Let's kick off here. So for today's session, we have J.B. Hunt with us. Thrilled to welcome them. And from J.B. Hunt, we have Brad Hicks, who runs their dedicated business, John Kuhlow, CFO, and Brad Delco, who is treasurer, finance, IR.
SVP of Finance.
Wears a lot of hats?
Corporate development.
Yeah.
Corp dev there. And former sell side as well. So welcome. Thank you for joining us. Pleasure to see you guys. Let's start out kind of talking about macro volume environment. I think a lot of folks were a little bit surprised by the first quarter outlook. You indicated operating income likely down 20% to 25% sequentially. I know you said that's in line with normal seasonality, but a lot of folks heard that as implicitly saying the rate environment is not necessarily improving. Do you have any update on that guide? Curious to hear kind of what you're seeing in terms of the broader macro and the broader volume environment.
I'll start, Brad, and I'll let you take over. No update on our guidance. I mean, Ari, and hopefully the audience knows, J.B. Hunt doesn't historically give guidance. We saw there was a little bit of a mismatch between what our expectations were versus what maybe investors or specifically the sell side expectations were, and we kind of had been signaling for most of 2024 that a lot of the rate work that we were doing maybe a year ago at this exact same time would be sort of reflected in the business from third quarter of 2024 until, call it, second quarter of 2025. There really isn't, particularly in intermodal, a material change in just for the general contracts that we operate under between fourth and first quarter.
And so just because it's a new year doesn't necessarily mean we wake up and all of a sudden our pricing changes in our existing contracts. So the messaging was, "Hey, we feel really great about how we've set ourselves up. We're coming off of two consecutive quarters of record intermodal volumes at or near what we're calling an inflection in the cycle," which your kind of question asked or sort of alluded. But what really moves earnings and margins is pricing. And I just will remind the audience, pricing is a lagging indicator in transports, and leading indicators are typically around volume. And so we've seen good trends there. Obviously, we're in bid-season for 2025 now. We don't have an update as of yet. It's still a little bit too early.
But as we get later into mid-season and talk about our more meaningful contracts in terms of size, kind of in that March, April, May, we'll have updates at a later point in terms of how the contract negotiations are going for rate, which will then influence or impact our business Q3 of 2025 into, call it, first and second quarter of 2026. So nothing really changes overnight from December 31st to January 1, and we just felt like we should have appropriately reset the expectations that maybe were out there for us. But I would be encouraged by normal seasonality. I mean, we're just expecting, despite two really strong quarters of volumes, that we expect normal sequential trends from 4Q to 1Q.
Okay. And so with the recognition that.
No, I was just going to say, given the environment that we've been in for the last 30 months, just hearing some things labeled as normal is encouraging, so.
Yeah. So actually, that's a great lead-in to what I wanted to ask next, which is, how are you thinking about, with the understanding that a lot of this is unknown, how are you thinking about the prospects for truckload to inflect in 2025? Because I think that's going to lead a lot of other things, whether it's the intermodal business or other parts of the business. How are you thinking about broadly for the truckload market to inflect after about 30 months of weakness?
I'll start on this one. Maybe you can clean me up, but first off, Ari, thanks for having us. We appreciate the time this morning and the audience for participating. One of the things that we've really been focused on, and some of you may have heard our CEO, Shelley Simpson, mention, is that we've been intent on operational excellence, and so you hear Brad talk about record intermodal volumes in Q3 and Q4. We've been really hyper-focused on operational excellence. How can we be at the top of our customer scorecard? How can we be number one for them and create value that can perhaps differentiate us against the common truckload space or the other IMCs or the other dedicated providers or whatever alternatives they have and feel like we've done a really good job focusing on that?
