Great. Thank you, everybody, for joining us here in Boston for our 30th annual transport conference, the BofA Transport Airlines and Industrials Conference. To open our conference, we welcome CSX and Kevin Boone, EVP of Sales and Marketing, a position he has held at CSX since June 2021 after serving as acting CFO. He started at CSX back in 2017. Also here in the audience is Matthew Korn from Investor Relations. We welcome Kevin to our conference for the 3rd time in the past 4 years, welcome CSX for its 15th consecutive year and 20th time in the 22 x we've hosted the conference. Thank you to CSX for your steadfast commitment to the conference.
CSX is actually one of our top rail-focused stocks given its sustained operating performance, built-in capacity for growth and solid operational execution. We've got a lot to cover in the 35 minutes, I'm gonna take a seat, join Kevin, and just jump right in with some questions. Kevin, let me turn it over to you. I guess I understand you've got a few thoughts. You have updates on service levels, what your key message is as we're now more than halfway through the second quarter.
Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I think two of those were virtual, right? Two of the three. This is the first time back in Boston in a long time. Celtics lost last night.
Yeah, it was tough.
I wasn't awake by the end of that game. No, there's a lot to talk about. We have a lot of excitement, a lot of energy around CSX. We've obviously had a leadership change, that's been exciting for our internally for our employees and some other things. A lot that's happening today. Certainly a challenging backdrop in terms of the market. A lot of debate around the recession. I agree with some of your comments earlier. I believe we're already in the recession from a lot of the things that we've seen from a demand perspective. On the flip side, we've made tremendous progress on the service side. We're getting really, really positive feedback from our customers, that's translating into strong merchandise growth as you've seen.
Intermodal has been weak, that's consumer-facing, and we're seeing that weakness continue, but we've seen stability, I would say, in the last few weeks. That's encouraging in terms of our numbers. We're hearing signs that hopefully the back half, particularly on the international side, could be a little bit on sequential basis stronger than what we've seen. That's all dependent on where the economy goes from here. When you think about aggregates and some of the other markets, we're very, very strong right now, and we're ramping up our service there to meet the needs of the customer. Tremendous growth that we've seen, and we see a long opportunity to continue on that.
On the chemical side, a little bit more weakness there, and I would say that's more consumer-facing, a lot of destocking. Many markets I think are destocking right now. We're seeing declines that are, quite frankly, probably more acute than what the underlying demand is. My hope is as we get through that destocking event, you'll see more stabilization in some of the markets that have been weakest for us, so. Internally, Joe has had the team focus on the customer. We're looking at how we can improve customer measurements, measure what they are really focused on, and that, quite frankly, matters market to market.
A lot of work internally with our technology team and the customer service team of putting those metrics together and really getting out in the front end of the customers and saying, "What do you need from us?" We can win more market share. Big effort on the small and medium-sized customers. We're able to reach out to them, have our customer service group now that they have a little more time, less service issues out there. We're using that their time to really reach out to the customers that don't have that day-to-day interaction with our sales and marketing team. A lot of momentum around that.
I would say finally on the industrial side, I've talked about this a lot, We had a slide in the last earnings presentation, we've never seen this much activity in decades, A lot of momentum around that. A lot of that will come to fruition in late 2024 and 2025, We're really pushing there and have a great team around that's pushing. We've seen a lot of activity. There's clearly demand, particularly in the Southeast, for industrial sites, We have got a great inventory. We're continuing to go out and rebuild our inventory, That's probably the biggest challenge right now. We've been so successful is we've got to replenish those industrial sites and have those shovel-ready sites for customers to develop.
Excited about some of the emerging industries that are coming along, EV. You know, we obviously have the battery markets, and we're participating in all of those. Then a huge shift on the metal side. We're seeing a lot of new development there and working closely with the customers. A lot of activity. We're shifting into growth mode and really leaning into it. I challenge the team every day. This isn't certainly a backdrop where things are challenging, but customers are more willing in these environments, I believe, to shift their share from truck to rail, and we're seeing that.
