This is Justin Long with Stephens. We'll go ahead and get started with our next fireside chat with J.B. Hunt. Very excited to have them attending our Nashville conference again this year. Representing the company sitting next to me on stage is Shelley Simpson, President; John Kuhlow, CFO; David Kefauver, EVP of Dedicated Contract Services; and Brad Delco, who's SVP of Finance. As a reminder, this will be a fireside chat format, so I'll ask some questions but also open it up to the audience if there are any questions from the crowd as well. I will try to repeat the question when there is one just so the webcast can hear it as well. With that, Shelley, I'll turn the mic to you, and I would love to just get a general update on the business now that we're halfway through the quarter.
We've got peak season, so maybe you can just start with a state of J.B. Hunt, and then we'll get into some of the questions.
Okay. Thank you, Justin. I appreciate you having us, and also to Stephens for hosting us for today. We talked about on the earnings call that we were experiencing record volumes in intermodal, and as of the time of that call, continued to experience record volumes in intermodal through the call in October. I would say we are experiencing a continued update from our customers as to what 2024 is going to look like. Feel comfortable with our position inside. They're very focused on our long-term with customers, really trying to create more value for our customers today so that we can have a conversation with them around some of the cost and inflation challenges that we've had.
I think you heard Darren talk about that on our call overall, just making sure that we execute on business that our customers expect us to do, and that allows us to set up for 2024 to have a good conversation with customers.
Okay. Great. I think one of the comments you've made is we've started to come out of a freight recession. I don't think there's anything to get too excited about yet, but you've seen some sequential improvements. I'm just curious if you're continuing to see signs of that sequential improvement materialize.
Yeah. I would say maybe let me back up just a bit because I think it'll give a little more color. I'm hoping that we don't sneeze today, Justin. If I think about what's happened in August, our customers were telling us maybe a muted peak, not totally sure. Darren Field, our head of intermodal, was at a conference and said, "Not planning on a big peak. Our stock took a change on that day." We went into the month of September, towards the end of September, I actually attended a conference, and it was at that very point we were experiencing record intermodal volumes. Our customers, I think, were somewhat surprised by the level of volume and activity that they had, and we knew what the forecast looked like here coming into it. I've talked about intermodal being the very start of the North American supply chain.
Typically, you'll see coming out of a freight recession, begin inside that space, and then move over as a period in time. I think at the time we released earnings, and we knew we were taking share. I don't think we understood the magnitude of the share we were taking. I think we made assumptions that the same peak that we were experiencing, that other providers were experiencing it. I think that's why the market reacted the way that it did because we were an unusual story. We really didn't know how unusual we were until we saw everyone else make announcements. I think that just further solidifies for us that we've been head down with our customers, focused on what we can control, and one of the things we control is making sure we execute on impeccable service.
The thing I think if I look back what happened with us in peak and with our customers, for the scale and how fast we moved with our customers, so many people are saying to us, "Well, the rails do not have volume, and so service is going to be better." It was a great challenge in peak for the level of volumes our customers really moved and the locations that it moved at. I will tell you the railroads in particular, BNSF, in lockstep with us in being able to serve our customers. We really did that pretty flawlessly overall. I think it challenged the system, and I think we really rose to that occasion. I think our customers saw that.
Our year this year has been very focused on making sure we prove it to our customers that intermodal is a great long-term, viable, sustainable answer to their supply chain and creating resiliency in their supply chain. I think we proved that in the third quarter, and that has us focused on finishing out the year strong and helping our customers think about what 2024 will look like.
Okay. So it sounds like the underlying market you would maybe describe as a muted peak, but you're taking share in the market. Is that fair?
I can speak for J.B. Hunt. For us in intermodal, we've been pleased with our peak and just performance with our customers, the reaction we're getting from our customers. That certainly hasn't translated into the truckload part of our business, not dedicated, just the truckload part of our business as much, but it also is the part of the business that's been impacted the most in total.
Okay. When I think about this year, to your point, there's been somewhat of a step function change in terms of how your business is performing in intermodal relative to your competitors, the market share opportunity. Do you think there's an opportunity for another step function change as we move into 2024? There's a lot of discussion about what's happening with BNSF, and it might be good for you to frame up what's already benefited the business versus what's to come.