And so I do think that that's a reflective element of some of the success that we've seen over the last several quarters, and we look to carry that momentum in. Now, back to what we think on the truckload space, I certainly believe that there will be an inflection. Don't know to the degree and don't know exactly when. It's been, as John mentioned, 30+ months. I think it can go as high as 33 or 34, depending on when some kind of pick that moment in time. And we think about the inflationary cost and the pressures that truckers have been under the last several years, whether that's been labor, whether it's been equipment. Certainly, insurance is one that we've all, as an industry, have been dealing with.
I know for us, on the premium side, we've seen our premiums go up 40% three years ago, 50% last year, 30% this year. And so do that quick math. That's unsustainable when rates are actually depressed and down. And so every trucker feels that. You can see that in all trucking industry earnings. And so something has to give there, right? As Brad mentioned, it's pretty early in bid season. We talk about bids being kind of a third, a third, and a third, but that doesn't mean that they're all equal in terms of size shipper. And so some of the bigger volume shippers we've yet to see are just in-house now, and so we really don't have a good read there.
It would be my expectation that rates are going to move up throughout the bid season, probably more towards the end than they will at the earlier juncture. I think several of our customers continue to signal that to us. They're planning for that. They believe that the truckload rates will go up. Most of them say mid single digits. That can range anywhere from three to eight, I would say, depending on feedback we've received. I think as an industry, we need more than that. I don't think we're going to be able to get it all back in one bid season. I think it might take a couple of cycles to kind of inch forward through this one and then take another step, perhaps, in the following year. I don't know if you want to add anything.
Yeah, the only caveat, not to pour water on Brad's prediction or anyone's prediction, our customers a year ago were also telling us that they were planning for.
That's fair.
Increases, so just to level set the expectation, it's a good data point. I mean, Ari, you look at the data. Everyone looks at the same data. The one thing I feel confident saying is that we do feel like if we're not at, we're pretty close to equilibrium, and every day that goes by, we're going to get closer to whatever that sort of equilibrium status is because certainly it's been a difficult environment for truckers to run with where rates are relative to where costs have been, and so it's not sustainable. That's been our messaging.
Probably more for 12 months.
But the longer this goes, I think the more meaningful or severe the inflection will be at whatever point in time that happens.
I will offer one data point that I think is a positive. Many of our customers this year have talked with us about mode conversion to intermodal. I think that makes sense for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons that they're signaling that is that they're trying to find any savings they can get in the first part of the year because they have high confidence that they're likely or there's potential for them to miss their budgets and their plans later in the year.
And so in an effort to try and get ahead of that, if you can convert some freight here in the first part of the year and generate those savings, kind of go in the cupboard for a future date where they're anticipating that there could be a miss later, I think that's another good affirmation that our customers believe that some things are going to have to shift.
Brad, you mentioned the market coming more into equilibrium at the same time as you kind of rightly noted. A lot of people were sounding a similar tone last year. What do you think it was last year that really held back the market from improving? Was it just the capacity, or was it demand coming in softer, and what's different now?
I would say a little bit of both, but I think that we did have too much capacity. It didn't exit at the pace and rate that we would have all liked to have seen, or at least those that are still here today. I do think that there's been a little softer demand throughout the year in some pockets, not all customers, not all industries or sectors, but there has been some softening on our customer side. So the combination of two, I think we're in a healthier place today. I think there was a revision on some publicly available data that puts it a lot closer to equilibrium today. Imagine that, another downward adjustment on a government report. But I don't know if that was appropriate or not, but we've been looking at that data, believing that, wow, how can there still be so much excess?
They do a revision, and it gets a lot closer to what equilibrium looks like.
I'd say too, I mean, Ari, another data point that we were sharing with investors throughout 2024 was how we were seeing improvements in bid compliance from our customers. And so think through, hey, earlier in the year, a customer said, "We're going to give you," I'm making this up, "but 100 loads in this lane." And we were seeing bid compliance levels in the 60s or maybe low 70s. And as the year progressed, we started talking about seeing bid compliance in the mid to upper 80s and in some instances even in the lower 90s.
