Truck Body & Trailer Manufacturing
The industry — Motor vehicle body and trailer manufacturing
Base industry report for 3362 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 380
- Under 10 employeesA
- 39%
- Establishments · USA
- 2,166
- Employment · USA
- 178,268
- Payroll · USA
- $10.6B
Of 380 Canadian establishments with employees, 39% have fewer than ten — an industry where large establishments carry real weight.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Come with the asset, or buy the business that owns it. Plant, fleet, land or quota decide this market before any operating skill does. Operators here are bought, not started.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 6
The binding constraint — capital intensity
A plant business on a freight cycle, and the cycle is presently against it. Wabash National — the one listed pure-play — turned $1.54B in 2025, down from $1.95B in 2024, and closed the year with a 12-month backlog of $576M against $813M a year earlier and a total backlog of $705M against $1,169M [B]. That is a roughly 40% collapse in visible forward work while fleets defer capital spending. Wabash is put at about 7.0% of US truck-trailer manufacturing revenue [C], which implies an industry near $22B [derived] shared with Great Dane, Utility Trailer and Trailmobile. Entry means a welding and assembly plant, a dealer network and working capital through exactly this kind of trough. The reachable adjacency is upfitting and service bodies at small scale, which needs a shop rather than a plant, and which this record does not screen.
A trailer is delivered anywhere in the country and fleets buy nationally, so unlike most records in this research the market genuinely is national — the constraint is plant capacity and the freight cycle, not a drive time.
Handle — Wabash National. The only listed pure-play in the category. It reports revenue, backlog and an estimated industry share, which converts a private, plant-heavy industry into arithmetic.
Wabash National's 2025 revenue of $1.54B divided by an estimated 7.0% industry share. The share is a market-research estimate rather than a reported figure and the industry definition behind it may be broader than trailers alone, so this is an order of magnitude, not a market size.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 1 of 4 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
Mean of 1 independent vendor estimate.
No usable published figure; the size here is derived from vendor revenue and share.
How each vendor implies a total
Competitor set · 4 named · 1 disclose revenue · 1 with a published share
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wabash NationalNYSE: WNCA | $1.5B | 7% | FY2025 net sales |
| Great Dane / Utility Trailer / StoughtonC | not disclosed | — | Private US builders; no results published and none opened for this record |
| Hyundai TransleadC | not disclosed | — | Subsidiary of Hyundai Motor; not separately disclosed |
| ManacA | not disclosed | — | Largest Canadian trailer maker, Saint-Georges, Québec. Private since October 2015, when a Québec consortium paid $10.20 a share; no results published since. |
Evidence
Evidence. Wabash's 2025 net sales and the 2024 comparative, the segment split, adjusted EBITDA and the $705M total backlog were read from its own fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results release on ir.onewabash.com and the GlobeNewswire copy of it (4 February 2026) [A]. A caution on the backlog: that release publishes only the total backlog; the 12-month split of $576M against $813M and the prior-year total of $1,169M quoted in the reason were not found in the document opened here and stay at tier B pending the 10-K. Manac's $10.20-a-share privatisation price, the completion date and the purchaser group were read from Manac's own completion release on newswire.ca (October 2015) [A]; the aggregate deal value of about $186M circulated in trade press was not confirmed from a primary document and is not stated on this record. Market size remains UNVERIFIED — the implied ~$22B industry total rests on a market-research share estimate [C], not a reported one, and inherits whatever definition that publisher used. Great Dane, Utility, Stoughton and Hyundai Translead are private and disclose nothing. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Site states it represents over 2,000 companies that manufacture, distribute, install and sell commercial trucks and truck equipment.
NTEA's show, Indianapolis, 9-12 March 2027; described on the site as North America's largest work truck event.
Blocked automated access (Cloudflare). Search shows a live site and a Manufacturers' Annual Conference held 28-30 September 2026.
Light- and medium-duty trailer builders; runs a compliance verification programme and an annual convention and trade show.
Trade title for trailer and truck body manufacturers, distributors and upfitters; carries monthly trailer output statistics.
The Truck Trailer Manufacturers Association site (ttmanet.org) currently shows only a 'website will return in January 2027' holding page, so it was left out.