I think it's a really great opportunity in intermodal in general across all of the three major railroads that we do business with. If I look at BNSF, Norfolk Southern, and CSX, all three of those Class I railroads have commercial leaders or customer-oriented leaders. I've served on our executive team for the last 16 years. I'm not sure that I've ever seen three major railroads have a customer focus. I think moving away from some of the way PSR impacted our customers, which were lane shutdowns, and really having to mold to what the railroads were doing versus listening to customers and determining what schedules and what service we can provide and then getting a sustainable return, I think that has changed. I see all three of the railroads really leaning in to listen to what customers are wanting.
I think they know that we lead in that in the marketplace. We talk to the customers on behalf of the railroads, and we have those pricing discussions and volume discussions and commitment discussions. I think they've seen over the pandemic that we've been able to really deliver on what we've said overall. I have a lot of confidence, particularly with the BNSF. Our conversations with them are much more strategic. I think the greatest change that we've had with the BN really is there's really no channel conflict now, Justin. We had for years thought about things that we could do that would make it a better experience for our customers, but it was very difficult to implement if you're a railroad and having to manage several channels because everybody has to agree and then go to market in the same way.
Really, when we made the announcement at the BNSF in March of 2022 that we were both investing and we were going to grow intermodal containers to 150,000 over the next three to five years, that really was a testament to our strength together, our partnership, and really our focus on our end customer, how we believe we can take freight off the highway and move it into more sustainable transportation. Our conversations, our strategic planning, we're on year two of doing strategic planning with their entire executive team and our entire executive team for full-day sessions focused on one key objective, which is what our customers want and can we deliver what they're asking for differently than what we have in the past. I think you've seen services like Quantum come out of that, our new service and expansion into Mexico.
We have lots of ideas on the table that now becomes much simpler to have a conversation about because it is really the BNSF and J.B. Hunt talking about how we go to market together. I think that for me is such a renewed focus. It gives me a lot of confidence about our future in taking freight off the highway. Even on the Eastern Network, I think that both CSX and NS really want to lean into customers. I think you see that by their leaders. I think they are working on what steps that they need to take to make sure and ensure as freight starts to come back that intermodal is a good growth channel, but also our customers have a great experience through that process.
Okay. Great. Maybe I'll ask a question for David and John and then turn it over to the audience. David, when I think about the dedicated business, it's been a source of resiliency through this freight down cycle, but we're also hearing about a little bit more competition out there, and there are things about your dedicated business that are unique versus others. Could you just talk about the competitive environment you're seeing and your ability to navigate that and still deliver on the growth targets and margin targets that you've outlined?
Sure. Yeah. I think we certainly have been very pleased with the resiliency that we've had. I think one thing that's unique about our business is that there's different types of dedicated, and there's a certain portion of dedicated, and we try to limit our exposure to this. I wouldn't say it's commoditized type of business, but it's more commoditized than the more specialized business that we try to lean into more. I think that's been a real key piece of our resiliency is that we have a really big chunk of business that really doesn't get impacted necessarily by the overall freight market. We have customers in that segment that really don't even speak the language of spot market and what one-way rates are doing because what their business is, it's almost irrelevant to them. That's certainly been a real key piece to our resiliency.
We certainly have felt some competitive pressures and some inflationary pressures, just like I'm sure all our competitors have. We do our best to differentiate ourselves. We've been really successful maintaining that business. We have lost some business. I think the bigger piece, what I would say on some of the business that we've lost, and it's not been a lot, but the business that we've lost, it's been a decision that we've had to make is we're going to stay disciplined, and we're not going to try to hang on to business that's not going to be profitable. We're going to, even though we don't want to lose business, we also don't want to run business that's not going to contribute to our overall well-being. We don't like that.
Obviously, we work very hard to prevent that from happening, but I would say the bigger story when it comes to, if you look at our truck counts and whatnot, is actually a little bit offensive on our part. We think in terms of, I think a much bigger piece of our truck count reductions this year has not been from lost business. It's been from actually a way to keep business. It's to take great care of our customers. If we have, for instance, a 20-truck fleet, customers' volumes are down. We do not take the approach of, "Hey, you have a contract for 20 trucks, so you're going to pay for 20 trucks." We think that maybe that would help us a little bit short term, but long term, that would not be good. We're here to take care of our customers.
We actually spend, we have engineering resources that actually go and help our customers figure out ways to reduce truck count, which sounds maybe a little counterintuitive, but what it does is it allows our customers to keep their costs in check. It helps us on our returns. We can move that equipment, redeploy it elsewhere so that we can maintain returns on that individual location. The biggest piece of this, and what we feel is most important, is that that business will then come back at some point. We are going to do all that we can to take care of our customers. Those trucks that we reduced this year, it has been a rather significant amount. We do not really have any questions, generally speaking. That business will come back to us. I cannot say exactly when.
A lot of us, I'm sure, wonder about that, but we have no doubt that business will come back to us.
Okay. Great. Maybe I'll ask one to John and then hand it over. CapEx, any initial thoughts on 2024? Maybe you could just help us understand what you view as replacement CapEx for the business. On that growth component, I guess my question is, could we see a pullback given the excess capacity you have in the network today to grow?
Yeah. We are right now in the process of developing our plans for 2024, and I do not have finalization on what our plan is. I do expect that, as we have talked about, we have made, because of the inability to get equipment during COVID, we use 2023 as a big replacement year. Replacement is really trading out equipment once it meets the age that we like to operate them in. It is not the full useful life, mechanical life of the truck, but we like to keep equipment from three to five years. That is kind of the sweet spot of when you can get your return out of that equipment, but then you also are not bumping up against major maintenance initiatives. We were not able to get new equipment to process those trades in 2021 and 2022.
In 2023, we had, I would say, probably half of our CapEx for the year was devoted to replacement. We also did have probably 20-25% was investment in properties. That's included in our CapEx. I see that being similar going forward, at least for the near term. We are trying to take on as we become so diverse and dense in certain areas. It makes more sense to own in those areas than to lease. Some of that will be a trade-off between operating lease expense and CapEx. Not sure I got to everything on there. Was there?
Thank you. I think you tackled it, Brad. Did you want to add something?
Yeah. I just wanted to, just for the benefit of the audience, talk a little bit about CapEx and some of the things that were unique. John alluded to being behind on some of the replacement demand. You go back to 2021, 2022, David and the dedicated team grew by 3,000 trucks over that period of time. That was the most difficult market to get drivers. You think about how were we able to support that? It was really by taking delivery of that new equipment and holding on to the old. We're still, I think we've been communicating with Wall Street. We're still working through the backlog. I think we anticipated to be done by the end of the third quarter. We're close there. Reason for me bringing that up, that's why CapEx has been elevated.
In addition to that, we are making investments to grow our intermodal fleet. I think that's probably the most well-publicized to get to 150,000 containers. It's not just containers. We're also investing in real estate. I think we've publicly disclosed about $400 million worth of investment in real estate this year and maybe something similar. John Lewis is still working on the plan. The key and where I really wanted to make sure it was well understood, the most capital-intensive business we have is our dedicated business, right? That's a long contracting process. It typically takes 18 months. We will get a signed contract, and then we will go out and procure trucks and procure the trailing equipment, about half of which is specialty equipment to go service the needs of those customers.
I think there's a lot of investor focus on, "Hey, what's CapEx going to look like and what's free cash flow going to look like?" When you have a business like dedicated where you've seen very strong resiliency of the business, you've seen consistent growth, and we can deploy capital at what we think are very acceptable returns, I hope our CapEx continues to stay elevated because that would be a good sign and a good indication of success of our dedicated fleet growing that has five-year type contracts. Really good problem for us if we're talking about elevated CapEx levels for the next several years because more likely than not, it's supporting a lot of our growth in dedicated, which I think sometimes everyone just thinks of our CapEx being capacity additions to intermodal, and that's not necessarily the case.
We are investing capital to grow and support our growth in intermodal, and there's a lot of work that I think is well understood, but so much of our CapEx is also success-based based on what we're seeing in our dedicated pipeline.
Okay. Great. That's helpful. Question from the audience?
Sure. I guess I give it to Shelley, and you can take it down. Although obviously intermodal is a large part, you have a lot of robust other segments in there of your service portfolio. Have you seen any trends in the last couple? I mean, the last four years, I mean, there's been no comps. But sort of pleasant, unpleasant surprises and then how you use that to position yourself for further growth?
The question was, have you seen any surprises across your different businesses in the last several years, and how does that change your plans for growth across the business?
Thank you, Ted. I have been with the company for 29 years. I have seen a lot of cycles. This cycle was unlike anything we have experienced in our past, and I am not sure to what extent that will change our future, but certainly I do think some things are changing. We do have a mode-agnostic approach with our customers. For us, it really is about solving whatever need they have in the moment. You heard both Brad and John talking about our inability to source new equipment, but we were holding trades to grow inside dedicated. We were using the power of our platform, JBM 360, to really source contract capacity to do startups quicker, but also to help where intermodal could not service our customers.
I do think you saw a big step function change in our revenue, but also just the trust our customers had that whatever supply chain challenge they had, we really could do that for them. In a time of crisis, typically our customers will lean into us, and I think that that really proved itself through COVID and even through this year. Coming into third quarter, I think our customers have trusted us more certainly. Overall, I do believe having a mode-agnostic approach is very important because you never know what part of the supply chain is going to break down, and it's important for us to be able to say yes. I think the other part is in our five businesses, our two businesses, particularly dedicated, very resilient during this time. I think dedicated has done a very nice job.
Through this downturn, they have set themselves up for more success than the previous downturn. If you go backwards in history and looked at the economic recession, that was as large of an impact as what we are experiencing now, or maybe now is even worse from a freight demand perspective and just kind of the disruption that is happening overall. Dedicated really did pivot towards private fleets, thinking about how do we do really work that is very difficult, that is less commoditized. Now you are seeing that resiliency. It takes time to create resiliency in the supply chain, but also in your business model. We are doing that same thing today. If you look at our brokerage business, it has been impacted the very most. It went up the fastest, down the fastest as well. What are things that we can do in those businesses? That is what we are really focused on.
I would say outside of making sure that we are focused on our people, we're doing that so that our people will feel safe. They know that we're thinking long-term, and we need our people to focus on our customers. If we get the entire organization, Brad Delco, I think you even said you've got a KPI now that you have to watch for what we call customer value delivery. We have everyone in our organization thinking about how are we delivering customer value? The more value we can create for our customers, the more value we can create for our shareholders over the long term. We're focused on what we can control. I think building a more resilient model for ourselves for the next downturn is really a huge focus that we have now. Really planning for the long term.
Question in the back.
The question was about ICS profitability, when we can inflect to a positive number, and can we see a positive number in 2024 without the market inflecting?
Yeah. We are working on what the plans are inside all of our businesses, as John talked about, what the budget is. We took a little different approach maybe than what the market took in the third quarter. In our brokerage business, we actually talked with several customers about price increases in the third quarter, and we took price increases. Very counterintuitive to thinking about being in a freight recession. We have a great saying in our company, "If we are going to go broke, we are going to be well-rested." I think that is really important for us to not lose our discipline that we are in the we are not in the nonprofit business. We are in the business to make a fair return over the long term. If we cannot make business today in a freight recession, it is going to be very difficult to make money when the upturn occurs.
I think getting our teams in a position to say, "You know what? Let's deliver exceptional service. Let's find those customers that are willing to pay us for exceptional service." That is the retooling that has happened here in the third and part of the fourth quarter. I think that really sets us up to have a good 2024, to what extent and how much we will see from that. I will tell you, I think it was a relief for our team when we said, "Hey, listen, it's okay. We need to find the right placement for us to grow out of that." I will tell you, generating a proper return is important to us across all five of our businesses. That business has been impacted, but we also see that the market is significant across all of our businesses.
It's going to be important that we have a great brokerage service for our customers. You just look at how much brokerage has taken on share with a small carry community. It continues to be at very high levels. We have to have a great brokerage answer to our customers. For us, that's not just in a non-asset way. We actually do that with our trailing fleet as well. We have 360 box. Our customers get flexibility in the market by sourcing nearly a million trucks, by using drop trailers that we call 360 box, but also being able to broker directly. That gives us access to a $120 billion market or $120 billion of bids that allows us to talk to customers about how we can convert into more efficient ways to do business, like intermodal and building great dedicated fleets.
A very important part of our strategy, but it is important also that we generate a proper return. I think that's what the team is focused on next year.
You've talked about volumes being a leading indicator for the business. In intermodal, we've seen a stabilization and an improvement versus the trough. That is encouraging. Pricing is a lagging indicator. I wanted to ask about that for a moment, and maybe you could speak to both intermodal and truckload and if you're seeing any signs of stabilization on that front.
We did talk about being here in peak volumes in September through our earnings call. I think that's important because we finished up our bid season. Third quarter is fully reflective of our new pricing. We'll continue to live with those pricing coming off of those peak volumes. We'll live with that pricing here all through fourth quarter and into first quarter. We need to get through a full bid cycle to get to experience what we're seeing from a volume push. Again, more information that we've learned through this process and understanding where the market is at, repeating what Darren has said, we really want to make sure to talk to our customers about what's happened from a cost perspective. Inflation across the board. Inflation is with all of our businesses talking to customers about where that is.
I couldn't really predict yet what we think on price, but I can tell you we're talking to customers about that. Also on the truckload side, not totally sure yet. We're not done with budgeting from that perspective. Remember, on the truckload side for us, our power is variable. We're in a little different place maybe than if we were an asset-only company. We've done that before. Today, we essentially have no company trucks in our truckload business. Our truckload business is powered by contract carriers, so we'll be able to float more with the market. That's important to us as we think about what's going to happen overall in intermodal and pressure we may or may not feel in the other parts of our business.
That business can be a little more flexible than maybe in years past where there was a heavy amount of fixed cost. We have more variable cost in that business today.
Okay. Without getting into the specifics for 2024 bid season, do you feel like we'll be in a position to see positive price?
Again, we've learned more as we've come through August, September. We've released earnings, and now we've seen our competitors release earnings. We know what the inflation is, and we're not satisfied with our margins. We do take a long-term approach, but we do believe that we're generating great value for our customers and that we have a right to have a conversation about extracting more value for our shareholders. We plan on having those conversations.
Understood. Any other questions from the audience? If not, I can keep going forever. Shelley, on the earnings call, you talked about prudently managing costs in the near term while maintaining a long-term focus. I wanted to double back to that comment, specifically the first part of that comment about managing near-term costs. Can you talk about some of the ways that you can do that given what we're seeing in the freight cycle right now?
Sure. One of the things that we embarked with our team on is a process that we call elevation. It really is an efficiency process. We had them focus a lot, and actually Brad Delco and his team led this for us organizationally. We really got all 35,000 of our people to go through this process that really says, "Hey, what ideas do you have that creates a more efficient network that reduces our cost long-term on behalf of our customers?" Really trying to reset our network coming off of peak volumes overall. We had nearly 6,000 ideas submitted by our people, and I'm not sure what the total approved ideas were. Brad, you probably remember that better than me, but I do know what the value was, which is.
It was last year.
Which was important for us. I think it's a grassroots effort that says, "Hey, listen, we're in a different time, and our customers expect us to be cost competitive in the market, and costs have been elevated. There's too much waste in the supply chain, and we need to think of things differently." That has allowed all of our people to think about what is my job and making sure we create a more efficient network. I think that's been an important component. Some of those ideas, literally our frontline, we'd come up with an idea and we would say, "Okay, you're empowered to make that decision today." I think that's been great. More important for the mindset of our teams and to what that looks like also. We also have benchmarks that we're working against and giving people a better picture.
We're not doing anything on a short-term basis. It'd be very difficult for us to change our cost base short-term within a month or two. We've done things like, I think we've said this publicly, that we've made sure our people know that we're not going to have layoffs based on where we're at. We've come through this freight recession with our people, and I think that has created a lot of trust with our people. When we can have our people think that they're safe in their jobs and we just want you to focus on our customers, I think that creates a long-term advantage for us, our people. That is our greatest advantage. We have a lot of tenure inside our company. We talk a lot about our executive officer team with an average tenure inside the company of 25 years.
If you were to actually go all the way down to our director level or senior manager, you're talking about 15 years, 13 years, 10 years, a long tenure. A lot of reasons our culture over time has been taking care of our people, but that didn't mean that we weren't managing our people costs. We let attrition take hold from a people perspective, and we've come down quite a bit in our total people count because of that. There's a great example where we're not just going to backfill every single job. We're going to evaluate what the business looks like and how can we make sure that we are right-sizing the business in an appropriate way without necessarily putting people at risk. That's a really big one that we've been successful on.
Everyone buckled down and understood there are certain things, like we did not back down on our driver appreciation events. We are not going to do that. We appreciate our drivers. Just because we are making money or not making money does not mean that we do not do things like that. Where it was people-oriented, we continued to lean in. Where it was something that had more flexibility, we would back off of that.
Okay. Question up front.
Shelley, when you talked about going back to or feeling comfortable going to your clients to talk to them more about price or seeing some price increases in your products as you're in an intermodal business, is it fair to say that that's a signal that you're feeling comfortable enough that these volumes are sustainable?
Here's what I'm comfortable with. I'm comfortable that we have a better picture today than we did in August, September, and on our earnings call in October. More information has been made available. We know what our competitors look like. We don't know what they might do in 2024, but we also know what the inflation costs that we sit with looks like. We feel really comfortable with the value that we've created with our customers. That's what we feel comfortable with. I think it's important that we have those conversations, that they know where we're at. We've done that over the course of really several years now. We typically won't take it in a moment. We'll take a little bit longer, make sure that we feel comfortable, and then start talking to customers individually about each one of them, how they impact the network.
Can they take costs out so we do not have to change our price to the same degree? