Hino’s ebullient and ever-positive President and CEO Richard Emery is confident that the Australian truck industry has a positive future.
Speaking at the company’s end-of-year press conference, Emery said that although the market was down compared to the previous few boom years, 2025 was not a total disaster.
Emery said the market was “taking a breather” from the frantic post-Covid times and things will improve in the not-too-distant future.
It has been a fairly lacklustre year for truck sales, especially in heavy-duty where sales were down around 18 per cent year-on-year at the end of November, according to the official TIC figures.
However, he said Hino was almost on track: “We’re looking at around 5000 units for the year (4254 to the end of November according to TIC) which is roughly what we did last year,” Emery said.
“So, we’ve been able to hold up our volume position despite obviously not having built a 500 Series for 14 months. It’s a little short of our plan – we would have liked to get up to about 5100 or 5200, but I’m not so panicked about that.
“The order bank is good, with a few hundred that we’ve still got to get out, and we’re still having trouble with body builders and things like that. So, there’s enough trucks in the market with customers’ names on them to get us over the 5100 or 5200 units but they’re just not going to get delivered by the end of the year.
“In terms of sales, it’s as if we’ve been running since the end of Covid and now we’ve slowed to walking pace – we’re taking a breather. Some of it is market circumstances and some of it is supply. But we think it’ll go again at the end of next year.
Emery takes the view that the economy will start to get back into a growth phase by the end of next year and early into 2027.
“We think that consumer confidence will probably come back at the end of next year, and this is just people considering things, slowing decision making down, get through the next period of time and then get moving again,” he said.
Emery also said that during the heady days of the market surge during the period of 21-24, not many trucks were replaced. A lot of the sales were for extra trucks and this added to the average age of trucks in Australia.
“The average age of trucks in Australia now is 14 years. We’ve got to do some replacing of those trucks. We believe there will be period of renewal where you’ve got to move some of those trucks on.
“There will also be pressure on emissions – getting the latest Euro 6 trucks, as well as safety. The old trucks are not up to the safety standard of today and they will need to be replaced.
“So, we think we’ll back into a growth phase by 2027 onwards. And that’ll be driven by the economy being robust and starting to increase again, but also, we’ll have our (500 Series) product back.”
Emery also gave the assembled transport journalists a bit more of an update on the Fuso/Hino merger.
He said that the umbrella company, Archion, will begin trading on April 1, 2026. Archion will control the collaboration between Hino and Fuso.
Archion will be owned by Daimler trucks on the Fuso side (25 per cent), Toyota on the Hino side (25 per cent) and Institutional investors known to both sides will own the rest.
“That business will then own 100 per cent of HML. So, Hino Motors Limited today will effectively be owned by Archion,” Emery said.
“Going down another level, we (Hino Australia) are currently owned by HML, so for us, nothing changes. The shareholding of our parent company changes but in terms of our relationship on a corporate level, nothing changes for us.
“Nothing really changes for HML either, they just have a few different people to answer to than they have today. And there is no indication of anything that will change on April 1 in terms of how we go about our business in regards to HML, or how we operate in Australia.”