Wonderful. let me follow up, I guess on what you just mentioned, right? I guess on 3 parts. One is the new leadership service and operations, and it sounds like we might even throw a new one in CapEx. Joe's been CEO now for about 8 months, succeeding the, you know, what we think was the great Jim Foote and before that Hunter. What's changed from your point of view? It sounds like you mentioned small, medium-sized business, service levels. Has he changed the focus or tried to shift the culture of the organization toward one part?
No, I think, day one, when he got there, in my first meeting with him, you know, we've had five core principles. We're focused on operating efficiency. He said he wants to continue on that path. Asset utilization, critically important. First of all, safety. We're not gonna sacrifice safety for anything. Quite frankly, he's challenged the team in more ways. Moving forward, to use technology and look at ways where we can advance even quicker on the safety side. On the flip side, the two areas which remain our core principles is the customer and, you know, and the employees. There's been a lot more focus on those two areas. You know, Joe came from Ford, and they make things. He reminds us we don't make things.
Our people are our service and our product that we're selling every day. The more engaged they are, the better the product that we have. We're feeling it. I'm sure you can see a lot of the momentum and hear about it. We're hearing it from our customers, a lot of positive response so far, but it's early, and our customers are reacting. I think this will build on itself, but it's fun going out in the field, and it's fun working with the operating team and seeing their energy now and what that's translating into some of the early signs of growth for us.
I'm gonna jump back to that kinda southeast comment, you know, where you need to replenish. You know, we heard from one of your peer railroads during earnings that they're raising CapEx, right? You've got a $2.3 billion target of CapEx, about 16%. One of your peers raised it up to 18%-19%. Is that, is that the new ballpark to where you need to be? Are you comfortable where you are? Just trying to think what happens in PSR when CapEx, you know, came down to now do we need to get back to rebuild levels. I think that's a concern for investors as to where this-
Yeah.
Does the capital go?
I read it. I ran into Ed earlier. He was in the room. I think, you know, I haven't spent a lot of time analyzing their network, but I think a lot of what they talked about is they need more capacity on their network to handle the growth that they have, which sounds exciting for them. Where we are today, and Ed would be familiar with our network, is what we did in 17 is, you know, we reduced train starts. We have a lot of capacity to grow into. Jamie will tell you this every day, a lot of our network, the key corridors are double track today. We don't feel like there's a huge investment from a network perspective that we need to make.
If we can find investments that generally are smaller on the TRANSFLO side and other areas where it's expanding our addressable market, we'll do that all day long because we've seen the returns are tremendous. 20%, 30% + type of returns when we find those opportunities. If we see the opportunity to take up CapEx, it'll be for those reasons and not necessarily for more network. We don't see that. We have a great plan in terms of our rebuild plan that we'll continue on, but no spike in capital that we see going forward.
Great to hear. Service levels have just been so consistent and really more closer to the top of your five-year bands, lately. 1Q carload trip performance at 86%, intermodal up at 96%. Does that mean there are still costs that are coming out of the system as you run that efficiently? I guess, you know, is there room for improvement? You know, how do you measure that compliance? Are they tight enough in your view? Can you tighten them further?
Yeah. I think, we work with the team every d ay on tightening those schedules because the tighter those schedules, particularly on the intermodal side and some of the truck competitive side, you're going against truck every day. The tighter the schedules, and we look at those every day, the more truck competitive you are. I think there's probably opportunity, and we'll continue to look at that. From a cost perspective, and I think Sean mentioned this on the earnings call, we expect some incremental opportunity as we get in the second half of the year, whether it's overtime, car hire, all of those things as you speed up the network, tend to fall out of your cost base. We have a lot of momentum there.
You'll start to see that probably accelerate in the second half of the year.
Are you done hiring T&E employees? Not done, you're never done, but did you get back to, you know, you targeted 7,400. You have a 10% attrition rate. you know, your overall employees are, you know, down to 22,000 from 32,000 at the peak, but above your 19,000 trough, right? You've rebuilt the base. You've gotten your TMY, if I'm right, kind of back to where you want. How do you feel about the employee levels after the struggles of the industry the last?
