YRC Worldwide Inc. (later Yellow Corporation) (YRCW)

YRC Worldwide Inc. was one of the largest less-than-truckload carriers in North America, hauling shipments that were too big for parcel services but too small to fill a whole trailer. Its brands included YRC Freight, Reddaway, Holland and New Penn, and it ran hundreds of terminals with a large unionized workforce represented by the Teamsters. For many years the company was headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, and it later moved its principal executive office to Nashville, Tennessee.

The company's roots go back to Yellow Freight, a regional carrier from the 1920s that grew into a national network. Under the name Yellow Corporation it bought rival Roadway in 2003 and became Yellow Roadway, then added USF Corporation in 2005. In 2006 it renamed itself YRC Worldwide, and its shares traded on Nasdaq as YRCW. The acquisitions created a giant but left it with heavy debt and overlapping networks that were hard to integrate.

The 2008 recession hit YRC hard. It survived through a series of debt exchanges, wage concessions from its union employees and large dilution of shareholders, including a 2011 restructuring and reverse stock split. Losses and high leverage continued through the following decade. In 2020, during the pandemic, the company received a $700 million loan under the CARES Act from the U.S. Treasury, which took a large equity stake as part of the deal.

On February 4, 2021, YRC Worldwide renamed itself Yellow Corporation as part of a plan to merge its separate carriers into a single network under one brand. The Nasdaq ticker changed from YRCW to YELL on February 8, 2021. The consolidation effort led to a bitter contract dispute with the Teamsters in 2023, and the company warned it was running out of cash as customers moved freight to other carriers.

Yellow stopped operating at the end of July 2023 and filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware on August 6, 2023, putting roughly 30,000 people out of work. Nasdaq said it would delist the shares, the company did not appeal, and trading was suspended on August 16, 2023. The stock then traded over the counter as YELLQ. In bankruptcy Yellow sold its terminals and equipment to other carriers, and creditors and shareholders contested the plan to distribute the proceeds.