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PACCAR, a multinational truck, parts, and financing company, had a negative 2024. Examining PACCAR’s Truck, Parts, and Other business specifically, revenue fell 5% to $31 billion and earnings before interest and taxes fell 17% to $4.5 billion over the last year. (This article excludes PACCAR’s financial services business and makes no comments regarding how pricing should be managed in that line of business.) A review of PACCAR’s 28 January 2025 earnings call…
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That structural problem is the “deep divide” between manufacturers and dealers. While manufacturers spend millions of dollars on image advertising to promote the brands, the dealers care little about the long-term brand value and instead put their emphasis on the transaction.
Read More One of the most interesting booth visits I had was with Starfrit. Founder Jacques Gatien started selling kitchen gadgets at trade fairs in 1965. Over the past several decades, they’ve created many new categories. They showed me The Rock, a frying pan with a unique non-stick surface using what they call RockTec. It comes with a generous 10-year warranty.
Read More To embrace creative destruction is a choice. We can either lament that we fell on the destruction side of market forces, or we can throw ourselves into the creative side of market forces. When market forces destroy your industry, embrace it as the opportunity to create a new path — don’t wait for some third party to have pity on you and fix it for you. Fix it yourself.
Read More Marina Krakovsky argues in a compelling new book that conventional wisdom was wrong. The Middleman Economy argues that, while transaction costs have decreased for everyone, they have decreased at an even faster rate for professional middlemen, leading to have an even larger role in today’s economy.
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