We're around 7,300 T&E today, about 100 short of that 7,400 that you mentioned. If my team is doing their job, we're gonna need to hire more people. You know, we have a lot of opportunity to grow. Obviously, in that environment you need more people, that's our focus. We're entering the summer months, and that's a huge focus for us with vacations and other things to keep the network resilient. There's still a lot of hiring going on to replenish, as you said, the attrition rates, which hopefully are falling. We're seeing a lot of stability in the attrition rates there. There's still pockets of our network where there's opportunity that we'll need to add employees over time. They're working hard.
We've done a great job. You know, we called the ball very early on the need to hire.
Definitely.
I think everybody realizes it was a lot more difficult during the pandemic to do that than we all realized. I think you're seeing the early signs of all the work, the hard work that, quite frankly, our HR department and ops team did to really go out and find people. Now our service is, you know, back to those levels that, to your point, are approaching those levels that we saw before the pandemic.
No, absolutely. I'm gonna talk near term for a minute. Car loads are down about 3% second quarter to date, slightly below our 1 and change target. Still the third best rail performer, but yeah, and you're almost 500 basis points better than your regional peer. Should we think about some of that being share shift from, you know, given their accident? Is it benefits of your good service? I guess talking to your term, let's talk, you know, maybe parse that a little bit.
We're certainly leveraging our service product, which we think is industry leading right now, and that's really resonating with our customers. You know, the focus has always been how do we expand the addressable market for us, and how do we go after that truck share? We're having quite frankly, we're having different conversations than we did the last two years around that as customers are seeing the service. Are willing to give us more of their wallet share. It's very, very early. I think we're seeing some customers more willing to do it now, others saying, "Hey, I wanna see a few more months of this," or, "I wanna see a few more quarters to have that discussion." The early signs are there.
We compete every day with our eastern peer and, we have the best service product today, and, that makes competing, a little bit easier, and we're leaning into that.
Given the way things are trending, it seemed like you switched from a, you know, kind of a GDP outlook to an RTM outlook. Maybe walk through your near-term volume outlook, what you're expecting. International Intermodal still seems a bit weak. I know Joe mentioned it was about a fifth of your revenues, half your volume. Maybe just delve into kinda your thoughts.
Yeah. I think coming into the year, you know, we probably didn't see Intermodal as weak as it has been in the first half of the year. That's clear, and that was the driver of the guidance change. On the flip side, I think we've had a lot more success on the merchandise side, particularly, really capitalizing off of the service improvement. You know, we certainly were modeling in an improvement through the year. I think that improvement has been stronger to start the year than what we even expected, which is a positive, and that's manifested into a better merchandise performance, which quite frankly is, to your point, is, you know, almost two-thirds of our revenue base. You know, coal still is a very positive volume story for us as well.
Between those two, it's. You know, I'll take that mix shift any day. If you told me, merchandise is gonna outperform and Intermodal came in a little bit weaker, I'd probably take that trade all day long.
Yeah. Let's talk about that big picture then, right?
Yeah.
Because, you know, CSX right now moves about 6.2 million car loads, give or take this year, if volumes are somewhat flattish. It's almost the same level as 2019, down from 2014's peak of 6.9 million. Clearly, your network has capacity, right, to grow. I think, you know, we're gonna talk to rails throughout the day about, you know, the target is growth, right? Has always been. You know, what gets us to believe that rails can get back on that growth trajectory? Obviously, we had coal fall 50% between 2011 and 2016.
Right.
You had to battle that. What gives you the confidence that we flip that into growth now?
I mean, it is a show me story, right? We really haven't proven it as an industry, we've gotta put up the numbers. You know, we have to have commitment. You need to hear from our customers that we're willing to grow, that we're willing to open up new lanes. We're provide new service that they need. Those things, we're out there delivering that message day in and day out, and it helps to have a leader that's very focused on that. I can't tell you how many customers Joe's been in front of in his first seven months, but he's been out there a lot and is resonating with our customers. He was a customer. They like to hear that.
He understands some of their challenges. You know, he would've liked to have put more volume on the railroad, during his time at Ford. Those things are highly focused. You need to have Jamie and I aligned. We are aligned. He is, you know, we just had a meeting yesterday, and we're talking about a specific customer and how we can open up even more capacity there. That alignment needs to happen internally, and the teams are working really, really well together. It helps that we're not putting out fires like we had to on the network, day in and day out, and that way we can focus on having a different conversation with the customer. At the end of the day, we gotta perform.
You know, we can talk about it, but we gotta put up the numbers, and I'm confident that we're building on the momentum. We're having fun. You know, last two years at times weren't that much fun, but all of that is really changing, and people are feeling the energy inside, and our customers are feeling it, quite frankly.
That's great. I love the fact that you've got both the marketing hat on now, but you've got your CFO hat on in the past, so I can ask you minutiae questions and get real number answers.
Maybe.
just, you know, there's a lot going on, right? You talk about the mix impact change. Talk about losing, I think it was $300 million of accessorial revenues for the year, right?
That's right.
How do we think about yields in as much as you can discuss it? You know, in terms of sequential change, right? 'Cause you've got the loss of fuel, understanding... I guess ultimately, how do we see core pricing, you know, follow through in this kind of market, right? I know you've got so many mix issues with coal.
Yeah.
things. Maybe talk a little bit about that overall.
Yeah. I mean, let's break it down. I, you know, first of all, our accessorial charges are, you know, in other revenues.
Right.
You can see those are very transparent. That, you know, when I look at yields, you can, you know, you can easily adjust for that. When you look at our merchandise business, still, obviously, with what's happened with inflation, still a lot of pricing momentum. We've gotta cover our costs. And so we see no change there. We're having that discussion with our customers. We wanna grow with them through volume and price. If there's opportunities to grow volume, and be partners around that's certainly a discussion we're willing to have. A lot of momentum there. In some cases where we had two, three-year contracts, we're obviously in renewing those in a different environment and taking advantage of that opportunity.
On the Intermodal side, challenging backdrop on the truck side, you'll hear from a lot of other companies today that'll talk about that. Hopefully, we're seeing a floor here. You know, we didn't participate in the dramatic price increases that occurred on the trucking side on Intermodal. We typically don't participate in the, you know, severe declines either. We're seeing stability there, I would say. In our spot business, which is a very, very small part of our business, obviously, we're seeing some softness. Otherwise, we're just waiting for the demand, the return, and the market to start to stabilize, which, you know, there are early signs that suggest that's what's happening.
On the coal side, you know, the met prices is probably the biggest swing factor as we get into the year. They're not as high as where they were in the 1st quarter, so we'll see sequentially probably more in the 3rd quarter, some RPU declines there if things don't change from here. Still really healthy levels for that market, that support volume. We have some new production coming online, which we're really excited about into the 2nd half of the year that we'll take advantage of. Production should be up and that'll be helpful and partially offset some of the RPU hit that we'll have on the met coal side.
When you talk production I'm sorry, when you talk healthy, you're talking volume side, not necessarily the pricing side.
I mean, the pricing on a historical-
. Yeah, on a historical basis, it's very, very healthy.
Okay.
We just had some extremely good pricing last year.
Last year.
Yeah.
Yeah. Just to kind of revisit what you just said, though, you don't see the, necessarily the impact in 2Q can be delayed till 3Q based on that timing of those?
When you look at our, particularly our met coal portfolio on the export side, some of that business prices on a quarterly basis.
Yeah.
That would've already, you know, priced in at the March kind of levels that we saw. Then some of it is on a monthly basis. Really where you'll see the largest impact from second quarter to third quarter is that quarterly business.
Yep.
If prices remain here, kind of resetting a little bit lower.
Okay. Last 5 years, you've averaged about a 240 basis point improvement in your operating ratio from 1Q to 2Q. You're starting from a soft first quarter with a 62%, you know, excluding the insurance recovery and real estate gain. Given the economic background, the loss of accessorials, a worse starting point, should we see above historical norm performance in second quarter? Is that something that can happen just given the starting point?
Yeah, you kinda touched on it. First of all, first quarter I don't think was soft. It was really, really strong performance. We were really happy with the OR performance, particularly in the backdrop that we, you know, we're coming out of. Very happy with that performance. You made the point when you adjust for the insurance claim and, you know, the fuel surcharge lag, about a 62.5% kinda base to look at if you're gonna compare first quarter, second quarter. You know, what we traditionally seen with the railroads and in particular our railroad is, you know, second and third quarters are typically your best OR quarters, less weather impact, a little bit more volume on a seasonal basis. Those factors that continues to hold.
