Trade war puts the brakes on TFI trucking expansion plans, as cargo volume sags

MONTREAL — Tariff angst has forced TFI International Inc. to back off big acquisitions as the trucking industry confronts lower cargo volumes, its CEO said Thursday.

“We have one transaction that we really liked, but because of all this uncertainty on tariffs, we had to walk away from that deal,” chief executive Alain Bédard told analysts on a conference call.

“We can’t touch that. Maybe later on, we’ll see down the road once we have better clarity. This is why our M&A in 2025 … is going to be minimal.”

Meanwhile, “customers are sitting on the fence” as they wait for stronger indications of where U.S. tariff targets will land, Bédard said, with freight activity starting to sag after a cross-border surge sparked by shippers rushing to beat shifting tariff deadlines.

He pointed to the United States’ escalating trade war with China. The standoff, which has raised tariff rates to 145 per cent for most Chinese exports to the U.S. and 125 per cent for China-bound American products, has set off ripples in North American trucking.

“If you are a U.S. farmer right now, you don’t feel pretty good because your main customer, China, is saying we don’t want your products … Then you’re not going to buy a tractor, you’re not going to buy a combine,” Bédard said, noting that TFI’s manufacturing clients include agricultural equipment makers.

“Those guys don’t sell a lot because their customers, the farmer, are insecure right now.”

Closer to home, stop-and-go tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump have left a confusing array of duties on imports to America, with Canada’s auto, steel and aluminum sectors facing 25 per cent tariffs — though broad exemptions apply to vehicles.

A chunk of TFI’s specialized truckload division, which refers to shipments ranging from oversized goods to hazardous materials, took an especially hard hit in the first quarter. Bédard said flatbed trucks hauling industrial products in the U.S. drove 15 per cent fewer miles some weeks — “just a disaster.”

“Our industrial-based customers are just waiting, because their customers don’t know what’s going to happen.”

He said the “foggy” outlook prompted the country’s largest trucking firm to hold off on a financial forecast for the year. TFI said only that it was aiming for earnings per share of between $1.25 and $1.40 in the second quarter.

Bédard also said “less-than-truckload” deliveries — multiple drops of cargo for different clients on a single run — have been “very disappointing” this year. The segment’s adjusted earnings in the first three months of 2025 declined 29 per cent year-over-year.

Overall, net income fell 40 per cent year-over-year last quarter to US$56 million. Revenues rose five per cent to US$1.96 billion due to TFI’s acquisition of flatbed trucking giant Daseke Inc. last April, the Montreal-based company reported Wednesday.

The profit decline came despite the fact that outbound loads to the U.S. from Canada across the trucking sector rose nearly two-thirds year-over-year in the first quarter, according to Loadlink Technologies. Inbound freight volumes increased by a third in a race to beat the tariff clock.

However, less than five per cent of TFI’s business comes from transborder shipments, Bédard has said. The vast majority of sales flow from domestic trips within the U.S. and Canada.

Industry-wide freight volumes in the U.S. have “collapsed” to near pre-pandemic levels, according to Craig Fuller, CEO of logistics analytics firm FreightWaves.

“With imports deteriorating, volumes are expected to fall by another three to four per cent over the next month,” Fuller said Tuesday in a social media post that cited the company’s Sonar data platform.

Bédard said TFI bought two “very small” trucking firms earlier this month — Basin Transportation and Veilleux Transit — adding to the company’s 26,300 employees.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 24, 2025.

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Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press