Swift Transportation, the largest trucker in North America, saw its shares crater 16 percent on Friday after it said it could not find enough truck drivers and that it would hurt future earnings.
The firm, which has a large facility near the Port of Elizabeth in New Jersey, said it was “constrained” by a challenging driver market, which led to higher turnover than was anticipated.
“There has been a driver shortage that has been getting incrementally worse as the economy improves and they have to fight for employees with the housing sector,” Lee Klaskow, an analyst, told Bloomberg.
“You see some carriers passing on rate increases to drivers, but for whatever reason, Swift has had a harder time attracting and retaining drivers,” he added
The American Trucking Association has issued repeated warnings that the North American trucking market has lost more than 30,000 drivers in the past few years and anticipates that shortfall could skyrocket to 200,000 in the next decade, according to a statement on its Web site.