We'll see those factors off that 62 and a half hopefully play out here in the quarter. The big swing factors obviously are met coal. As you get in the back half of the year, you have the labor costs that will the union will get their labor increase in July. We'll have to work to offset that. On the flip side, you continue to have pricing momentum, particularly on your merchandise side that will drive some performance. Then we'll see where the market takes us. I'm more and more convinced every day that, you know, the operating leverage is there. We're gonna see that. If our team's successful in bringing on more volume, you should see that drop to the bottom line in a very healthy way.
There are a couple things I wanna revisit with what we just ran through. Let me start on coal. We had a lot last year, right? You had Sugar Camp mine was closed. We had a strike at the port, Curtis Bay, right? Is it.
Oh, yeah.
It's fully up and running now. Warrior Mine had a strike. Is your network now fully up and running? Do you still have some of that legacy impacts from that?
No. I mean, all three of those things when you... Curtis Bay, fully up and running, made the capital commitments there, and the team is doing an amazing job up there and we're running full out and probably some more opportunity as the Allegheny mine comes online and some other opportunities to give even more throughput through there. That was a discussion that Jamie and I and the team had yesterday, is how do we get more through Curtis Bay? 'Cause what we're seeing on the thermal market with, you know, obviously natural gas prices at the levels they are today is more of our producers are wanting to shift some of their volume to the export market where it still remains healthy. How do we react to that?
How do we get more through our terminals? We have a lot of opportunity there to do that. You talked about some of the strike issues. Those are behind us. When you think about Warrior Met Coal and then Sugar Camp, while it didn't come back to full capacity, remember half of their production is still kind of offline. We're at a lot healthier production than we were seeing last year. You know, we'll TBD on whether, you know, the full production will ever come back on the Sugar Camp. Certainly a much better place we are. We're just seeing in general a lot more reliability from our producers. They're well-capitalized now. They've been able to reinvest in their production.
just a lot less downtime, unplanned outages, those things.
Okay. Just to revisit your pricing on coal, just so I'm clear. I thought on the call you had mentioned $3,400 could hold sequentially steady. Is that, is that still the...
Yeah, I think that's right. Given the dynamic that a lot of our quarter, you know, quarterly business, priced in that based off the March pricing.
Yeah.
You'll probably see more of the step down from second quarter to the third quarter.
Okay. we kinda talked intermodal, like expecting some of these headwinds to moderate. Is there signs of a floor? I wanna revisit that theme too. I know you started opening by saying, "Yeah, we think we're in a recession," but are there signs of a floor of chewing up some of those inventories or are we still in the thick of it and seeing that pressure accelerate?
On the export side?
No, no, I guess just overall intermodal.
Yeah, I think, you know, I'm looking at this data daily. Obviously, you're gonna have some of your companies that are much, much more close to it on a daily basis. We're seeing, on the export side, a slight tick up in volumes. What we're hearing from our customers is, you know, some optimism.
Yeah.
It varies from customer to customer, depending on who you're talking to, but that we're seeing a floor there. Obviously, there has been a destocking. If you look at some of the earnings and announcements that have come out, whether it's The Home Depot and others, have talked about very, very high inventory levels. Some are in a better place than others, but inventory levels have come down. I continue to believe that there's been, on top of obviously a weaker consumer, a lot of destocking happening out there. We're not run- rating at current demand levels today. We're underrunning that. There's gotta be hopefully an adjustment up to those volumes, that we'll see in the back half of the year.
The team's working on a lot of interesting opportunities too, that I'm hopeful in the second half of the year, continue to bring, you know, new solutions, and new opportunities there that we gotta work harder to offset some of the softness in the market. Provide new lanes, and new opportunities to create the solutions with our western peers as well.
Yeah. Let's switch over to safety, right? Obviously, a big issue in the market. Your peer has had obviously, a couple of publicized derailments that have brought this to the forefront. I think Jamie noted you're increasing hotbox detectors, adding about 53, reducing the space from 16 miles to just under 15. I think legislation was talking about getting that under 10, mandating two-man crews. I mean, we'll certainly be talking about this throughout the day.
