The $800 billion trucking industry has been struggling in 2019.

And while there are some signs of an impending turnaround, one large trucking company just announced a shocking plunge in profit.

USA Truck's net income in the second quarter totaled $1,000. Last year it was $2.5 million.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The industry that moves 72% of America's goods is suffering through a downturn so epic that some truckers are calling it a "bloodbath."

There have been some signs of a turnaround: Retail sales are on the up and up, and big names like UPS and J.B. Hunt announced better-than-expected earnings this month.

But until trucking gets back on its feet, more companies are likely to go bankrupt, according to Jason Seidl, Cowen's managing director covering air freight and surface transportation.

And others are on track to not make any money, including USA Truck, in Van Buren, Arkansas, which reported its earnings last week.

Read more: Thousands of truck drivers have lost their jobs this year in the trucking 'bloodbath.' Here's what's behind the slowdown in the $800 billion industry.

USA Truck reported $2.5 million in net income in the second quarter of 2018. In Q2 2019, it reported $1,000 in profit.

Total miles driven increased from the previous year, but revenue per load, a key measure of yield in the trucking industry, fell by 18.4% from 2018 and by 8.5% from the first quarter.

USA Truck did not respond to a Business Insider inquiry.

USA Truck executives emphasized in the earnings call with investors that the company had turned any profit at a challenging time for the industry in the face of a plunge in spot rates, where retailers and manufacturers find trucks on demand rather than through a prearranged contract.

Spot rates dipped by as much as 18% from June 2018 to June 2019. Because of that, USA Truck said, much of its contract business had pulled out and headed to the ultra-cheap spot market.

The company said it would continue to focus on cutting fixed costs by 5% to 10% and adding new customers to its base to improve its financial performance.

Read more: Amazon has quietly ordered 2,000-plus vans to deliver your Prime packages — and UPS and the Postal Service should feel stressed

Last year, trucking was incredibly profitable, with record-low bankruptcies, remarkably high rates, eight-month waitlists for new trucks, and huge bumps in trucker pay.

"I view it as the market correcting itself," Seidl told Business Insider. "We basically put too much capacity out there in the marketplace, and you saw that by the rates dropping very hard. The market can only take so much of that — so it corrects itself. And this is the market just correcting itself."

'We know who kind of took advantage of us in this market'

Trucking is highly cyclical, with huge peaks and lows that often catch trucking companies and their customers by surprise. In 2018, for instance, the ultra-high rates forced companies like Amazon and General Mills to increase prices simply because they couldn't otherwise pay for their goods to be moved.

Now that rates are dipping, retailers and manufacturers are able to move their goods at dirt-cheap prices — but trucking companies are getting squeezed.

Read more: Truck driver salaries have fallen by as much as 50% since the 1970s — and experts say a little-known law explains why

"It's a self-fulfilling cycle, and we are shooting ourselves in the foot," Ahmad El-Dardiry, the chief revenue officer at Transfix, told Business Insider. "We need to figure out a way how to come together and normalize this variability that shippers are truly incentivized to make sure that carriers are around and viable in a soft market. It's hard for me to comprehend that all these trucking companies go out of business when the market is soft."

USA Truck's chief financial officer, Jason Bates, alluded to that issue in the earnings call when he candidly praised long-term customers who didn't take advantage during the trucking downturn.

USA Truck said that by not demanding super-high rates last year, it was able to still charge those customers a reasonable amount this year.

"We had one customer last year that said, 'We know who kind of took advantage of us in this market from their perspective, and we'll have a long memory,'" Bates said. "And they've been true to that. They've given us most of the freight that we committed to our largest customer, which you can go look at RK is disclosed in there. They have been very faithful in giving us the freight that we agreed to."

Are you a trucker, freight broker, or have another role in the trucking economy? Email the reporter at rpremack@businessinsider.com.