Thank you for joining Forward Air Corporation's fourth quarter 2022 earnings release conference call. Before we begin, I'd like to point out that both the press release and webcast presentation for this call are accessible on the investor relations section of Forward Air's website at www.forwardaircorp.com. With us this morning are CEO, Tom Schmitt, and CFO, Rebecca Garbrick, excuse me. By now, you should have received the press release announcing our fourth quarter 2022 results, which was furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K and on the wire yesterday after the market closed.
Please be aware that certain statements in the company's earnings press release announcement and on this conference call are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements which are based on expectations, intentions, and projections regarding the company's future performance, anticipated events or trends, and other matters that are not historical facts, including statements regarding our expected first quarter 2023 and fiscal year 2023. These statements are not a guarantee of future performance and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. For additional information concerning these risks and factors, please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the press release and webcast presentation relating to this earnings call.
The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. During the call, there may also be discussion of financial metrics that do not conform to U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. Definitions and reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the press release issued, which is available in the investors tab of our website. Now I'll turn the call over to Tom Schmitt, CEO of Forward Air.
Thank you, Brad. Good morning to all of you on the call. First things first, a big thank you to all of our teammates, our independent contractor drivers, and our business partners. You did keep our commitment to the best service in the industry with the most intact damage-free LTL shipments. I thank you for that. You also delivered a record year in all of our lines of business, top line, bottom line, with EPS year-over-year growth by almost 70%. That's top of the class in our space. Still, we did not finish the year the way we expected. We need to address that. In contrast to many of our peers we had guided to Q4 to be sequentially better than Q3. Our peak planning efforts with our customers actually supported that guidance.
We always poll our top 25 customers or even more going into the fourth quarter, we felt good about the guidance that we gave. It's turned out, we have no monopoly to wisdom and not even in concert with our customers as we plan together. We had modeled that the Forward 23 actions that we control would more than make up for the shortfall in demand, the overall sluggishness in the economy, and also for fuel coming down. Where we ended up, though, was with the LTL tonnage going down by 13% in the fourth quarter, way more than the single-digit decline we, and frankly, we together with our customers, had expected. December was the worst month, and January was equally sluggish. We're talking 15%, 16% down. The most recent weeks were a bit more promising.
The most recent week that is a complete week we showed at -10%. Q1 will be tough and also I want to say despite the Q1 being tough, our story and our drive towards high-value freight still holds. We are keeping all of our LTL customers. We're actually adding customers by adding direct shippers. We have more than 200 right now, and that's in the space small, medium-sized businesses where they do not use forwarders. In Q4, the number of LTL shipments held stable, we were down by 0.4%, so it's pretty much the same as last year. The freight mix, as we showed in the release, is getting better and better. Evidence for that is also that on a per piece basis, the weight increased 12% year-over-year.
We looked at four high-value verticals, and they used to be 18% of our freight mix a year ago, and now they're 29% of our freight mix. Trade shows in the last quarter of Q4 went up by 50% compared to the last quarter of 2021. Finally, what's also important, we get paid for that higher value freight. Our revenue per hundred weight is up 13% Q4 over prior year Q4. A lot of the journey that we're on works out to exactly the way we had intended. The challenge that we have, right now that caused the year to end with a quarter that was less than what we expected, significantly less than what we expected, is our shipments that we still have way fewer pieces than they used to have, and that they will have.
20%-25% fewer pieces. We expect that sometime in Q2, inventory start normalizing and shipment sizes should be normalizing too. At the end of the day, we do not rely on that to happen. We do have our Forward 23 initiatives in place. We have half of them that are focused on growth. We talked about them many times before. Anything from selling more direct to events coming back. We also have initiatives that are focused on cost containment, and we call that Forward Game Shape. For instance, including dimming and reweighing, which is a huge initiatives, as well as cost reductions in travel, reduction in force. We're down by more than 100 people in the last two months alone, and we also have a hiring freeze in place.
Also part of Game Shape is, for instance, making sure that we use our independent contractor roster as much as possible, and we have minimum outside miles. We just updated our Forward 23, Forward Force Growth, and Forward Game Shape initiatives for impact. At this point, we still believe that we can target to a 2023 that's ahead of 2022 in EPS. That's what the collective initiatives are telling us. We show about a $0.90 EPS headwind from a sluggish economy. We show a $0.60 headwind from fuel coming down, but the initiatives collectively, in our minds, will make up for that. Please bear in mind we did buy a beautiful company called Land Air Express that's helping us also with $0.18 EPS impact that we expect out of that's accretive to our model.
As you also know, if the economy keeps being sluggish longer, we tend to have beautiful tuck-in acquisitions, both in intermodal drayage as well as in LTL. That would be on top of those initiatives that we are targeting. At this point, we still believe that with Forward 23 initiatives in place and updated for the economic slowdown and for the fuel going down, as well as with the Land Air Express addition to our team, as well as potential additional acquisitions, we can still target a EPS 2023 ahead of 2022. By the way, I'd rather shoot to do that and have initiatives in place with first-class team members driving them and getting very close than targeting 10% or 20% down and starting that with that as an ingoing proposition.
In our models, we can get to an EPS in 2023 that actually is on top of what we had in 2022. With that, I'm gonna turn it over, Brad, back to you. Rebecca and I will take questions.
Thank you. With that, the floor is now open for questions and answers. If you wish to ask a question, you can press one and then zero on your telephone keypad. You may withdraw your question at any time by repeating the one-zero command. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before pressing those numbers. Once again, if you have a question, you may press one and then zero at this time. 1 moment please for our first question. We'll go to Jack Atkins with Stephens. Please go ahead.
Hey, this is Grant on for Jack. Good morning, Tom and Rebecca. Thanks for taking my question.
Morning, Grant.
Morning. Just kinda curious on the big reversal in weight per shipment and, you know, with the volatility we've seen there over the last couple years. Kinda how are you thinking about that going forwards?
Yeah. So this is the combination that we just talked about, right? The weight per shipments for Q4 shows down by 13%. That in itself is not a good metric. It's also not something that we like to see. You kind of unpeel the onion and say, "What's happening here?" Our freight mix is getting better and better. Again, the weight per piece inside a shipment, most shipments have more than or many shipments have more than one piece. The number of pieces inside a shipment over the last several months went down by more than 20% because people still order two SKUs, but the third SKU is still in the warehouse, so they don't order that as part of the shipment.
Despite the fact that our weight per piece is going up, that the number of shipments is holding steady, the fact that we have more than 20% fewer pieces in a given shipment means the weight per shipment is going down. I know this is a lot of kind of math pieces coming together, but in essence, the quality of the freight is there, the number of shipments is there. What's inside the shipment currently is actually high quality. It's just less of what it was and less of what it will be. That we're not relying on the economy coming back quickly. We are pulling all of these cost actions, Forward Game Shape, we're also pulling all of the growth actions.
Again, collectively, between the Land Air Express acquisition and our organic growth initiatives, which has opened a terminal in Midway, third terminal in Chicago. We got five new dots on the map with Land Air Express. Between the game shape initiatives and the forward force growth initiatives, we do believe we have a good shot of 2023 being ahead of 2022, despite an economic headwind that we just updated, and despite the fact that we expect fuel to come down and normalize in 2023. Weight per shipment down by itself is not something we would like to see, but we need to understand what drives it. The quality of the freight is exactly what we want it to be.
Gotcha. That definitely makes sense. Just to follow on, you talked about growing earnings next year this year in 2023. Could you maybe just kinda try and quantify how that could break down quarterly? You know, you kind of expect a more of a positive inflection in the second half of the year. Just kinda any color you could offer around, you know, how the EPS breaks down by quarter, maybe would be helpful. Thanks.
Yeah. We did guide for the first quarter, and that is continuing the sluggishness that we saw in Q4. Let me just give a little bit of color commentary. You saw the $1.32 that we guided to for Q1. Obviously, if you multiply this by four, that doesn't get you to past $7.00, which we still target. Again, we came in adjusted at $7.18 for 2022. Again, between our initiatives that we control, between getting $0.18 EPS for Land Air Express, and between a potential of wildcard acquisitions, which we tend to have, highly accretive tuck-in acquisitions, we think we can still beat the $7.18. It is more and more ramping up. As an example, Land Air Express is joining us.
We're working with them very closely to make sure that the quality of the freight in a cleansed operating environment, gets to standards that we expect at Forward Air, and the Land Air Express team is wonderful to work with. They'll get us there. This is a journey that's ramping up quarter by quarter by quarter. Most of the initiatives that we talked about, whether it's selling more direct, whether it's bringing events back, doing more in and out of Canada and Mexico, or on the Game Shape side, getting dimming and reweighing equipment in all of our terminals, all of that is ramping up throughout the year.
While it looks perhaps a bit, thought lazy to say, okay, it's gonna be back-end loaded or it's gonna be second half loaded, fact is, all of these, growth and Game Shape initiatives are taking, steam and are ramping up throughout the year. You would see a bit more of an impact in Q3 and Q4, and you see more impact in Q2 than Q1. Yes, it is, ramping, the first quarter being the most, muted one. This is, frankly driven by the fact that we expect continuous growth by each one of those initiatives, and therefore, you do see a ramping effect.
Great. Thanks, Tom.
Thank you.
Next, we can go to Tyler Brown with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys.
Tyler, good morning.
Hey, Tom. Thanks so much for the color on the guide, I just wanna kinda make sure I've got it. You have maybe $1.50 in bad guys from the economy and fuel, and then I'm rounding, maybe call it $0.20 from Land Air, and then maybe another few cents from Chickasaw. Can you kind of bridge that other $1-$1.20 in savings that you think you can achieve? I mean, are there kind of three things, maybe kind of key things that might be driving that?
Yeah. Roughly, you got the math exactly right, Tyler, and, we both, you and I are both pretty math inclined. The $1.50 bad guys is absolutely correct. From a pure math perspective, we finished the year with $7.18, not quite the $7.50 that we shot for because of, what happens deeper and faster in Q4 than what we had expected. Then we say we wanna have more than $7.18 in 2023. You have $1.50 coming against us from the get-go, that's the $0.90 or so from the sluggish economy and the $0.60 from, fuel prices coming down. Now how do we get to a positive kind of $1.60 or $1.70 to make up for that $1.50?
You mentioned the $0.20, and $0.18 is the one that we have in our model for Land Air Express. That still leaves us to have to get at least $1.30 from the other initiatives. They break down roughly, Tyler, 50/50 between the what we call Forward Force Growth initiatives, and I'm gonna get a bit more specific in a moment, and the Forward Game Shape initiatives, which are more about efficiency and effectiveness, including cost containment and cost management. The biggest items on the growth side, would be doing more high-value freight, with some of our core domestic forwarder, airlines, 3PL, international forwarder customers. That gives us about $0.17. Selling more direct to small, medium-sized businesses that do not use our core customer forwarders gives us about $0.07.
You have more coming back on the trade shows. You have more Canada and Mexico. This is kind of stretching in existing areas because we are doing Canada and Mexico today and trade shows, obviously. That's another $0.08. We do have a lot of brokerage ramp up with our new leader in brokerage under Nancee, Brian Foe. That gets us backhaul efficiencies, both from a cost perspective and an empty miles perspective. That's about $0.12. We're growing our final mile integrated customers. Integrated means it's more efficient for us to operate them in a co-mingled system. That's about $0.04. We have an intermodal drive to grow more with BCOs versus intermediaries. That's about $0.12. That's adding up kind of the impact on the growth of forward Force side.
On the Game Shape side, the single biggest one is staying in single digit with outside brokered miles at a highly cost-effective basis, where we expect a $0.37 delta between what we had last year and this year. Remember, we had last year, Tyler, quarters where we were in the low to mid-20s of outside brokered miles. We're in 3%-4% territory today, and we expect the entire year to remain in single digits. Tremendously well managed by Tim Osborne, by Justin Lindsay, Chris Ruble's team members. That's the single biggest block on the cost management side or on the Game Shape side. We do expect dimming and reweighing benefits and other technology enhancement benefits in our terminal system. That actually adds up to $0.37 between those two.
Cost management, some of the ones I mentioned, travel, reduction in force. Initial wave got us to $0.11. We may not be done there yet. We have surgical pricing efforts where we continue becoming more and more of a machine in Pricing for the quality of the service where it's relevant to the customer. That surgical pricing gets us another $0.14. If you do the math between those, again, we're more than willing to open up and be very transparent because these are real growth and real cost management and Game Shape initiatives that collectively add up to the $0.93 economic slowdown and the $0.61 reduction on the fuel side, add up to that and slightly more.
Even if we fall a bit short, we still have the possibility of another tuck-in acquisition or two. When we're saying we're targeting a year that's actually up from last year, this is based on initiatives by our leaders with their teams that add up on the growth side and on the Game Shape side, and if the economic headwind is steeper and longer, we do have additional opportunities with, again, Land Air Express already on board. You mentioned Chickasaw, we typically always have a couple of tuck-in acquisitions that we don't know at the beginning of the year which ones will come through, but they always come through.
Sounds to me like you were prepared for that question, so that was extremely helpful. real quickly on fuel, what is the estimate in there on the $0.60? Is it, call it $4.50 fuel or lower?
I'm doing this top of my head, Tyler, and I'll get it close enough to write. Stefan Brischmeier, who runs our pricing, he would know the exact number. What we do there is, I'll tell you directionally correct numbers. What we do there is, we look at the one of the best sources for forecasting, that's the Energy Institute in Washington. They have for this year, and they have it by month, by the way, so we have it by month too in our forecast. We don't try to outsmart people who do this for a living full-time. We took on average for this year, something around $4.23-$4.24. That number was, I believe, in 2022, more like $4.89.
In rough terms, let's say 490-ish to 420-ish, step down by about $0.70. Once we actually get that through our math exercise, and we also have some employee drivers where the math works slightly differently, but this gets translated into, at this point in the model, a $0.61 headwind comparing 2022 to 2023. It's a 490 to 420-ish step down.
Yes. Okay. That is extremely helpful. Kind of going back to the weight per shipment. I think you're around 730 pounds-ish. Do you think that that's gonna be a low mark? Do you think it can build from here? Maybe can you talk about where your current weight per shipment is? I think that'd be helpful. Just longer term, when we think about the model, where do you think you kind of pan out in terms of weight? Is 800 pounds more like a stasis kind of weight, or could it be higher than that, or should it be lower than that? Just kinda any broad thoughts there.
Yeah. My sense is, Tyler, so your numbers that you have, and you just quoted are correct. That is where we are. I would wanna believe that the 730-ish is kind of the low mark. Again, this goes back to way fewer pieces than we saw six months ago, and that we will see again at some point. If it doesn't come as early as we want to, then we need to pull a few extra levers, including a couple more tuck-in acquisitions. We probably will never get into the 1,200, 1,500 kind of a pound range because this is where you deal with bulk commodities, where you deal with kind of big shipments that are more kind of in the retail and kind of consumer goods sector.
We tend to be more specialized. I mean, remember, this is what used to be air freight being grounded in many, many cases. There's a difference between what a world-class company like an Old Dominion or a Saia in the class freight space hauls and moves and what we move. Remember also, I mean, in some cases for the more sensitive but smaller high-value shipments, some of these best companies in the LTL space are our customers. 800 sounds like a good space. Perhaps even 850, 900. We were there when shipments were fuller, so I think that's possible
Okay. just my last one on Land Air. it sounds like it is expected to be accretive here in year one. I'm calculating maybe $6 million-$7 million in EBIT.
That's fair.
Yeah. When you think about 2024, because I feel like there's more to this story longer term from an accretion perspective. Can you just talk about maybe what you would expect over the next few years out of Land Air and maybe what some of the benefits were from this deal? Thanks.
Yeah. I mean, roughly speaking, the number you used, the $6 million-$7 million for this year is absolutely correct. What we're doing is, we have a company that is now part of us that has some of the same DNA. They did air, airport to airport line haul extremely well. They were a formidable competitor. Now they're part of us. Now we are in a compact way together with them doing our growth forward story very, very quickly. What took us two-three years, we're gonna try to do here within one year or so, which means upgrade the freight to more high-value freight, operating in a, what we call a cleansed operating environment, which means all palletized, making sure we're pricing accordingly for the high-value freight, and then also tapping into a larger customer base.
A lot of that, including synergies, where in some cases we have duplicates, in terms of buildings, we can consolidate some of them. We do get, as I pointed out, we have five new origins and destinations in our network based on Land Air Express. Waco, Boise, Topeka, Springfield and Abilene, Texas. You probably see a ramp up of the synergies throughout Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, and some of it will probably spill over into next year. If you look at this, Land Air Express, we said we think we're gonna retain between $74 million and $94 million of the revenue. Just make that, for argument's sake, $85 million.
Do assume that from a Forward Game Shape perspective, that Forward Air and Land Air standards will be very similar in a year. Take a 15% margin to be conservative. You talk certainly more like about a $13 million or so run rate impact from that acquisition versus perhaps half of that this year.
Right. Right. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for the time.
Thank you, Tyler.
Next, we can go to Todd Fowler with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hey, great. Thanks. Good morning, Tom. Hi, Rebecca.
Morning, Todd.
Good morning, Tom. Maybe a similar thought on what you were just talking about with Tyler on the fuel side. The $0.90 headwind that you have coming from the economy, can you break that down a little bit as far as how you get to the $0.90 headwind? Maybe how much of that's tonnage? You know, what would be an assumption on the OR side for the environment that you're thinking about maybe on the expedited freight side? Just some thoughts on the $0.90 headwind.
Yeah. What we did do was, we modeled this basically again, with some macroeconomic assumptions. Some of the reports, frankly, that you and some of your analyst colleagues put out are helping us with kind of validating and kicking the tires on some of those assumptions. We finished the year with 13% down year-over-year in tonnage per day. We took some of that, and we started actually even with a higher number down 15%-16% for the first couple of months. Then we looked at that number getting somewhat better throughout the rest of the year. We took a very, very steep double-digit year-over-year tonnage decline as the base case.
We built those Forward Force initiatives, the Land Air Express acquisition, and some of those impact of effective kind of running of our system, including cost management or dimming and reweighing on top of that. It's a double-digit year-over-year decline in the LTL tonnage that makes up the base assumption. We also had a couple of margin points that we kind of took down. What the thinking there was, in a very, very soft environment, we may have to work with our customers in some specific cases about competing and winning business that may be a bit more in the soft kind of profitability's area. We are still gonna be extremely pricing disciplined.
We had a GRI, we put this in place for every single customer. The pricing discipline is gonna be there. It's a combination of double-digit, starting with 15, 16, and then alleviating, getting a little bit smaller throughout the year, tonnage per day reduction, coupled with a couple of percent margin points that we took off. Once you run this through our model, it ends up being the number that I quoted, which was $0.93 EPS impact.
Got it. I'd say other than relying on our reports or some of my peers, maybe those are all prudent assumptions, Tom.
That's what I'm assuming.
Right. You got to be careful there. I don't know how granular you want to get on this question, but, you know, when I look at the expedited freight OR in the fourth quarter, despite the fall off in tonnage, you know, it was only 30 basis points or so higher than the fourth quarter of 2021, at least what I've got in my model. You know, what's a realistic assumption for 2023 in this environment? I mean, can you hold the OR flattish on a full year basis? Do you see it move back by 100 basis points? You've got a lot of levers on the cost side. Just maybe any thoughts on the expedited OR as we move through 2023.
It's probably flattish. But here, let me just perhaps explain this one more time too, because I think we had this conversation, and I think the logic holds, but you guys challenged us on that. If you remember, we said, we expect inside the expedited freight, the 800 pound gorilla is our main show, the LTL business. The other businesses are, in their own right, obviously profitable, and they need to be above certain ROIC and margin thresholds, but they also need to make the main show better with backhauls, with co-locating, co-routing, and so on. We, we did say going into 2022, we expect 150-200 basis point margin expansion in 2022 and in 2023.
If you look at 2022, you've got probably about twice that. We were more like 390 or so basis points that we added margin on the LTL side. Some of that is temporarily inflated by fuel. Say for argument's sake, we get 3.5 or 4 percentage points LTL margin expansion in 2022, we as a team do not take credit for the 150 or so that come from fuel being temporarily at very high levels. Same is true the other way around. Now, fuel is walking down.
If the margin remains flat, it still means the quality of the freight, the quality of the business, the way we operate our terminals, the way we dimming and reweighing, all the initiatives that are part of Forward 23 still get us 150 to 200 basis points margin expansion in 2023. If you look on a piece of paper, it might show flat because fuel is gonna be the headwind in this case. We wanna get pound for pound as a company better, and we don't take extra credit for fuel, but we also don't wanna take fuel as the determinant when we look flat, but de facto make the business better. It's almost like put fuel aside. Sometimes it's a bit of a tailwind, sometimes it's a bit of a headwind.
The test is this business getting better by 150-200 basis points, in its own right? It did in 2022, and we expect the same based on these initiatives in 2023.
Yeah. Okay, Tom. Those are all really fair comments, and I appreciate the thoughts around kinda how fuel helped 2022 and you guys being prudent about what, you know, you can control and what you can't. I'll turn it over. I'm sure you've got some other people in the queue. I appreciate the thoughts this morning.
Thank you. We'll keep using your analysis.
All right. Thanks, Tom.
Next we can go to Scott Group with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks. Good morning.
Morning, Scott.
Can you just really quickly go through the monthly tonnage for 4Q and start of 1Q?
Sure, Scott. In October, our tonnage was down 11%. In November, our tonnage was down 12%, and in December it was down 15%. In January, through the end of January, we're seeing about a 16% decline year-over-year.
Any chance you have the monthlies for Q1 a year ago?
I do not, actually. I'm sorry, Scott.
We can get those later. Okay. When I think about the fuel headwind that you guys talked about.
Mm-hmm
Is there any of that in Q1, or is that really all starting in Q2? I just wanna. I mean, it feels like maybe Q2 is the biggest of that fuel headwind, so that could be the biggest year-over-year earnings decline. Is that fair, as I think about the quarterly cadence, Tom?
Yeah, Scott, that's right. I mean, if you remember, right, I think June was like the peak of all of the fuel that came in. It was up over like $5.60, I think, at that point in time. I think Q2 is when we'll see those, you know, fuel headwinds. I think in Q1 we'll see a bit of a tailwind. I think you're right in your thinking.
Okay. Okay. Just lastly, I think the, this year's GRI a little bit smaller than last year's. Just any color around that and I know it's early, but how it's sticking so far?