Yeah.
Start off with safety. What you know, start off with what Jamie is talking about, what else you're doing, and then maybe some reactions to the proposed legislation.
I think Joe was there about two days ago in D.C., and he spent a lot of time up there educating, right? It's all about having a discussion about what the core problems are, what are the issues, and finding solutions and working together, but, you know, dealing in with facts and what, you know, each railroad is doing. We're not all doing it the same way, but we need to share probably a little bit better across what we're doing as well. What we've done about across the hotbox detectors is we link them all together, and we're looking for trends and algorithms, and studying that data is critically important. You can find patterns before you actually get a failure, right?
How do you identify those, in advance? We think we're leading the industry in that area and have led the industry and made a lot of investments over the last five years, to be there. We're pretty proud of what we've been able to do, but you gotta push the envelope forward. Joe's bringing in a lot of new perspective, from his experience, in another industry, and he's got a lot of relationships out there. We have a new leader in technology that has a different perspective that comes from an industry, quite frankly, that's highly focused on safety. We're using all of that knowledge, to push the envelope forward and come up with solutions.
Again, we gotta understand the core problems or the issues that cause the accidents, and solve for those rather than make a knee-jerk reaction. I think, you know, we're very focused on that. We're trying to lead the industry in those discussions. Joe's been very good in spending a lot of time out there doing that.
Yeah. The automatic track inspection cars. What % of the main lines to look at each year? I just wanna understand kind of where we are in the development of some of the.
Yeah
T he technology progress.
Yeah, I think, you know, technology is particularly on an inspection site, can do some amazing things, right? That quite frankly, just the human eye can't identify. I think at this point, and I checked this with Matthew, is we have about eight that are running out there today. Roughly, they can cover 50% of our, you know, main line track every week. You think about that coverage and constantly looking at the health of the network, on a weekly basis is really, really important. It's a step change function from, you know, the inspection, from a human perspective is very, very important as well, but this is just on another level, and helps us identify and repair and be proactive.
Wonderful. I've got a couple more. We've got about five, six minutes left. Let me just see if there's any questions from the audience. If you do, just wait till we get you on mic. No questions to start. Quiet room. I'll keep going. Quality Carriers. You're, I think, just about a year in or just over a year.
Over a year, yeah.
Over a year in, yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe talk us through that, right? You know, are you seeing the conversion from the chemical business to rail that you were talking about? You talked about the opportunity for TRANSFLO before. Is there any possibility of other commodities that you could think about that transition like that? Maybe just I'll open it up to you, talk about the investment and your takeaways a year later.
Yeah, I, you know, I talked to Randy quite a bit, as obviously chemicals is our, you know, one of our largest end markets, and he really has, you know, different relationships than we do and being the largest truck carrier in that market. I've been pleasantly surprised how well that business has held up, both from a pricing and just a volume perspective, very, very resilient. His customer base is focused on the staples, you know, think of P&Gs of the world, others that just don't have the volatility or the cyclicality of a lot of businesses. He continues to open up relationships for us. We can go in there, and obviously, we have a trucking and a rail service.
This ISO tank product that we're just, quite frankly, took a little bit longer to get the product to market, from a supply chain issue from the tanks coming from South Africa, and we had some hold up there, but those tanks are in the market today. He's marketing on them. They've been very, very successful to the customers that have tried them out. This is an industry that's typically slow to adopt. So we're seeing that they wanna test it over time, but the customers that have started to use it, are seeing tremendous performance. Randy, quite frankly, is seeing performance he didn't expect from our intermodal network. He was used to the traditional carload side, and intermodal product obviously can shoot across our network just as fast as his trucks can.
That's been an eye-opener for him. We've got a lot of initiatives. He's got a long list that he just sent me a couple weeks ago, all the customers that are testing the equipment today. We just opened up our New Orleans terminal here about two weeks ago, and that's gonna be a key terminal for his business as if you think about the Gulf. Trucking some of that business into that terminal and then shooting it through our network is gonna be huge for us. A lot of excitement there. The core business is holding up very, very well from both a price and a volume perspective, as I mentioned, he continues to grow the business.
That's great. just 'cause it was definitely a different one, right?
