All right, it's 9:00 A.M. I think we'll get started here. Thanks, everyone, for joining the kickoff to Deutsche Bank's 2023 Transportation Conference. Very happy to kick it off with CSX, Executive Vice President and CFO, Sean Pelkey, Investor Relations. we really appreciate everybody coming. We got a packed schedule over the next couple days.
CSX, obviously, one of the few Class I railroads, $61 billion-$62 billion of equity market value. it's been a, it's been a tough year as you digest costs and, and we deal with this freight recession, but seems like things aren't getting worse, and, and we hope volumes pick up. I'm going to pass it on to, to Sean to give maybe 4 or 5 minutes of, of prepared remarks, and then we'll jump right into Q&A. Sean, over to you.
Yeah, great. Thanks, Amit. Thanks for having me here and hosting us here in New York. It's great to be here and be able to, you know, tell the CSX story. I have prepared a couple of slides that I'll go through here. Feel free to stop me along the way if you got any questions as we're, as we're walking through it.
Forward-looking disclosures as usual. You know, I think it's important to start with the service story because the service story is foundational to ultimately what we're trying to achieve, which is transforming the way that we approach the customer experience, and doing it in a way that allows us to capture, share, not just from our peer railroads, but also from trucks over time. And that's really the key to unlocking profitable growth over the, the medium and the long term.
When we look at how CSX has done, it was right around this time last year that we finally started to see the signs of inflection in the service performance. Not coincidentally, also about the same time that Joe joined us back in September of last year.
Joe, as you know, has done a tremendous job transforming the culture of the railroad and with a fundamental belief that the more engaged the workforce is, those, you know, 20,000 or so union employees that are out there moving freight every single day and maintaining the track and maintaining our assets, the more engaged they are in solving the problems and, and proactively coming up with solutions to serve the customer better, overall, the better service product that we're able to deliver,
which ultimately translates into growth over and above our rail peers and, and our truck competition. Just at a high level, in terms of what we're seeing in the markets right now, you know, our, our service product is extraordinarily strong, and we're meeting significantly more of the customer orders this, this time this year than we were last year.
Unfortunately, the absolute number of orders has come down, and that sort of freight recession that you talked about in your opening remarks there. We do see some positive markets that continue to be supportive for us. Obviously, auto's been good all year long. We've had some competitive wins in the auto space, albeit a little bit lower RPU than the average within auto, with some shorter haul business and mixed impacts there. It's been a very strong market.
We see every reason to believe, even though production's not quite where it was in 2019, that we'll continue to see strength in the auto market. Fertilizers has been strong, particularly recently. We've been working very closely with customers to help them ramp up their production and allow us to move more freight by rail, and that's been working very well.
A lot of that freight that's been coming on in the last quarter, quarter and a half, has been short-haul, lower RPU freight, but still positive in terms of overall bottom line impact. Export coal, obviously, has been supportive all year long, will continue to be supportive here in the third quarter from a volume perspective. Obviously, we talked about some of the rate headwinds on the quarter call, and that's, you know, in large part, what drove our guidance around mid-teen declines in overall coal RPU from the second quarter to the third quarter, and that still appears to be the case. Minerals market, I think, is one that we feel very supportive about long term. We're going to see a lot of construction activity, road construction, building products. A lot of that shows up within minerals.
We had a little bit of a, a slower patch, you know, call it within the last month. A lot of that had to do with customer production issues. Those seem to have resolved, and that market has continued to pick back up. That's a lot of good news within that. On the steady side, domestic intermodal, I would say domestic intermodal is steady, sort of trending towards positive, hopefully.
Last week, we had our strongest week of the year in domestic intermodal. The team really has been scratching and clawing in a market that has not been extraordinarily supportive to try to find opportunities, create new lanes, work directly with customers, win some share from truck, has been doing a really nice job. We were up mid-single digits in domestic intermodal last week, and hopefully, that continues.
Metals has been a, a market that's been supportive all year long. We, we continue to see strong demand in metals, particularly as it relates to auto production. Equipment's been off a little bit recently. Military move's part of that, but, you know, that's a market that overall has been fairly good for us.
Domestic coal, I think going into the quarter, we were, we were thinking that because of where inventory restocking had sort of landed at the end of the second quarter, we probably would see a little bit of a soft patch in domestic coal. We still likely, you know, see some headwinds year-over-year, but it's certainly stronger than what we expected, given how hot the summer has been. That's been supportive.
Then on the softer side of things, chemicals has been a headwind all year long. We-- particularly on the domestic and industrial chemical side, we have seen export plastics hold up fairly well. Again, that's a little bit lower RPU than the average within chemicals. Forest Products, we've seen some weakness in paper and pulpboard recently, in line with consumer demand.
Ag and food's been a little bit off, particularly grain. What's happening there, both the wheat harvest as well as, we're seeing strong production in sort of the Carolina area, which is where a lot of the pigs, chickens, livestock is produced. That's being trucked to the local market. We're not seeing as much come in from the Midwest. Over the next couple of months, we're going to see that show up in our volumes.
That being said, the, the ag producers, in terms of the number of sets they've ordered for the fall harvest, it's about as strong as we've seen in a long, long time. We're optimistic once we get into the fourth quarter, that'll turn around.
Can I just interrupt for a minute?
Absolutely.
Talk about automotive-
Sure.
obviously, the big, big question now is with this UAW deadline that's coming, I think, on September 14.
Yeah.
What's, what's the latest thoughts there in terms of you're, you're obviously very close to your customers? Talk about how your customers are thinking about shipments, because it's obviously a big production hit if they go offline for, for a couple of months or something like that.
Right. Hopefully, hopefully, we're not looking at a couple of months situation. I think the, you know, the intel that we have or the best guess that we have is that even if there is a strike, hopefully, it's short-lived. We don't really know exactly what we're dealing with. You know, this, this is, unprecedented territory in many ways in terms of some of the demands, but I don't want to comment on that labor situation specifically, other than to say, you know, as long as it-- if there is a strike, it's relatively short-lived. In terms of we still have some finished vehicles that need to be moved, so that'll work its way through the pipeline.
When you think about the broader supply chain in terms of inbound product, you know, I don't think that the auto companies are going to turn that off day one. You think about metals, chemicals, plastics, those types of things.
Are they accelerating parts and shipments to kind of protect themselves against?
I haven't, I haven't seen any of that or heard any of that in the data so far.
Got it.
Got it. Yeah. International intermodal is the last one on the page, obviously, that one's been a weak point all year long. I think we started out, we were a little bit surprised at how weak it was, and then, you know, there was predictions that, hey, we'd get past this destocking, and then second half of the year, things would start to turn. We just haven't seen that yet. The good news is that we've been stable for probably a couple of months now, sort of in the down mid-teens % basis. You know, hopefully, as we get towards the end of the year, start to see that, free up. I would say, you know, one additional thing, this is all sort of the volume picture, when you step back a second, I talked about some negative mix within merchandise.
We saw that show up in Q2. When we look from Q2 to Q3, we see that persisting. When you think about ex fuel, our RPUs within merchandise, probably pretty flat from Q2 to Q3.
Chemicals? Chemicals coming back.
Chemicals, short haul business, things like that.
Sorry to interrupt you here, Amit, but just on Domestic intermodal, so obviously, fuel prices have been creeping back up.
Yeah.
They're up, like, 15% in the last month, which is pretty incredible.
Yeah.
That just obviously helps the, the spread between intermodal, rail, and, and truck. Is that, is that what's driving...? You obviously have great service, too, so, so that's helping.
Yeah.
Is that what's kind of tipping the scale more towards domestic intermodal?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination of a couple of different things. Certainly, when the differential is compressed, it makes it harder to compete relative to truck and when fuel prices go up. Now, we do have a very effective fuel surcharge program within intermodal as well, and it responds real-time to those changes in, in fuel rates, unlike our merchandise program, which is on a 2-month lag.
We are catching up to it, but you're right, that discount that we have relative to truck increases as fuel prices go up, that is supportive. Really, it's been initiatives that the team's been working on, working directly with some shippers, sitting down with shippers and looking at matches of their traffic flows relative to the service that we can provide.
you know, running in the, in the 90s, mid-90s% in terms of trip plan compliance now for, you know, the better part of almost a year now, certainly goes a long way. How do we measure ourselves? you know, I think a good way to look at it is on a, a tonnage basis. When we look at how we have performed this year relative to both truck and peer U.S. railroads, we've outperformed. First quarter of the year, you know, we significantly outperformed. We had some positive mix within there. Weather was supportive for us. We were able to move some traffic in an unseasonable way in the first quarter. That was very supportive.
By the time we got to the second quarter, we were still up overall, in light of a market that had clearly turned. The demand picture was, was not as supportive. Truck tons were down, rail ton miles were down, CSX was up. You know, that's ultimately the story that we are portraying here, and I think that gives us a lot of optimism for what the future holds.
When we start to see customer orders turn around, the macro starts to be more supportive. We have the crews in place, we've got the locomotives, we have the cars, we have a network plan that works, and we're excited about what that might translate into for us.
Then, you know, when we think a little bit longer term, we've talked a lot about our Select Site program and our industrial development efforts. We've had a lot of success there over the course of the last year or two. So much so that the number of sites that we had started to be depleted, and these are very difficult to try to rebuild because we are looking for sites that are shovel-ready and rail-served by CSX, and there's only a limited number of those potential sites across our service territory. I'm proud to report this morning that we now have 19 sites. Our goal was to get to 20 by the end of the year. We're essentially there already here in August, so very exciting. You can see a concentration of those sites in the southeastern part of the network.
Frankly, we've got sites up and down, you know, the, the north to south across our network. Over 500 projects that are currently in the pipeline, and it spans across a lot of different markets. I think that's what's exciting, is sort of the broad-based interest in manufacturing, building on, on the CSX railroad.
Great. Well, thanks, Amit. That was really helpful. By the way, so if anybody wants to ask questions, please feel free to come in and make this as interactive as possible. I want to start with the operational side of things, because there's been a couple big movements. I mean first, I think Brian Barr left a few months ago to Union Pacific, and then obviously, the big announcement recently, Jamie Boychuk leaving, which caught people off by surprise. I wonder if you could just talk about that because it is in the context of CSX having such great service, and Jamie was really well regarded, at least, you know, generally in the industry for driving that service product.
Talk about kind of the continuity of service, what the reasons for that change were, how you guys are ensuring, protecting that service has really led to kind of a lot of the success on the merchandise side of this.
Sure, absolutely. I think the first thing is, we're 6 years into the Scheduled railroading journey. It's in our DNA, and you've got a, you know, a team of leaders across the operations group who understand what that plan looks like, how to run that plan, and the repeatability of that plan is sort of what makes it so successful. Casey Albright, who runs our, our network operations and service design, same guy that was there a couple of weeks ago, Ricky Johnson, who runs sort of the transportation, engineering, mechanical, same guy that was there a couple of weeks ago and has been there for, you know, over 30 years. There is a tremendous amount of continuity. I have a lot of respect for Jamie and what he brought to the railroad.
He's a good railroader, and, you know, we were thankful to have him. That decision that was made to make a change was a decision that Joe and the board came to. Ultimately, I think whenever there's a significant change like that in an organization, you look for, how is the organization going to respond? I would say that, you know, there's been a lot of optimism in terms of what we can do going forward.
You know, we're not going to look backwards. We're gonna come together, and so Kevin, myself, Brian and Ricky, excuse me, Ricky and Casey got together last week. We sat together with our leadership teams, and we talked about all the opportunity that's out there.
You know, how do we, how do we break down some of the barriers that exist across our organizations? Anytime you've got over 20,000 people in an organization our size, you're going to have silos. How do we work through that? Just as a very small example of that, Casey implemented a daily morning call, which the operating team does many, many calls every day, as you can imagine, to understand the state of the network.
Everybody in commercial, and frankly, anybody across the company that wants to join that, that has an interest, is now invited to come onto that call. We had the first one of those yesterday, and it's very tactical. We're working through issues that really impact the customer, and you've got the voice of the customer now on those calls, represented by the commercial team.
That's really exciting because I think we're going to be able to push our way through some of the challenges that may have prevented us from unlocking some of those incremental opportunities in the past.
One of the things I think about is, you know, when I think about what, what's been the recipe for success in CSX from an operating perspective is really how Kevin's team and Jamie's team kind of got together.
Yeah.
I mean, I think they shared a conference room between both of their offices.
They did, that's correct.
They would meet daily.
Yeah.
You know, when you look at, like, the CNI evolution, one of the big problems with CNI that Tracy Robinson talked about was-
Mm-hmm.
the operating team and the sales team just never really collaborated, and there was a breakdown there. I guess it's so important to continue that, that culture of transparency between sales and operating team. How, how, how are you continuing that, you know, and beyond, like, the Jamie, Kevin-
Yeah.
-relationship there, that Jamie's not there?
Look, I think it's, I think it's healthy in an organization to have tension between your operating team and your sales and marketing team, right? That exists in most organizations. You know, you, you want to make sure that there's a, there's a, a good dialogue and a healthy balance there.
That's ultimately what's going to translate into the best service product for the customer, that allows us to maximize bottom-line profitability. I think, you know, while, while there was a good line of communication there, you know, where, where's the balance, right? How do we make sure at all levels of the organization that we're engaged and that everybody feels empowered?
Not that, you know, there's one person who's got a veto or there's, you know, there's, there's one decision-maker in the organization, that we, we, at a, at a vice president level, at a head of level, can bring ideas forward that are ultimately going to translate into bottom-line growth, and those ideas are going to be heard and, and well received. I think you're going to see more of that going forward.
Not to the point where it disrupts the balance and the fluidity of the network. The plan is sacred, but we're talking about things like, "Hey, I've got a customer who we serve three days a week today. On days four and five, you already have a local start that goes by that customer.
Could we please add a 4th or a 5th, and/or a 5th, stop at that customer?" There's really no incremental cost to that, potentially a little bit of overtime. So, you know, in, in instances where we have those opportunities, the more we say yes, the more trust we build with the customer.
Can we talk about your CFO, so we can talk about some near-term trends, if that's okay?
Yeah.
Volume is down 3, 3.5% quarter date. merchandise is actually pretty good, flat to kind of up a little bit, you know, 20, 30 basis points. the yield is, is going to take, you know, a decent step down year-over-year. It started to in the second quarter. can you just talk about kind of sequentially year-over-year, however you want to frame it, the mix, revenue and, and kind of... We'll just start there, and then we'll work our way down to PNL.
Okay. You're thinking as it pertains to margins or just-
We'll get to that, but then let's talk about revenue probably is-
Yeah.
flattish to down, maybe sequentially
Right.
-down mid to mid-high single digits year-over-year. You know, how does the mix look within that as you think about sequentially?
Right. I mean, I think the biggest thing, and I, I mentioned it earlier, we mentioned it on the call, is the, is the headwind to the coal RPU, and that's almost entirely driven by net coal pricing, which is tied to, you know, the international rates. That resets going into the quarter.
We have some contracts that run on a monthly basis and reset monthly. It's been a little bit more supportive than we expected going into the quarter, because a lot of that traffic gets set going, you know, where, where it was heading into the quarter, we've got pretty good visibility into that mid-teens decline in coal RPU. That's probably the biggest and most notable headwind. Clearly, supplemental revenue continues to be a headwind for us. It's come down.
the intermodal storage revenue peaked this time last year, with all of the supply chain hiccups and backups that we had across our terminals. We're cycling that. That's gonna be a big headwind year-over-year, not as much sequentially, but a huge headwind year-over-year. When we talk about merchandise pricing, you know, I'm continue to be encouraged by the results that we see.
We get a report every week that shows contracts that have been renewed, and those discussions are going well. The team's been able to continue to achieve pricing that reflects the value of the service that we're providing, that continues to exceed inflation, and I'm optimistic that that's gonna continue. You know, we've got some contracts that are renewing now into next year.
Probably about 15%-20% of the book has now repriced, for 2024, and the results have been very encouraging. I think all of that's good news. Obviously, I talked about the mix on the merchandise side being a little bit negative, sequentially from Q1 to Q2, and that's probably gonna hold here going into Q3.
Do you have ability to kind of offset that? I mean, I know PS&O, you made really good progress from 1Q to 2Q.
Yeah.
You still talk about $30 million-$40 million of, of inefficiencies per quarter. Are we, are we able to lower that non-fuel OpEx base in the back half of the year to maybe cushion a little bit of the mix headwinds in the back half?
I mean, at that meeting we had that I described last week, one of the things we talked about was, hey, look, the volume environment is not as supportive as we'd like it to be. We wanna make sure that we're doing everything we can to position for a rebound in the markets.
At the same time, if there are costs that we can, you know, curtail, asset utilization, efficiency gains that we can drive over the next 2 months, we ought to be looking at every opportunity. The operating team is focused on overtime, particularly in the mechanical and engineering crafts. I would say that's probably an area that hasn't been in focus over the last 6 months or so.
We've really been, you know, full out, let's make sure everything is ready to go. Let's make sure we have the crews in place where we need to. Let's make sure we run the plan. We've got some opportunity there. We've got some opportunity with outside contractors, outside services.
Taking a fresh look at the vehicle fleet, work, work equipment fleet. The fewer of those we have, the less we need to maintain, the less we need to replace. Taking a, you know, just a hard look at everything. Frankly, I, you know, I took a deep dive into my budget. I've only got $80 million, and, you know, half of that's already spent, and the other half is labor. I took $2 million out of my budget. You know, it's everybody is focused.
I can't necessarily tell you, yeah, you know, we're gonna see a dramatic decline in cost sequentially, but we're focused on it in light of an environment that's not as supportive as we'd like it to be.
Do you think a lot of that lifting that you're doing can be effective in offsetting the wage, like in July?
Right, the 4% increase.
Yeah, that comes out in July.
Yeah.
Are we in a position to say that, "Hey, listen, like, it's gonna be hard to, to lower the, the, the cost structure given that?
Yeah.
Maybe we can hold the line on it.
Yeah, there's opportunities there. We do still have higher headcount, though, and, and we are hiring. We're hiring for attrition, we're hiring for growth, and we still have a couple of locations where we're still a little bit short. As volume needs shift and we see flows shift from time to time, you've got to make sure that you've got enough folks in those locations.
We also need to start doing some, some setback engineer training. We've been focused almost exclusively on conductor training. We've got about 80 or 100 engineers in the training pipeline right now. We need to increase that number as we get into the, the sort of, you know, winter months, and I think the team is focused on doing that as well.
Just given intermodal's been such a, a tough place, especially international intermodal. I mean, retail sales today were a little bit better. Home Depot reported results that were
Yeah
... pretty good. Anything that you're seeing that it's a little bit more optimistic? I mean, the interesting thing, you think that the, the discord on the West Coast with more ships, you know, coming to Savannah and the East Coast and Miami and all these places is good for... But it's actually not, because a lot of that stuff gets trucked in, and you're interchanging with the UP and BN on some of the stuff that goes to the West Coast.
I mean, talk about that dynamic. One, are you kind of seeing anything that gets you a little bit more optimistic, or are we kind of bouncing along the bottom from an intermodal demand perspective? You know, what, what is kind of what's happening on the, on the port side with the labor on the West Coast?
Kind of think about your outlook or change your outlook for intermodal.
I mean, I think longer term, clearly, we've been seeing the shift over to the East Coast ports. East Coast ports are making tremendous investments in continuing to make sure that they're, you know, a, a significant player in that, in that freight flow, and that's supported for us. Yes, there is some business that lands there, that trucks, but there's some inland port business. There's plenty of business that moves inland to the Midwest or other, other parts of our service territory that moves intermodal.
Clearly, you know, I, I, I think, you know, a, a healthier, stronger West Coast port is also good for us because traffic that lands there that wants to make the land bridge east, you know, it's gonna interchange with an eastern partner, and if we're able to capture that, you know, good portion of that share, that's, that's supportive for us. Ultimately, it's about how do we grow the pie, not necessarily are we worried about does it land east, does it land west? There's advantages and disadvantages to both, depending on where the ultimate destination of the freight is.
With, with Norfolk now kind of through their remediation effort, I mean, I assume you guys benefited somewhat from, from the unfortunate events of what they had to go through and the rerouting of traffic and all that stuff? Has there been any, any benefit over the last several months from that, that maybe you're, you're giving back now? How do you think about what's happening there, how that impacts you guys?
There isn't, there isn't a tremendous amount of what I would call sort of spot opportunity benefit when, when another carrier is struggling and, you know, "Hey, we're the overflow." I would say. The good news about that is to the extent that there, there were opportunities, they were contracted opportunities.
We've been able to tie those up, in many cases in multi-year contracts. You know, not only have we been able to provide a better service product, we've also been able to, to, you know, offer more service, than our competitors. It's, it's been a supportive environment. At the end of the day, though, you know, when, when the rails, all the U.S. rails are operating well, it's, it's, it's the best solution for the industry. It keeps us out of sort of the regulatory spotlight.
It keeps us out of the legislative spotlight. We've got to operate safely, and we're going to meet the commitment that we have to our employees.
The interchange, I mean, one thing I think about CSX is, you know, Kevin and the team kind of are always thinking about ways to actually create, create new business...
Yeah.
business development opportunities, and obviously, the CPKC interchange in Alabama is a new thing that could be pretty significant, given you have the 2 best service railroads that are now interchanging, and that could be... Any, any thoughts on, you know, what that could mean, when that starts in, in, in greater volumes and when we start actually seeing that?
Yeah. In terms of that, that deal, it is, it's very exciting. At the end of the day, you know, I've been here at CSX almost 20 years. I, I haven't seen a new interchange like this pop up over that, that time frame, that's going to be as significant as this one. That's extraordinarily exciting because it provides optionality. It gives us a route for traffic that originates in Mexico that wants to come to the southeast. There's some truck movements that CPKC can convert that's moving east. We're going to have a pipeline to do that across the, the Meridian Speedway, or excuse me, the,
I was going to ask you that.
To compete with the Meridian Speedway, I should say. That's exciting, and, you know, I think it's going to ramp over time. One thing that, just to make sure folks are clear on in terms of our part of that transaction, there's a short line railroad that's been leased for a couple of decades. All we are doing is essentially taking that lease back. It's land that we already owned, that should be relatively straightforward. We do need to go through the STB process. Hopefully, that will not be a long process, you know, at some point next year, we'll be able to take that line back, make some investments and start translating that into some growth.
Okay. Any questions from the audience? Yep.
What are the circumstances where Domestic intermodal does well and International intermodal continues to struggle?
I, I mean, I think on the domestic side, it's a continuation of the initiatives that we've got in terms of trying to grow the pie with some of the direct shippers that have been working with us and introducing some new lanes. Regardless of what the consumer demand levels are, regardless of where inventory levels are at, we win share, right? On the international side, we've got long-term contracts with the international steamship lines. If it lands at ports that are conducive to moving that freight via rail, then we'll move it. And, you know, right now there's just less freight that's, that's landing, and there's less freight to move.
Knight-Swift Transportation, I should say, their contract with Norfolk was set to expire this year. I know they were kind of getting all you all in a room together to talk about maybe optionalities. It looks like, I think they, they did secure that business with Norfolk, six months before the contract was expiring. You have a better cost structure. You have a better service. You know, why, why weren't you able to conquest that business? That's obviously a, a huge carrier with, with a lot of, you know, load capacity. Talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, I mean, I'm hesitant to talk about any specific shipper or specific situation. You know, we're always looking to compete. Always want to make sure if we're going to try to win some new business, that it fits within to our network, that it's not going to cause undue disruption to the, to the balance and fluidity of the network.
That, you know, we have the right cost structure to be able to compete, and that when we look at it from a profitability basis on its several different metrics, that it's attractive. And, and then, of course, we got to go out and we got to win it, and the customer needs to, to, you know, on their own, decide that we're the better solution, versus, versus another. I, I can't-
Yeah, I guess once you're being, you know, quite price disciplined, I think, which is, which is great. You talked about 2024 pricing, which is obviously in a pretty high inflationary environment. When do we start to, like, see a noticeable. Fuel is, like, putting a lot of noise in the yield numbers right now, and we'll probably take another step down sequentially on fuel.
Yeah.
Then maybe on 4Q, it starts to get better.
Sure.
When do we start to see like, you know, a noticeable inflection in yield ex fuel?
Right.
Not just from a mix perspective, but within the different, like, the mix within the mix, excluding all that, to actually see, like, some real price reflected in the yield.
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's there, right? We, we have a, we have a measure that we look at, which is Same-store sales pricing. It looks at same commodity, same lane, same shipper, same, you know, same OD pair, all that, all that, all those criteria.
We look at what was the rate last year, what's the rate this year, and how has that changed? That's been very supportive. It, it gets down to well beyond the, you know, 10, 11 markets that we report at, down to a very specific level of detail, we aggregate that together, and we can look at what that looks like. We don't disclose that publicly, but...
Sure
... you know, it's there. To the extent that from a public-facing standpoint, you're not seeing it, it doesn't mean that, that, you know, somehow we're, we're, you know, not pricing in the way that we're-
Yeah
conveying. It means that there's negative mix, there's fuel lag, there's other headwinds.
What's the runway in terms of pricing? The book of business for this year is pretty much fully baked, and now you're thinking about 24. Do we, do we have kind of another robust pricing environment for the next 12 months? Maybe as the fuel noise abates, we start to see a little bit more of that flow through to the, to the yield numbers.
Yeah. I talked about it earlier in terms of where we are on the pacing for 2024. We're still in the early innings, but, you know, of the way in or so, the results have been pretty encouraging. You know, inflation is expected to come down a little bit as we get into next year. We still have, obviously, the labor inflation headwinds, with the July next year increase being 4.5%. You know, we're hopeful that we can still continue to price in excess of inflation.
Couple of things on headcount. One of your competitors, not direct competitor, talked about maybe slowing headcount as the volumes come in weaker. Doesn't seem like that's, that's what you guys are looking to actually replace attrition.
Yeah.
I know you're confident about growth when, when cyclical volumes come back, but is there any I mean, you guys have seen a lot of growth in headcount, and any reason to say, "Hey, let's just pause, wait, and see here until, until we get a little bit more robust volume outlook, or more certain year on the volume outlook?
In terms of headcount, you know, I think one of the things that's not as fully appreciated outside the, the industry is the difference between the active headcount and the available headcount, right? We, we have this sort of now public-facing number of what the active headcount is, and that's the number of people that are qualified to run the trains.
Then you've got the available headcount, which is, okay, today, how many people can actually run the trains now? That excludes people who are out sick, on vacation, personal leave, you know, other, other leave statuses. That's what you ultimately need to manage to. You know, we're in a period now in the summer months, where that availability is much lower than it would be, you know, post-Labor Day, right?
We get post-Labor Day, yeah, we probably are going to be carrying a few too many people relative to what the network needs, but that ultimately is going to translate into us being fully ready for the spring peak. What does that mean in terms of costs? It might mean if you're not running the starts, it might mean you're running $2 million a month heavy versus where you'd like to be. You do the math on the volume opportunity, it pales in comparison to what we might be able to translate that into in the spring, if and when we see some growth opportunities.
