Dive Brief:

• Old Dominion Freight Line doesn’t expect Amazon’s less-than-truckload offering in the U.S. to threaten the rest of the domestic market, President and CEO Marty Freeman said during a Q1 earnings call on Wednesday.
• “As I understand it, it's mainly geared towards their own suppliers and I actually see it as an opportunity for us to help them with their logistics needs,” Freeman said. “If their suppliers need to pick up the same day, we certainly cover all 48 states and we're able to help them out with that.”
• Amazon’s domestic LTL service, which debuted earlier this month, provides access to over 60,000 trailers and thousands of lanes across the U.S.

Dive Insight:

Old Dominion sees an opportunity for its LTL services to take advantage of the growth of e-commerce, even with new competitors like Amazon entering the market.

“As more and more [of] the retail world moves to e-commerce, we've seen it developing over time, that’s an opportunity for shipment sizes to become smaller and to move through an LTL network, and those retailers can leverage our network as part of their supply chain,” CFO Adam Satterfield told analysts.

Retail makes up about 25-30% of Old Dominion’s business, with the bulk of its exposure concentrated in the industrial environment, Satterfield said. Still, retail opportunities will continue to be a tailwind for the carrier and the LTL industry broadly, he added.

“We've got the best on-time claims-free service and can help those that are delivering into that retail world and add value to their supply chain. So I think that's something that we'll continue to see as an opportunity of growth for the industry,” but an even bigger opportunity for Old Dominion,” Satterfield said.

Despite the optimistic outlook, Old Dominion reported a 5.8% year-over-year decrease in total revenue to $1.37 billion for Q1 2025. The results reflect a 6.3% decrease in LTL tons per day, Satterfield said. The dip was partially offset by a 2.2% increase in LTL revenue per hundredweight.

In a securities filing, Freeman said Old Dominion’s financial results reflect the ongoing softness in the domestic economy.

The company is seeing consistently positive trends overall from a revenue per day standpoint, Satterfield said. The carrier saw a week-to-week surge from February to March that could potentially be attributed to customers pulling forward cargo to avoid disruption from rising tariffs from the Trump administration. 

“We did see a little bit of a drop off that first week of April, but it's come back pretty consistently with what we would expect since that time,” he added.