freight class
- Regional comparisons
- Top rate movers
- Historical trends
Why it matters
Flatbed and LTL often move on different cycles than dry van. Flatbed tracks industrial output and construction, and LTL pricing tends to lag truckload. Seeing all four modes together helps teams spot those divergences early.
| Audience | How they use it |
|---|---|
| Shippers | Benchmark flatbed and LTL costs before bids and budget conversations |
| Brokers | Spot flatbed capacity tightening and price loads with current context |
| Carriers | Decide where to deploy flatbed equipment and when to push rates |
Frequently asked questions
What is SONAR National Insights? National Insights is a pre-built SONAR page that summarizes national freight conditions, including capacity, demand, rates and fuel, with plain-language analysis and no tickers required.
Does SONAR National Insights include flatbed data? Yes. A new Flatbed tab shows tender rejections, volumes, fuel, spot rates, Weekly Top Moving Markets and the TRAC Spot Market Conditions Map.
Does SONAR National Insights include LTL data? Yes. A new LTL tab breaks down LTL rates by region, length of haul and freight class, with regional comparisons, top rate movers and historical trends.
What data does Truckload National Insights use? The dashboard now runs on SONAR’s new blended datasets, with tabs for truckload, flatbed and LTL.
Who is National Insights for? Shippers, freight brokers and carriers who need a fast read on the national market before making pricing, procurement or capacity decisions.
How do I access National Insights? National Insights is available to SONAR subscribers inside the SONAR platform.
See flatbed and LTL in National Insights
SONAR subscribers can find the new Flatbed and LTL tabs in Truckload National Insights today. Want to learn more about SONAR? Request a SONAR demo to see the updated dashboard in action.
The post SONAR National Insights Expands With Flatbed and LTL Data appeared first on FreightWaves.
Hail the return of the preighter. Latam Airlines is the first airline in four and a half years to operate a passenger plane with cargo loaded in the cabin.
The South American carrier said it activated an Airbus A319 to deliver emergency aid from Quito, Ecuador, to the Galapagos Islands, which suffered flooding after being hit by heavy rains, and stored cargo in passenger seats in addition to the lower deck.
When air travel and the global economy shut down in 2020 during the Covid pandemic many airlines quickly turned passenger aircraft into temporary freighters, commonly referred to as preighters, often loading cartons in the cabin where people normally sit to meet soaring demand for medical supplies and other goods in high demand. Those flights ended by the first half of 2022 as the travel industry and other cargo transport modes rebounded.
Latam Airlines said it transported about 28,450 pounds of food, water and hygiene kits last week for more than 2,000 families impacted by the flooding on Santa Cruz Island. Latam donated the relief flight at the request of the Chamber of Industries and Production and Grupo Entregas, according to the news release.
Latam Cargo, which separately operates 19 Boeing 767-300 cargo jets, helped coordinate logistics for the flight. The medium widebody freighters couldn’t be used, Latam said, because Baltra Airport doesn’t have a long-enough runway to handle a fully-loaded jet of that size and officials didn’t want to reduce the amount of aid that could be delivered.
On a regular passenger flight, an A319 can carry about 7,700 pounds of cargo. With no passengers and only the hold in use, it can carry about 15,000 pounds. By utilizing the cabin seats, the flight was able to carry another 13,450 pounds of relief supplies, nearly doubling the maximum cargo payload
Why It Matters: Latam’s use of a jet to move cargo is unusual because the use of passenger aircraft as auxiliary freighters ended when the world recovered from Covid in 2022.
Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.
Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.
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