So that's also something that I think has changed in the last 12 months to say, "Hey, when we're going through these bids and a customer is telling us, 'Hey, we need capacity for X number of loads in this lane,' it does create opportunities for us to be more efficient in terms of going out and winning the right freight because we also have greater confidence now when a customer tells us, 'This is the capacity we need.'
This is actually going to be the capacity at least very close to what they're going to need," as opposed to four out of the last six years going back even through some of the crazy times of the pandemic, bid compliance rates were all over the place, and it was really hard to drive efficiencies in network businesses when you didn't really fully understand or comprehend what you were going to get when you won a bid.
Fair hits?
Yeah. Absolutely.
So Brad, you mentioned service a moment ago. I think a lot of people maybe cynically see the trucking business as commoditized. And yet J.B. Hunt often talks about service. Help us understand how service flows through into your relationship with the customers and particularly, especially in a circumstance where J.B. Hunt takes on an extra cost to provide superior service. How does that come back to J.B. Hunt?
Yeah, I think we have long focused on creating value for our customers. And to the extent that we can find ways to be more effective, be more efficient on their behalf, look for new strategies. And really, when you think about the J.B. Hunt organization, we have five businesses that do a variety of things. And sometimes we can leverage one business with another to create an efficiency, for example, in dedicated and intermodal. Perhaps we're providing dedicated services for a shipper, and they have intermodal inbound. And how can we integrate those two services to create efficiencies rather than the dedicated trucks are going here and the intermodal dray fleets doing their thing? And to the extent we can do those types of things, we can create value. There's a tremendous amount of asset sharing among our organization.
And anytime a customer has a day-a-week blip and we can bring in and source capacity at a fair rate, not an open market rate, those things can create value. I think for me, service first and foremost, we want to be number one on our customer scorecards. And when we do that, we put ourselves in a favorable position for a variety of things. One is as it relates to bids. We can get early discussions about locking out the freight that's most valuable to our networks. We can get last looks in the bid process. We can get the first call when they have something that randomly pops up because they have confidence in our ability to execute on their behalf.
The investments we've made as an organization, we've talked about this openly, but we're carrying excess equipment both in our intermodal division as well as our JBT segment. That affords our customer great flexibility right now in this environment. So what can we do? We want to be that first call when they have something unique and different. We want to be that first call when they're in trouble in a certain market or out of a distribution center. And I think that we've proven time and time again over a long period of time that we can be that carrier of choice, that we've earned the right to be in that number one spot. That doesn't always necessarily mean we're going to get more rate than anybody else. There's times when that is the case, and some customers put a premium on that level of service.
And the way that they'll kind of reflect that and how they evaluate your bids can give you a little extra. We've long talked about being a premium provider and dedicated. That doesn't mean we're always the cheapest, but over the life of those deals, we're able to demonstrate value creation for our customers and save them money really by driving efficiency more so than doing it through the rate componentry. And I really feel like those are things that are unique to J.B. Hunt. I think we have a strong culture around quality and customer value delivery, which is our kind of internal proprietary program on how we hold ourselves accountable for continuous improvement with our customers. And we have a really high retention rate in dedicated, for example.
And that doesn't happen if we're not honoring the promises that we've made and the commitments we've made to our customers. So I think those are the things that we think about, spend a lot of time with our internal teams and our operations teams and our customer support teams, making sure that they understand the importance of that each and every day. And I think it does reflect itself in us being a leader in many of the businesses that we're in today. We aspire to be leaders in some of the other businesses that we're in today. And I think that you don't get to be the biggest just because you set out to be. You get to be the biggest because you're really good at what you do. And I think that's a great reflection of all of our 33,000 employees in our organization.
So one of your peers gave an outlook on the dedicated side for revenue per truck per week to be up 0% to 3% this year for full year 2025. I'm curious, I know you guys don't provide guides in the same way, but how do you think about that number? It feels conservative relative to kind of the prospect of an improving truckload market. Is there the prospect to see a little bit more than that from J.B. Hunt?