Yeah, let me talk about this. The first calibration, the S we used, just to make sure everybody's on the same page here, we used 5.9% this year. It became effective on Monday, always the first Monday in February. Last year, the number was 7.9%. The one thing that we should say up front is, and I'm gonna make two comments here. The first comment is, we always look at pricing as an overall picture. Part of that big picture is actually fuel surcharge, and we always look at left and right, what do others in our space do as they service their customers, and then we make adjustments.
Late fall, Scott, we did make an adjustment in the fuel surcharge table, that's worth about 2 percentage points. We looked at that, and then we looked at the GRI kind of as a package and said, "We wanna make sure we keep our customers and us in a space where it works for both of us." There's a bit of a and proposition here between the fuel surcharge adjustment in November and the 5.9% that gets us into similar territory as we were last year. Now in terms of how is it playing out, every customer is getting a GRI, and the sales team and the customers did a tremendous job collaborating over the last several weeks about where we can grow with them.
We have more than 200 agreements in place where in some cases, if there's real growth that's substantiated, and we track this on a monthly basis, that customers can kind of save more as they do more with us, meaning there's a mitigation where if someone grows with us in key lanes that are good for them and good for us, by 10% or 15%, then there's a mitigation of that GRI. We always look at GRI in a combination of what's the actual take rate, so that typically is somewhere between 70% and 90%, and that's the mitigation where we gave some of it back for earned growth makes sense. We have those kind of, we call them value exchanges in place. We had them in place last year and this year.
You should expect 200 customers plus that actually have commitments to grow with us because it's good for them and good for us. You should expect a 70% or so take rate, perhaps even more than that, of the GRI. Both of these numbers are fairly common and somewhat consistent with what we saw last year.
Can I just clarify one real quick thing? With the $0.60 fuel headwind, is that including the benefit of changing the surcharge tables, or is that separate?
That would be. Let me just do this real time. This is kind of a net number. We look at it came down, and then we just looked at what it was last year. If we adjusted in, say, for argument's sake, in October, and we got two or three months with a higher fuel surcharge number, the 61 would step down, would include that step down from that higher number.
It's including the benefit of the new surcharge tables. Meaning if you didn't change the surcharge tables, the headwind would've been bigger. Is that what you're saying?
No. If you'd, if you hadn't changed the surcharge table, the headwind would be smaller because the actual fuel surcharge collected was bigger last year because of that adjustment, the step down is bigger now. It may have been but that difference, by the way, just from a math perspective, is a few cents. This would be going from $0.56-$0.61.
I thought you raised the surcharge tables. No. Okay, never mind. Okay.
We did. We did. We collected more fuel surcharge because of it.
Okay, I understand. Okay. Thank you, guys. Appreciate the time.
Okay, thank you.
Next, we'll go to Bascome Majors with Susquehanna. Please go ahead.
Tom, not to go back to mix again, I think it was really illustrative when last spring you shared that investor deck where you kind of let us visualize what the terminals used to look like before some of the changes you made and what they look like now. I think, you know, maybe some of the investor concern around mix and the shipment weights getting a little smaller is that we're going back, you know, a little bit in the way of where we were before. Can you help us understand, you know, if we were to walk the floor today, what does one of your LTL terminals look like?
You know, just visualize the shrinkage and the shipment size and why it's not, you know, a step back in all the hard work that you've done in this very strong environment over the last two years. Thank you.
Thanks, Bascome, for asking. By the way, for those of us, or you that look at our investor relations side and our deck, we just talked about over the last several days, that visual of what our uncleansed terminals looked like before the cleanse and what they look like all palletized today. We probably have to take that picture back in because I think it is a big part of our go forward story of better high-value freight operated in a cleansed environment. The one thing I do want to point out, we're not stepping back. We're actually sticking with this. These terminals look the same as they did after the cleanse today, and they always will.
