A measure of business conditions for shippers improved in September due to lower fuel costs, looser trucking capacity, and lower freight rates, but the freight transportation forecasting firm FTR still expects readings to be weaker and closer to neutral through its two-year forecast period.
Bloomington, Indiana-based FTR is maintaining its stance that trucking conditions will improve, even though its Shippers Conditions Index (SCI) improved in September to 4.6 from a 2.9 reading in August, reaching its strongest level of the year.
“The fact that September’s index is the strongest since last December is not a sign that shippers’ market conditions are steadily improving,” Avery Vise, FTR’s vice president of trucking, said in a release.
“September and May were modest outliers this year in a market that is at least becoming more balanced. We expect that trend to continue and for SCI readings to be mostly negative to neutral in 2025 and 2026. However, markets in transition tend to be volatile, so further outliers are likely and possibly in both directions. The supply chain implications of tariffs are a wild card for 2025 especially,” he said.
The SCI tracks the changes representing four major conditions in the U.S. full-load freight market: freight demand, freight rates, fleet capacity, and fuel price. Combined into a single index, a positive score represents good, optimistic conditions, while a negative score represents bad, pessimistic conditions.
