Roughly a dozen trucking companies bought 75% of Yellow’s properties for just under $1.9 billion at a court-supervised auction, according to a filing with a U.S. bankruptcy court December 4.
The LTL company XPO won 28 properties for $870 million. Estes Express Lines, who entered the auction with a lead bid of more than $1.5 billion for all Yellow properties, ended up winning 24 terminals for a combined $249 million. The Georgia-based trucking organization Saia acquired 17 Yellow properties following a $236 million bid.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the remaining Yellow Corp properties are expected to be sold for hundreds of millions of dollars over the coming months, said a person familiar with the process.
Yellow’s properties were appraised at about $1.1 billion before the auction, which began during the week of November 28. Over 20 buyers purchased roughly 130 Yellow properties during the auction while about 90% of the company’s trucking terminals were sold to roughly a dozen LTL carriers.
The auction comes just days after Yellow said it was considering an offer to revive the organization and potentially rehire thousands of former employees. That bid, which was placed by Jack Cooper Transport executive chair Sarah Riggs Amico, included $1.1 billion in financing.
Yellow was shut down July 30 and filed for bankruptcy July 31, owing $1.3 billion to creditors due in 2024. The company’s collapse over the summer eliminated almost 30,000 jobs, 22,000 of which were held by unionized workers.