What unfortunately looks a bit different is if you look at a big shipment that had last year seven or eight high-value treadmills in there, now it has four treadmills in there. We do like high-end consumer goods. They are good freight, but the shipment looks smaller. When you take a visit into any one of our terminals, you will like what you see from a cleanliness perspective. You just would like to see a few more of those boxes, or you would like to see some of these boxes to be bigger.
Understood. Thanks for walking through that. Maybe to cap it off, we've spent a lot of time on the LTL business today for understandable reasons. Can you walk us through some of the assumptions you're making for the intermodal segment, you know, on an organic basis, pre-M&A? How you are modeling that, the trend versus seasonality, and maybe even a little structural reminder of your customer exposures between, you know, the larger asset, you know, using IMCs versus the smaller, pure asset light or non-asset IMCs and, you know, ports and the shipping companies. Thank you.
Yeah. Bascome, on the intermodal drayage side, what you'll see is there's 2 customer segments. Roughly speaking, it's not exactly half, it's probably 60, 40. 60% of our customer base in intermodal drayage are shippers that make or ship the goods that we move on their behalf. The other 40% or so are intermediaries that have the end customer as their customer. We like both of these customers a lot, and we work with them extremely well. We have found that when we get to work with some of the shippers directly, this is really, really good business for them and good for us. We have a growth initiative in place.
I mentioned it when I ran through some of the Forward Force initiatives before, to grow over proportionately with some of those. They're called BCO customers who actually make and ship things directly. You'll see some of that good BCO growth as some of the organic growth. Also, our sales force has been much more focused on organic growth in intermodal. Yes, we grow by those tuck-in acquisitions, but we also need to grow organically. The one thing you should expect this year is the absolute growth rate in top line intermodal year-over-year is moderating. That's not because we're not organically growing. We are, as I just said, specifically BCO business.
What is happening, though, is we do expect some of the accessorials, specifically for storage fees, detention fees, to come down to normalize. Remember, last year, we had the preponderance of the year oversized storage fee, accessorial revenues, and detention fee revenues because we were helping our customers as things were coming onshore, mostly on the West Coast ports, but also on some of the East Coast ports. We helped them holding those goods until they could get moved, and we used our facilities in many cases for that. That is something that will be expect to normalize. When you look at year-over-year growth on the intermodal business, you will see a step down in percentage. That is mostly because of the accessorials normalizing.
From an operating income perspective, in your plan, does expedited freight or the intermodal segment feel more pressure for the full year? Thank you.
Expedited freight does. Difficult on each one of the three participants in that segment. The tonnage slowdown felt in LTL, final mile appliance business is probably not intrinsically growing as much as it did. Truckload brokerage sees the same slowdown that LTL sees. Having said this, just to take final mile as one example, that team has done a phenomenal job adding logos, meeting new customers, and that team has done a phenomenal job winning new markets with existing customers. That winning The Home Depot Appliance Carrier of the Year award clearly helped us becoming the most compelling provider. If you look at those two segments, the expedite freight segment, I think is experiencing, and this is I'm not taking any credit away from Intermodal, but is experiencing a bit more of a headwind.
Thank you for the time.
Okay. Thanks, Bascom.
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Well, perfect. I just wanna say thank you to all of you for listening and participating. I'm be more than willing to follow up on any of the models. We feel very good about what our team is driving on the growth side, but also on the efficiency and effectiveness side. Again, the target is for this year to end up better than last year. In our minds, the initiatives can get us there even with a moderated, or with the headwinds becoming less moderated. Again, we have an acquisition in a model that's already accretive, Chickasaw. We're having one with Land Air Express that's coming on top of the model. I do expect us to have a pretty good shot at an additional couple of attacking acquisitions.
We feel good about how we're gonna finish up 2023 as potentially another record year. Thank you.
Thank you. That does conclude Forward Air's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Please remember that this webcast will be available on the investor relations section of Forward Air's website at www.forwardaircorp.com shortly after this call. You may now disconnect.