Yeah. Maybe I want to chime in with a question here. Couple ones for me in terms of the, the new business opportunities. We talked about auto plans, battery plans coming online. Now, that's-
Yeah
... that's something you guys have been working on a lot. Just talk a little bit about, you know, the non-cyclical volume opportunity over the next 2 years based on some of these business development kind of initiatives you've done.
Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, I think it's broad-based. Like, like I said, we've got over 500 projects that we're working on. We've actually invested more headcount into the industrial development space. We actually combined real estate and industrial development together. We were able to reallocate some resources from the real estate team over to industrial development,
which helps us to have better touch points with the local communities, with customers, with, with government authorities, because ultimately, this is about collaborating to make sure that we're landing the business on our network. I would say it's generally broad-based. There's not one specific market that's going to benefit. Obviously, we've seen a lot of announcements around autos and EVs and that trend, but, you know, there's opportunities within metals, within many of the other merchandise segments as well.
On, on the coal side, too, obviously, we know the benchmark price is going to drive that 15% reduction, but the coal volumes are actually doing pretty well.
Yeah.
Curtis Bay is fully online, obviously.
Yeah.
What's, what's kind of the outlook for the rest of year on the coal volumes, just to maybe meet some of that, not completely, but?...
Sure
... benefit?
Sure.
Yes.
Yeah. I mean, we look at the trains that we've been running so far this month, and we're pretty much at the peak number of trains per day that we've been all year long, which is great. That's reflective of strength in the export market, as well as the domestic market running pretty well. Is that going to continue through the end of the year? You know, hard to say. Let's, let's see, you know, does December finish out hot? What does the winter look like? That's going to be the impact there on domestic. We think exports should hold up well. The year-over-year comps get a lot tougher in Q4. That's when we really started to see a ramp last year, so we'll cycle that.
Sequentially, here in the third quarter, we're off to a pretty good start on the coal market.
When I think kind of, you know, I guess, button this up a little bit in terms of volumes are, you know, a little bit weak. We're bouncing along the bottom here from, from an intermodal perspective, cost inflation coming a little bit more in the third quarter of the labor deal. You're doing your best to offset it.
But, you know, we're, we're kind of in this holding pattern here. Things get a little bit weaker from where they are today, from, from a profitability standpoint, but we're, we're, we're all waiting for when the volumes come back cyclically, and you guys are probably well-primed for that.
Yeah.
How would you think about it?
You got it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yep. Any last questions for Sean, CSX?
Hey, these exogenous shocks matter, Yellow to some of the other LTLs forcing traffic on the rails that we might not have seen before, Panama Canal, any of this stuff?
Yeah, the yellow, not so much. Panama Canal, there could be an impact there. Temporarily, might, might be a, a negative impact, to the extent some of the, the ships that would be headed through the canal get rerouted to West Coast ports, that it actually could be a positive for us.
Yeah.
Hey, to follow up on Amit's question on auto earlier.
Mm-hmm.
Could you help us frame just big three exposure? We can see the direct auto volumes and then also indirect within chems, metals, just how you think about the auto franchise as a whole.
Yeah. Big Three , I would say, is probably about half of our total, you know, auto exposure, somewhere in that, in that ballpark. Then, you know, you've got markets within metals and chemicals in particular. Not something I can put a specific number on, but it's, you know, it's a chunk of our overall merchandise business that gets tied up into auto.
Just one more. The arrangement with CPKC.
Yeah.
Why would railroads have ever figured out before this, those tracks line up, and there's, you know, hugely beneficial markets access?
Well, you know, I think CPKC is, is, is, you know, rightfully so, looking for as many opportunities as they possibly can in order to, to deliver on the revenue growth opportunity that they promised investors. You know, are they fighting a little harder than they would have otherwise to kind of figure out solutions? They needed a willing partner. There was a line that needed to be purchased. You know, we're thankful that all the stars aligned, and we were able to get sort of a triparty deal that worked for everybody.
Cool.
Great.
Thanks, Sean. Have a great day.
Yeah.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, cheers.
We got GXO coming up, next. If you may want to stick around at 10:00 A.M.
Okay.
Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
See you.
Thanks a lot. Keep in touch soon.