I think for us, I can't speak to what numbers they gave or what they got last year or the year before. We've worked really hard in our agreements to have index-based pricing. And so those typically are governed by a few different indices and some percentage relationship between this particular index and this particular index. And that's kind of the starting point in most instances for our rate need and our rate discussion. And I think the benefit there is I'd like to say that we're not necessarily in an environment where we need a ton more than what that affords as long as we've been successful at getting those the last several years. If you're looking at it through the lens where maybe you haven't gotten rate in one or two years, then I would probably suggest that, yeah, you need to have more than 0 to 3.
But if I've been able to successfully work with our customers and get two to three each of the past two years, then maybe two to three this year is going to be suitable. We still have pressure on insurance costs that was referenced earlier. That's been an abnormal inflationary cost. I mean, it's hyperinflation, I guess you would probably call it in that particular category. We know a few years from now, there's some new emission standards that will likely drive the cost of a new vehicle up pretty significantly. And those are all things that we're going to try and get in front of with our customers. I think what's unique in our approach to dedicated, which I can't speak for anybody else's, is that we're going to sit down with the customer and talk about the realities of those things.
Most of them were private fleet managers and owners at some point in time. That's what our number one focus is on private fleet conversion, and when they operated a fleet, they had to deal with inflationary equipment costs and insurance costs and labor costs, and so in most instances, it's a very logical business conversation. We use data. We have the backdrop of the indexes, and that can drive. Sometimes we need a little bit more. There were times a few years ago with what was going on with labor, the historical indexes weren't quite getting the job done, so you sit down and talk to your customer about what we need to do to be successful on their behalf, and they really treat us like we are their private fleet at that point, and so in most instances, we work through that together, and sometimes you delay.
Sometimes you pull forward. Sometimes the index is going to kick in in June, but we have some needs earlier, and we'll go talk to them, and they'll allow that. Sometimes they come to us and say, "We're a little bit in the hurt locker right now. Can we push that off four months," and we're going to be really smart and be just a good partner. And I think that speaks to our renewal rate and our retention rate, and I've been with J.B. Hunt 29 years, and believe it or not, we have some dedicated accounts that have been here the entire time. We didn't sign a 29-year contract when we did that. We signed probably back then, it was a two-year contract, and we've renewed that business probably 10x to 14x in that career.
And so that doesn't happen if we don't work closely together and be smart about where we're at.
Yeah. Ari, the one thing I would ask or like to add to that, just sort of disconnecting the idea that what is happening in the market is really largely influencing how we price deals in Dedicated.
As I was hearing Brad, as I was hearing you talk, I was like, "How do we explain it in a way that maybe lets people understand and appreciate just sort of the contractual nature of our, call it, I think, on average, five-year contracts we enter into, which is truly more of a private fleet replacement that isn't necessarily." I mean, the market can dictate an executive team-making decision to say, "Hey, instead of me running these trucks or me using my capital to run these trucks or me using our teams to try to go out and recruit and retain drivers or train drivers or mechanics to keep this equipment up," what's the easy button is, in our opinion, J.B. Hunt. But let's not think about dedicated as the pricing being influenced by the market.
Think of dedicated as, if I can, going out and making an acquisition. We are literally going out and acquiring assets, acquiring equipment, acquiring maybe even our customer's equipment, and running that on their behalf. And so that process is really, "Hey, what are the assets? What's the amount of capital that will be required in order for us to service that customer in a way that our engineers have designed?" It goes into our model, and we underwrite every single one of these deals to an ROIC target. And so built into that is the indexes that Brad referenced, which historically has been linked, we said publicly, to ECI or CPI.
We don't wake up every year wanting to say, "Well, can we get more rate or less rate based upon the market?" I mean, all that has been decided, sort of call it the time of the acquisition of that customer. Maybe that's a better way for us to be talking about it and thinking about it, but it's not an annual jump ball. It's not a, "Oh, we can get more rate this year because the market's stronger. We're going to get less rate this year because the market's softer." All that decision is made upfront when a customer decides, "Hey, we're going to outsource and use the easy button and let J.B. Hunt manage our private fleet for us on our behalf,"
So not just on the dedicated side, but kind of throughout the business, how should we think about what is that process for balancing volume against price? And what is that internal discussion? I know it sounds like you're underwriting to an ROI target, but obviously in a softer market, it becomes a little harder to push price. At what point do you say, "Okay, maybe we make some concessions here on price this year because we think we're going to get it back next year"? Just talk about how kind of we should think about that internal process of negotiating volume against price and the importance of kind of network balance within that, just making sure that your assets are deployed.
Well, I mean, you're right. I mean, there's always an internal debate as to, "Hey, do we need volume? Do we need price?" And there's never one answer. I mean, it depends on, I don't know how many origin-destination pairs we run in intermodal, but it's a lot. And in some lanes, we need more price. In some lanes, we need more volume. And so when I mentioned it yesterday, I mentioned it again today. I think that our strategy and approach to intermodal businesses, and Brad, maybe I'll let you talk to Highway, but our approaches to intermodal is three-pronged, right? First and foremost, our CEO or our CFO, on our last earnings call talked about, "Hey, we're focused on repairing our margins and our returns on capital." I mean, we're 30-plus months into this freight recession. We've been in a deflationary pricing environment, inflationary cost environment.
I mentioned we've lost, as an industry, not specific to Hunt, mid-teens of pricing in 24 months. And yeah, our intermodal margins have deteriorated about 400 basis points. And so how do you do that? We just mentioned we're coming off of record volumes the last two quarters. As a matter of fact, record volumes for the year in 2024. And on our last earnings call, we said we have 12% fewer people at our company than where we were at our peak. And so a lot of that's just operational excellence, as Brad mentioned, and being very disciplined around our discretionary cost. But we've been very intentionally focused, obviously this effort being led by John, on not sacrificing the investments that are going to allow us to compound our earnings and maximize our future earnings power potential. And so we've been very thoughtful about how we've been invested.
So as we approach this bid season, first and foremost, to get back to or to repair our margins, pricing is most important. That's the easiest and fastest way to repair margins and to improve returns. That is largely going to be dictated by what value we've created for our customers with our service and what the market will bear from a pricing perspective. And so admittedly, some of that is out of our control and will be dictated by the market. But number two, and I think this is an important element to really get the hands around, is we are imbalanced in terms of how freight is flowing in the network. And so we can be now with better bid compliance, surgical in these bids to say, "Hey, let's get more freight going west.
Let's get more freight going in this direction." And by creating better balance, we eliminate the movement of empty containers to get to a head haul market to go get a load. And so driving out that waste will be very beneficial to efficiencies and drive out costs in our network and can help repair margins. And then number three, I think, is volume. Volume is important. We've talked about, or Darren has talked about many times, Darren Field, our President of Intermodal, volume is more important to us today than ever before. And it's because we do have underutilized assets and capacity. And I think we've seen that play out last year as an example. We did see, and we talked about literally a year ago, there being challenges in the bid season, and we would see downward pressure in price.
When that typically shows up is this transition from our second quarter to third quarter. Third quarter is kind of when, "Hey, we've just finished bids. All the new pricing is now embedded in our performance as we report publicly in Q3." We actually saw our intermodal volumes or intermodal margins improve Q2 to Q3 despite what I would say was downward pressure in rate, largely because our volumes improved 10% sequentially. Just adding that as, "Hey, here's evidence that volume does matter more to us today than before." I think we've done a really good job of combating a lot of our costs and pricing pressure with balancing that question you've had about, "Hey, how do you do price? How do you do volume?" We don't necessarily have the magic formula.
If Darren was here, he'd tell you as to how we're really approaching all these bids, but I know we want price. We want to make sure we're very disciplined on what we win and what we really need to win in order to drive out waste, and then certainly we want to grow every year. We're a growth company, so Brad, I'll let you hit Highway.
Honestly, it's really mostly a carbon copy there. We definitely are pushing rate where we can with the intentionality around our network and understanding the type of freight and the freight in lanes that will allow us for greater efficiency because there is tremendous waste when we have imbalance, and honestly, in the truckload space, it can be there's even more exponential number of OD pairs that we're trying to keep balance on.
That was very difficult when we had compliance levels that were 65% and 70%. We really want to match your inbounds with your outbounds, right? It's not that difficult to understand. Doing that's a lot harder when, "Okay, here's the outbound shipper that we win 100 loads with, and we get an inbound shipper coming from some other origin on 100 inbound loads. One of them is at 90% compliant. The other is at 62%. Well, now I'm in balance by whatever that gap is." We work really hard throughout the year to fill and mitigate that. It is an iterative process throughout the year managing and balancing your network. You do get a great opportunity in bid season to really give yourself the foundation of your network and make sure you can clean it up and so r eally good focus there.
I want to say too, I mentioned a couple of times operational excellence and service that we touched on. Maybe that doesn't always translate into giving us some premium in rate, but we do believe that it gets us a better seat at the table to be able to work with our customers on the freight that will best fit our network that can then kind of kick back to them in terms of value, in terms of what our cost can be. Customers seem really open to those discussions as long as we're performing on their behalf. They're open to hear what our needs are and how they can help create our balance that creates efficiency.
Because a lot of times it's those same customers that are going to win because anytime we have imbalance, it can create disruptions in terms of where our equipment is, and it's not the right place, and we don't have capacity for when we have those imbalances, and so everybody wins if we can work together and get balance.
I'm not sure I heard exactly correctly. Did you say the network is in balance or imbalanced?
In balance.
It's currently in balance. Okay. So that's a good thing.
Imbalanced. I am imbalanced.
Oh, imbalanced. Okay. Fair. Fair.
Let's talk about.
Not imbalanced.
Yeah.
Well, Brad mentioned it. If you just look, we had probably a record number of intermodal containers that we shipped empty last year. And that's really representative of having too much freight coming out of a market and not enough going in. And so what can we do to work with our customers and the bids that we see to try and mitigate that? And it's probably not going to ever be perfect one for one, but can we get it a lot closer? Can it be within a 5% variance in the worst market as opposed to a 20% variance in the worst market? And so those are the things that we're focused on.
Got it. So let's talk about the path to get back to the long-term margin targets. 10% to 12% in intermodal, 12% to 14% in dedicated, 4% to 6% in ICS. I could go on. How do you think about the timeline and the prospects to get back there? Because I think that obviously provides a pretty significant uplift to the earnings potential if you can get there. Is it a matter of self-help cost initiatives, or is it more a matter of rate? I imagine rate obviously figures prominently in that.
You want to start with that one, John?
Yeah, sure. I think it really comes down to what Brad and Brad have talked about and our approach going into 2025. And it is going to take rate. It's going to take volume, and we need to get things balanced. As far as the timing, we haven't said specifically. We still are holding to the margin targets that we've established. We feel like that's the level of return that we need for the investments that we make. And we feel like we have been within those ranges, and that's what's informed us to set those targets. And so that's still our long-term target guidance. It's going to take a little bit of time to get there. As Brad mentioned, we've seen mid-double digit or 15% to 16% rate reductions over the last two years.
And it's going to take some time to get back to where we can get those rates and coupled with the cost inflation. We, as a company, have kind of held back on talking about and reemphasizing all the work that we've been doing around cost control because we feel like that is just something that a good corporation should do. And the presumption is, well, does that mean that there was ever a period of lack of discipline or cost control? And so, but there has been a tremendous amount of work on focusing on our costs. And I feel like we have been in a good spot with that. And now we just need to grow, and we need to get price for the work that we've been doing.
Got it.
I think there's evidence of that across, I mean, our businesses. Just to add to that, I mean, our intermodal margins are the best in the industry. So I think we've outperformed the industry in terms of our volume performance. I don't know that there's another carrier that is at record volumes. And we've been outperforming the market with industry-leading margins. So industry-leading growth, industry-leading margins. That's typically two good things to say about the same company because usually in order to achieve industry-leading growth, you have to maybe sacrifice margin in order to fund the investment needed to support that growth, or maybe you're using price to support that growth.
And so we're not pleased with our performance from a margin perspective at intermodal, but we also want to recognize, hey, in light of the mid-teens pricing headwinds and the inflationary cost pressures, let's recognize that we've seen about 400 basis points of margin erosion. And part of that is because of, hey, we wake up every day focused on operational excellence, drive out waste, and be more productive and more efficient. And so I think the team has done a good job. I would say if you look at Brad's dedicated business, we're running double-digit EBIT margins. And these are GAAP numbers. We're not putting reconciliations in the back of our earnings releases that exclude fuel surcharge revenue. And so same for intermodal.
I think when we compare margins across the industry and compare them in the same manner, we're sitting here beating ourselves up about our margin performance, and it's industry-leading in our two biggest segments. Then I need to mention Final Mile. I mean, Final Mile is our big and bulky business where we're delivering appliances, exercise equipment, furniture into the homes. We do other work, LTL brokerage in that segment as well, as well as some pool distribution for some of the discount retailers. But most of those end markets are under extreme pressure. I mean, furniture, appliances, anything housing related, and they just put up their largest operating income year in their history. We have some good news to share. Obviously, we're very hard on ourselves as well. We expect a lot out of us, the operational excellence that we've referenced many a time.
And we've told you that the focus is, hey, we have to repair our margins, and we do provide a great value and service for our customers. And so that's the focus this year, and we'll just see how the market will respond when we try to make sure we're getting as much value as we can for our shareholders.
If I could just add one thing there that I think is interesting. We've said this on the calls. We know that we have dormant or excess intermodal container capacity. We have dormant trailing fleet and JBT. What's interesting to me is just a few short years ago in the height of the pandemic, when anybody wanted to be able to add that extra capacity, you really couldn't. And we take a long-term approach in the short term. Yeah, that's a headwind for us, and it's putting downward pressure on the margins that we just spoke to. But those are 25+ year assets that we're buying. And likely, if things get kind of going and blowing again, the ability to really radically increase your fleet in a short window of time is going to be challenging. And so maybe we're in a favorable position as a result of that.
We have the ability to grow with our customers throughout this year, throughout next year. We already have the capacity. It's a sunk cost to us, so to speak. And so if we start utilizing that capacity, it really can have a high-velocity impact on what our margin improvements can be. And so I think it's important not to lose sight of that because we do sit here in a pretty favorable position. We're a healthy organization. We have industry-leading margins as it is. To Brad's point, we do beat ourselves up. We're super competitive, and we want to get back inside those target ranges as fast as possible. But we're ready to grow with our customers. And I think that's the message here is that we're prepared. We have the people. We protected our people through the downturn. We didn't do any layoffs.
We think that the advantage there is that we still have all that experience ready to go to work on behalf of our customers. We have the equipment to do it. We have the people. And so here we are, and we're hoping for better times ahead.
One of the things that I think has been really impressive looking at J.B. Hunt for some time is the ability to compound earnings through the cycle. Maybe you could talk about that as a characteristic of the business. And also specifically, you have these targets. I believe it's adding 800 trucks to 1,000 trucks per year and dedicated o n the intermodal side, I think there's this target to reach 150,000 containers. Just talk about kind of the timeline to reach those targets and more specifically that culture that enables that kind of compounded growth through cycles.
How do you feel about kind of the prospect to continue to do that?
Yeah. No, I'll start with Dedicated and maybe flip it to Brad or John for Intermodal. What we signaled in our Q4 earnings is that we believe that we're built right now to net add 800 tractors to 1,000 tractors a year. However, we had also signaled that we had some known and foreseen losses that would mute that for the first half of the year, and so we strongly believe that starting in Q3, we'll be back on track. We did have abnormal high losses for our Dedicated business inside of 2024. That's carried into the first part of 2025, really under the guise of organic loss where our customer's business was just a little bit down, so we had downsizing at existing accounts. We still have the business today. We still service the heck out of that business. We still have a long-term agreement.
It's a 17-truck fleet today where it used to be 20. We're optimistic at some point in the cycle that that'll rebound, and those 17 will go back to 20, and that'll be a great kind of bonus lift for us. We sold 1,500-plus tractors in last year's environment. And so we had a healthy sales year. If we can replicate that, our targets are more in the 1,000 to 1,200 on the gross side to net 800 to 1,000 on the net side. And so once we get past this known loss position, we feel like we'll get right back on track, and that'll create a nice wave for us going into 2026. Historically, our retention rates in dedicated have been 98% or better. They dipped all the way down, I think, 87 or 88 in the third quarter of last year.
It rebounded to 90 in the fourth quarter. So we're already marching out of that. And once we get back, and I think just over 30 years, the two times that it's not been in that upper 90s was really in the 2008, 2009 window of a true recession, and then the last two years in the freight recession that we've experienced. So high optimism on what our pipelines look like, our investments in sales. Our average fleet size is 18 trucks. So it's not that we just get lucky by selling 500-truck deals. We don't sell very many of those types. It's all about grassroots work, finding private fleets, creating value through our process to demonstrate that we're the right partner for them to outsource and that they can trust us. And we got to go do that a bunch of times and sell 1,500 trucks.
But we've done that several years consecutively and have high confidence we can do it again.
I know I got 37 seconds, so I'll try to wrap us up here. But the question is, how do we build a business that has higher highs and higher lows? And I think the management team at J.B. Hunt and the culture, it's always been very long-term focused. If you look, and I'll just share, hopefully some eyeballs pop out in the audience when they hear this. But if you look at our Section 16 officers at J.B. Hunt, they've been at J.B. Hunt collectively for 380 years. And so how do you have that sort of tenure and experience of professionals? And that's just not at that level. If you go at SVP, VP level throughout the organization, we have great people, great tenure, great talent. And they're always thinking about how do we build and compound and grow our business over the long term.
If you keep that mindset, I think that's how you build a business that's set up to have higher highs and higher lows through these cycles.
And so feeling confident about being able to continue to do that as we look forward to the next cycle.
Yeah, I think Hunt has historically zagged when the industry has zagged. And we sit here today, and man, we've been investing a lot during this downturn, and it's been painful, and we've talked about how it's put pressure on margins. But there'll be a different part of the cycle, and I think there's a lot of things that will shine through in terms of all the work that's been done during this downturn. And then we'll look back maybe hopefully next year at your conference, and we'll say, "Remember when we talked about that?" So I think that's what's a little bit of the secret sauce. There's a book that references the Purple Cow.
If you haven't read it, maybe read it and get a better understanding of the culture at J.B. Hunt and why I think we've been able to prove over time that invest and keep your eyes out long into the future and how to create value for your customers and do the basics, and good things come. Good things happen.
Great. Well, John, did you have?
No, Brad said it great. I think that, as he mentioned, we're long-term focused. We always have been. That has informed us for what we've talked about and the investments that we've made. And some of those investments have put pressure on our margins, but as we've mentioned, still industry-leading margins. And so we're really happy with the investments that we're making, and we just need to grow.
All right, great. So we're at time, but definitely a very interesting kind of run through the business, and we're excited to see what happens here when the cycle inflects a little bit and see what you guys can do with that. And as Brad mentioned, hopefully a year from now, we're talking about how impressive the results have been as the cycle has inflected. So thank you both.
Thank you for hosting.
Thank you, Ari.
Thank you, Ari. Really appreciate it.
Thank you all.
All right.