Ready? All right, fantastic. We're going to get going with our next session with J.B. Hunt. We've got Darren Field, the President of Intermodal, and Brad Delco from Investor Relations up on stage. Darren, thanks for being back. I'll pass it to you if any sort of opening points you want to make, and then we've got a lot to talk about.
Just, hey, look, we're excited to be back at Wolfe. I don't know how many years in a row this is for me, Scott, but it's been a number of years. I think you do a great job with the conference, and I look forward to the discussion today.
Okay, fantastic. I want to—we always start on sort of the demand and volume side. If I go back to the Q1 call, you talked about 20%-30% of your intermodal volumes originally on the West Coast. Then you said about half of that, half of imports into the West Coast come from China. I think one of the questions has been there's this very well-publicized import cliff into the West Coast. I think the question is, what actually does this mean for the domestic intermodal volumes? There's a difference in international intermodal and domestic intermodal. Obviously, you're in domestic intermodal. We're not seeing this. We don't get your weekly data, but we get Union Pacific's, BNSF, and we're not seeing big drop-offs in their volumes yet.
I guess the question is, is this a year where there's just a natural lag of when it comes into a port and when it shows up in your volumes, or is, for whatever reason, there's this hyper-volatility in ocean, but the intermodal volume is going to be more steady and stable? How do you think about that?
Yeah, sure. I think the hardest thing to do is answer that at a macro kind of simplified way. The reality is, if we have 200, 300 customers on the West Coast that we do business with, we have kind of, we'll call it 25-50 different strategies around the current environment that those customers are operating in. We have customers that have large warehouses for their imports. They may have 4, 8, 12 weeks of inventory in those warehouses. This is not a bonded warehouse. It's just the flow of which their imported cargoes happen to move. For the last, call it five, six weeks, I mean, really nothing has changed with that group of customers. We do not have great visibility from them on what's happening with the imports that they're bringing into those buildings.
They are telling us, "Hey, don't expect anything to change with my volumes." We have seen that largely out of a significant group of customers. We do have customers that have said, "You know what? I'm pausing shipments from China. I have other sourcing in other parts of the world. We're going to bring some inventory in from some different manufacturing location." We do not get down into the SKUs with the customers, so we are not going to typically see, "Does that mean you changed products?" It just means they are going to run volume through the business we do with them through a different method. We have seen a number of customers that have done that. I do not want to act like there are none.
There are customers that we've requested info from who are saying, "Hey, I've paused my shipments, and I'm going to be down with you over the coming weeks." We have customers that I think have really made no change at all. It is really hard to say at this point. We do have all of that same kind of feedback continues into the next days and weeks. I think when we get into July and beyond, it is really hard to tell whether we're early on in the newest change in the China tariffs from a week ago to where we're looking for feedback from our customers. I think we're trying to gather what does that mean for six or eight weeks from today. As we learn more and we're in the right setting, we'll certainly share more about that.
There have been a number of customers that simply had alternatives to purely running imported cargoes straight into their domestic programs early in the cycle and had enough inventory. So that has resulted in pretty steady business for us.
Okay. Just so I understand, what's like when it comes into a port versus when it, in theory, it's been transloaded into a domestic box on a train and shows up in your volume? What's that lag? Is it days, weeks, months?
It's all over the board. We have customers where we actually execute the physical transload for those customers. Some of those have had a reduction in their imports. As an example, it's a really small percentage of our business that we're the transloader for. That's not necessarily what I would call a description of what's happening everywhere. The really large retailers run really significant warehousing operations in Southern California where they're bringing in goods that they are the importer of record. Those are unloading into that warehouse. They're also buying products from vendors who they bought the—they were the importer of record and have their own warehouse. There's an LTL shipment, a full truckload shipment into the same warehouse that we might have delivered an international container to for a really large retailer.
They are going to consolidate down into a specific DC, and they are going to ship that load domestically. That is where the noise inside of the way imports find their way into the domestic supply chain is kind of all over the map. Some of it is done immediately. A vessel arrived. I am going to organize a dray move, bring it to a cross dock. I am going to transload it today. It is in the gate tomorrow, and it is moving on a domestic train. The vast majority of the imports come from some sort of warehouse where the customer may have days, weeks, even months of inventory that has built up before it ships based on the demands of their particular supply chain.
Okay. It sounds like, at least to date, you have not seen a big change in the volume trends, even with this, again, this import cliff. Your volume trends are more stable.
Look, I think more stable than what you've seen from imports. I think there have been puts and takes. There's customers that are down. There are some that are up. There's a whole bunch that are just kind of normal. There is still a little bit of wait and see for us. We are encouraged by our dialogue with the customers, and we are interested to see how the rest of the second quarter and as we get into July and get past some of the noise that has been created from the import 40-foot data that you referenced early on.
Scott, not to cut you off, but I think it's important to remind the audience too, when you go back and look at first quarter, we've been on this sort of theme for a while about pull forward. Just to repeat the number we provided publicly, our Eastern volume growth was 13% in the first quarter, which is really a very small portion of that would be related to imports. Our Mexico volume does count; we count that in our Eastern loads. There is strength in a lot of areas of our network, really related to the value proposition we've talked about, Intermodal versus truck. I think in our first quarter conference season, there were themes about, "Hey, we're batting 1,000 in terms of seeing customers' interest or willingness in converting highway freight to Intermodal." I think that's also important to point out.
That trend has continued, and I think unrelated to anything along the lines of questions you were asking about imports.
That helps. Two follow-ups there. I spent 10 minutes talking about the 20-30% of your volume at the West Coast port. The 70-80% that does not touch the port, is there a reason to think that that is impacted by what is going on, or is that more business as usual?
I mean, certainly our Eastern network, we showed strong trends in the first quarter. A whole lot of those kinds of commodities are food. There are items that are likely not imported. I do not want to suggest that none of it is. I mean, the intact international volumes that flow to markets like Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City do translate into domestic moves at some point in the life cycle before they land in a store or get to their point of sale. There are elements of imported economics that find their way into the Eastern network, but it is just a much smaller percentage of what happens there. There is lots and lots of growth opportunity with commodities that are consumer staples, paper products, things that are made in North America and move here.
Certainly, we've had a lot of good growth opportunity in the East, and we'll certainly plan to continue that.
Maybe just conceptually, in what still feels like a very lackluster trucking market, you would think you need a tight truck market to grow local ease. How is local ease growing 13% right now?
It's been one of the real success stories we feel like over the last year has played out for us in that both of our Eastern rail providers are really doing a great job for us. Norfolk Southern and CSX have been good partners and have delivered a great service product. We've worked together to talk about what we need to do to sustain high service quality for our customers moving forward. Brad highlighted that we've shared for months now that we're batting 1,000 on customers placing a high priority on the conversion of highway business to intermodal in this cycle. It's not new for customers to say they want to do it, but I think in the 2025 bid cycle, there was a lot more attention.
It is really a reflection that coming into the year, I really do believe our customers did not believe truckload capacity and low prices would be sustained. They wanted to lock up capacity today and produce a savings even against a depressed pricing market. Our customers are under really intense cost pressure. Their CFOs are telling them, "Your transportation budget has to be flat to down." When they look at the full calendar year, they are asking themselves, "Is there a way I can save some money today and bank that against my budget for the whole year?" I think that has been an influencer. We have been able to produce a really high-quality service product for those customers, and they have enjoyed some savings against a truckload market that they believe is likely to increase over the course of the year.
That has not happened yet, but it is a wait and see. The year's not even halfway over, so we'll wait and see. We're not giving back that growth to the highway since depressed truckload pricing has sustained. We're keeping that business and continue to find avenues for growing in the East.
Just so I understand what you're trying to say, as a shipper, there's two ways you can get your cost down. You can get lower truckload rates, or you can convert from truck to intermodal. You're saying the last couple of years, it's been easy to get lower truckload rates. Now, maybe shippers feel like we're getting to the end of that, and at some point, it's going to go against us. The better alternative to get lower all-in freight rates is to go to intermodal.
I think customers.
You think that's what's happening?
I think customers are nervous about the balance of the full calendar year and expect that before this year's over, they may have to pay higher truckload rates. That's going to be a bigger percentage of their business. There's more of their business that truckload is probably the correct answer for. How can I begin to bank some savings here and now? Intermodal is one of the quickest, best ways to do that.
How would you—so it sounds like we're having success with volume as bid season is going on. Are we seeing any success with pricing as bid season is going on?
We highlighted that we were mildly satisfied. I think the best way to say that is yes and no. We've had rate increases in the head hauls. We've had lost volume in the head hauls where we believe strongly in the quality of the service product we've offered. We asked for what we believe to be an appropriate price, and the customers chose an alternative. Some of that is probably that same budget conversation where on that business, they were willing to take the risk of what we would believe to be a weaker service opportunity and choose a different provider, or they just really did not care as much about the service that we were offering and did not feel like that value represented itself. There are times when you have to say, "Look, my quality of my product is worth X.
You're not willing to pay X, so we're going to agree to disagree. I know this. In the pricing cycle, our answer can never be no losses. Sometimes we have to experience that in order to understand where the market is. That has been the case at times. We have also achieved a number of customers who have said, "Your service is superior to the alternatives. I want to know that I've got the quality of your program behind my supply chain, and I'll agree to your pricing.
I want to spend a minute here. I feel like I've heard you and others, by the way, talk more about this distinction between head haul lanes and back haul lanes and getting pricing in one, but not in the other. I feel like, unless I'm just not remembering, that this feels like a different way to talk about the market. I guess, is this how the market always works where head haul starts going up before back haul? Or is this a new phenomenon that's just a function of what now is just like an extended down cycle?
I think we're expanding on the cost challenges we face and what those mean to our margin profile. We have highlighted the balance of our network as being one of the challenges we faced. That meant we needed to grow in back hauls in order to fill up empty containers to create a more balanced network. It is also highlighting just the macro pricing environment historically in our business gets a lot of attention. If we come out in Q1, and I think we said our revenue per load except fuel was down 2% or maybe 1%.
Down one. Down one.
Down 1%. Sometimes the investor community is going to say, "Well, you must be reducing rates." If we are just growing faster in the back hauls than we are growing in the head hauls, then that can also influence just the mix of all the traffic. We are trying to talk a little bit more about it so that it is not misunderstood as being just cutting rate for the sake of volume. We want to make sure that we have the opportunity to talk about the how and the why of what we do in order to repair elements in our network.
Should we expect that mixed dynamic to continue where that quoted rev per load stays something negative all year, or do you think that?
I think it just depends on the kind of business that's available to us. As we go through the year, we're certainly looking for continued growth in the Eastern network. That puts a little pressure on the revenue per load. It's shorter length of haul as an example, but that's a good thing for our system and helps us grow and helps us achieve certainly EBIT growth and volume growth. That's how we'll focus on that. We'll reflect more about the mix of our business as we move forward.
Maybe just one more on pricing, because I hear and sense a lot of debate about sort of the outlook for intermodal price. Certainly, you and others have added a lot of boxes to the system, the network, over the last few years. I think some people have a view that this is going to be a limiting factor in getting intermodal price, not just this year, but even beyond. I've had a thought that it's more the limiting factor, and your price is probably more truckload price. Until truckload price really goes up, we don't really know what the limiting factor is. How do you think about it? Does the amount of boxes that you have parked and stacked or whatever, is this going to limit your ability to get price whenever the trucking market really gets price?
Yeah. I share 100%.
Understand what I'm asking?
Understand. I share this with anybody that'll listen, whether it's a customer, whether it's a competitor, whether it's an investor. Nobody in the pricing department even knows how much equipment is in storage. We're not sitting down and saying, "Okay, I've got to achieve X growth because of the containers we've purchased." Now, are we looking at what are all the best ways to utilize that capacity? Can we grow a business in our dedicated business unit where we have leased trailers? Can we utilize some containers in that business as an example of something we're doing with the excess capacity?
I think that when we have a customer, and this does happen, that says, "Hey, I know you bought all those containers, so I'm going to need another 5% rate decrease in order to give you the business." That kind of conversation is not common, but it does happen. To that, it's like, "Absolutely not. We bought the equipment in an effort to be prepared for a time when there's demand." I don't want a customer to believe that our ownership of that equipment somehow means that we just absolutely have to have their business. We need a fair return on the business that we operate. What we are willing to do, and this is why the pricing team doesn't spend too much time on excess equipment, we're pricing business with the mindset of container cost around what it should be normally.
Don't necessarily apply a bunch of excess container equipment ownership cost inside the way you think about pricing. That's a result of having an underutilized business, but it's not part of our pricing discussion. We're going to approach customers with a fair return on costs that might be a more normalized utilization of our equipment without having too much excess.
I kind of liken it to, and maybe stretching here, the market understands our approach to dedicated, right? It does not really matter what is happening in one-way rates. When we design a dedicated deal, we know we have X number of trucks, X number of trailers. As a result, invested X number of assets. We target a return on that capital that we have deployed. What is going on in the market, maybe on the margin, could influence how aggressive we want to be. We have been very consistent with how we have underwritten dedicated deals for a long period of time. In a similar vein, we know how much a container costs, chassis, trucks, what it costs to run our network. We are trying to generate a contribution for every day's usage of that asset. That is really what informs the pricing team.
As long as you keep that sort of same discipline and philosophy around pricing to returns, sure, the market's going to influence that to some degree, and you have to defend the network because it's more of a network business than dedicated. I think that's probably more of the focus internally. We get that question so many times. I don't know how to better answer it. Darren, I know you did a great job answering it. Hopefully, I had another perspective to it because we've always said it. Returns on capital are very important. It's the North Star for Hunt. It still is the North Star. We'd love to have those assets utilized and generating revenue in EBIT dollars for us. They are metal boxes that have no moving part other than the hinges on them, and they can sit idle.
We've quantified what these costs are on an annual basis. Those aren't all cash costs. Just some things to remind the audience, I think it's important.
When I just look at margin, where Q1 was just below 7%, right? It's the lowest in 20 years. Sorry for the reminder. Can we make progress from that level this year, or is that not clear?
I would say we set out this year with the idea of improving our balance. We wanted to grow our business, and we wanted to achieve rate increases. I think we have improved our balance. We are growing our business, so we've achieved two of those. The pricing element of it and the role that that influences on our margin is certainly a little bit of wait and see. I mean, there's some outside, "Hey, look, there is still noise." I highlighted that I feel like our volumes have been steady. There is noise inside the mix of what's happening within our network, and we want to see how that plays out for the rest of the year. Is there an opportunity potentially this year with some sort of a brief uptick in demand for some sort of recovery?
Does that give us a new door to open around a pricing discussion? Possibly. Certainly, we want our customers to be aware. If there is a surge coming, we are going to ask to be compensated for costs we incur in order to accommodate capacity for any kind of a surge. There continues to be a really significant focus on how do we find better balance in our network. There are real projects around cost efforts, whether that is inside our headcounts in the teams that are leading our drivers and our customer teams, our back office support systems. I mean, all of those areas, can we find improvements inside our cost to serve? We are challenging ourselves. Exactly when does that show up? It is a combination of all of it.
Without knowing exactly when we get the right kind of balance in the network or when we can achieve some of these cost savings initiatives, I mean, it would certainly be our goal. We'll have to wait and see how it plays out.
If the Ocean guys are now starting to put in some really big peak season surcharges starting in June, do you think that means that it's inevitable for you guys to get?
I hope so. I would love for a big uptick in demand. That would be great. I just want to highlight the system, kind of the import system appears to have slowed down for, what, four weeks? And four weeks is not that much time to recover from. I do not want to anticipate some massive incline in demand because of a four-week slowdown. That feels like a pretty short period of time to have some sort of really significant sustained uptick.
On the domestic side.
On the domestic side.
I mean, if you're not seeing a big drop in domestic demand.
I'm talking, yeah, I'm talking as it relates to imports and what we've seen there. It just, hey, it matters. You need a really sustained period of time before that's going to result in a big uptick, or you need a big uptick in demand at the same time.
Do you still feel good about long-term 10-12% margin?
I do. I know that we have, we're disappointed. We're more disappointed in our margin than any shareholder. We're frustrated by the extended down cycle in truckload prices. We're frustrated by insurance premiums and claims costs at levels that are just extremely high and a massive burden against our margin while we're delivering record safety performance. There are a number of things that we're frustrated with and focused on. We do feel like insurance is an industry event, and ultimately that has to be overcome with pricing. We know that we have excess capacity. I think our CFO highlighted on the fourth quarter call, we felt like it was about a $60 million annualized cost for us in 2024. The majority of the excess capacity is intermodal. Is excess capacity.
Between insurance and excess capacity, there are some real growth trajectory to get us back into closer to our target margin. When you look at the health of the competition in the industry, it's uninvestable. It does feel like there's an opportunity coming in the future when prices can help us overcome and get back to our range.
We're over time, and I'm going to get yelled at, but I have a couple more I want to do maybe just quickly, very quickly if we can. Rail service.
I mean, 10 years, best it's been. Really, all of our providers are excellent. We're thrilled with where we're at on rail service.
Maybe just a couple for you outside of intermodal. Are we confident about 2Q being the bottom in dedicated truck count?
Yes.
That seems very confident.
We want to be efficient for you.
When do we think ICS gets back to profitability?
As soon as possible.
Okay. Fair enough. And then.
I'd say there's a lot of efforts. I think if you've been paying close attention, we've been doing a really good job on the OpEX side. I think there's opportunities for us to scale gross profit dollars while also making some more improvements on the cost side. We are pretty close in Q1.
Maybe not a fair question if I want a short answer, but to me, it feels like the most commoditized part of your business. At what point do we say it's not worth it and we need to, if we can't make money in here, we need to move on? Maybe this is a better question at some point for Shelley and not for you, but.
There's a lot to that question. I would say when we think about the service offering collectively that we provide to customers, we think it's an important part. We know that we have built and developed very meaningful and very significant relationships with customers that ultimately we were introduced to through ICS, so. Every single business that we have has to generate the right returns and pay their own way. There's no subsidies at J.B. Hunt.
Okay. Darren, Brad, thanks so much. Really appreciate it.