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Specialty Rentals Paces United Rentals’ 2024 Growth and Expectations for 2025, Flannery Says

Feb. 3, 2025
While the acquisition of ground protection matting company, Yak Mat, fueled the specialty rental segment’s growth, even without the Yak contributions, specialty rental revenue jumped 18 percent.

United Rentals continued the growth of its specialty rental segment during 2024 with a 30-percent specialty rental revenue year-over-year growth, with similar expectations for 2025, CEO Matthew Flannery told a conference call with investors last week. The company posted specialty rental revenue growth across all of its businesses, with solid same-store sales growth and an additional 15 specialty cold starts putting the company at 72 for the full year. “These specialty cold starts are a key element to accelerating our growth in this high return segment,” Flannery said. “By vertical, we continue to see similar trends to the rest of last year with non-residential growth helping to fuel construction and industrial growth driven by manufacturing and power.”

While the acquisition of ground protection matting company, Yak Mat, fueled the specialty rental segment’s growth, even without the Yak contributions, specialty rental revenue jumped 18 percent.

“We saw new projects across data centers, chip manufacturing, sports stadiums and power to name a few,” said Flannery. “Let’s turn to 2025, which we expect to be another year of growth, led by large project growth. Customer optimism, backlogs and feedback from our field team, combined with the demand we’re carrying into the new year, all support our guidance. This was reinforced at our annual management meeting, which we held earlier this month in Houston, Texas. We discussed how a key element of our culture is the quality people who work for United Rentals.”

Flannery reiterated what he said two weeks ago, when United announced its intent to acquire H&E Equipment Services. “We’re very excited to combine two complementary businesses. The transaction checks all three boxes we require when evaluating M&A: strategic, financial and cultural. Growing the core is a key component of our strategy and I'm really thrilled to have the opportunity to add high quality capacity, meaning people, fleet and real estate to the United Rentals team. This will allow us to better serve customer demand over the long term. It will also accelerate our growth all while generating compelling returns for our shareholders. It's really a win-win outcome and things remain on track for a first quarter close.”

“We anticipated another record year,” added William Grace, executive vice president and chief financial officer. “Total revenue is expected in the range of $15.6 billion to $16.1 billion, implying full-year growth of 3.3 percent at midpoint. Within total revenue, I’ll note that our used sales guidance is implied at roughly $1.5 billion or a mid-single-digit year-on-year decline on a percentage basis.”

For a more complete overview of United Rentals’ fourth quarter and full year 2024 results, visit: https://www.rermag.com/news-analysis/headline-news/article/55264526/united-rentals-tops-15-billion-in-full-year-2024-revenue.