YRC to Shed 50 Terminals

The long reorganization of long-haul less-than-truckload carrier YRC is still a work in progress, as the company looks to consolidate by shedding 50 terminals.

The company plans to shrink its 350-terminal network to about 300 terminals as it proceeds with a financial and operational restructuring plan in 2011.

"There will be some continued consolidation of facilities as we work through this year into the next," Michael J. Smid, president of YRC, told analysts Friday.

When asked if the goal might be a 300 terminal network, Smid said, "We will continue to work toward that number. Eventually it will be slightly less than that."

By the end of the year, the company will have sold $70 million to $80 million in excess property, YRC Worldwide said in its third-quarter earnings statement.

YRC Worldwide sold $36 million in excess property in the third quarter, when it reported a $62 million net loss for the quarter on $1.13 billion in revenue.

YRC Worldwide has been struggling to "right-size" operations since the economy began to slide toward recession in 2007. Rapid expansion earlier in the decade left the nation's largest trucker with excess terminal capacity when shipping declined.

"We've been aggressively trying to change the networks and our cost structure to get them to the right size," Smid told The Journal of Commerce in April.

The goal is not just to reduce operating costs but eliminate inefficiencies.

"We still feel we have opportunities in metropolitan areas to locally consolidate facilities, perhaps from three terminals to two," Smid said in the April interview.

YRC merged its two nationwide units, Yellow and Roadway, in 2008 and 2009 and also merged portions of its regional operations while changing its regional footprint.

At the end of 2008, YRC Worldwide had 711 terminals. By Dec. 31, 2009, it had slashed that number to 511. Now it has about 478, with 128 at its regional carriers.
(Source:www.joc.com)