It was.
We had seen some historical going, I've been around for a while, but seen some rail truck acquisitions that were just completely different business, moving businesses, and this seems to make sense if you can make that transition.
Then in terms of other markets, we like markets where there's high touch, there's high quality, not your average day trucker can't come in and serve that customer. There are some natural adjacent markets that he can get into organically that we'll look at when you think about maybe perhaps food grade and other areas that just make sense, that are natural, that are things that he does today, that we can intertwine with TRANSFLO and some of our other services that we do.
I thought you were using the name Quality again. balance sheet. Your target leverage about 2.5 x. you know, do you see yourself being more conservative in a backdrop of a slowdown, or your thought in capital allocation in a rising rate environment? Maybe talk about returns and, you know.
Yeah, I don't think anything's changed. First use of capital is always gonna be our network and safety. We're in a fortunate enough position that we generate a lot of cash flow. When we do have those growth investments, those are the highest return investments we can make. I think it would be a positive sign if you saw that inch up a little bit, if we're able to find those opportunities. They're generally small, you know, thinking $10 million rather than $100 million opportunities. I wish there were $100 million opportunities out there, and maybe one day there will be. You know, after that, we have a lot of cash flow to return to shareholders, and we'll continue to do that.
From a balance sheet perspective, I know Sean's looking at this, but we don't wanna get out of whack with our peers and the industry, so we'll continue to look at that. Nothing's really changed. We believe the model has worked over the last few years, have an incredibly supportive board on that, and we'll continue to have discussions with them because that's a board level you know, decision.
Is there a target return level on these new investments? You know, especially when you talk about industrial development that, what threshold do you talk about meeting?
Yeah, we do have a threshold. I'm probably not gonna make it public, but it's very healthy. The good news is we're able to find things that far exceed that very healthy threshold that we have. You know, we don't want it to be so high that we turn away good projects and... Yeah, I think I'm hopeful with the team we have that those opportunities will accelerate from here and discussions with customers, and we have a lot of whiteboarding discussions with our largest customers on the books for the next 2, 3, 4 months. I hope as an outcome of that, we'll find even more opportunities for investment to really accelerate some of the market share gains that we anticipate.
Last one from me, and then we'll just, we'll wrap it up. The move from we've seen kind of an extended move really since the winding of the Panama Canal, all water East Coast on intermodal, and clearly share gains, especially as they continue through their negotiations out west. We'll talk to them a bit later about that. You know, what are your thoughts on that? Is it permanent share gains? Is it, you know, now that they've gotten used to the network, they kinda stay there? Do you see it?
Right.
flowing back? How does that.
No, I think it's, the East is gonna outgrow the West. It's, when you look at, the investments that are being made on the ports on the East Coast, you know, largely when you look at the West Coast, L.A. and others, there's not a lot of opportunity to expand. There's plenty of opportunity. If you haven't been to Savannah, I would encourage you to go down there. It's pretty amazing what they've done. All the ports on our East Coast are investing, and, we're seeing it. It's, it's a, it's a trend that has, been there for the last five, seven years. We see it continuing.
There's obviously some things going on in the world with China and other things where we're seeing customers shift their manufacturing and diversify, and we think that helps the East Coast ports as well as manufacturing kinda shifts around to Southeast Asia. You're gonna bring it around in a different way. We're very excited. Our inland port strategy that our team has put together has been a tremendous success. We'll continue to invest in that, but see a lot of opportunity for our growth.
If I can just sum up, and then I'd love to hear you sum up, but kinda we're in a session, volumes are down, but you're happy to swap merchandise for intermodal any day. Pricing, coal yields hold through 2Q, then we can see some softness in 3Q, just given what's going on with international rates. Operating margin ratio improvement can be better sequentially, just seasonally and because of the starting point. That's kinda what I heard. Anything you'd add or-
I just wanna thank our operating team because our service is standing out in the market, and our customers are telling us every day that it is. It makes my job a lot easier. It makes our team and the excitement around that, the, you know, way that we're working internally together is something that I haven't seen since I've been at CSX. A lot of momentum there and a lot of excitement.
Great. Okay.
All right.
Thank you so much, Matt. Appreciate you guys.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody.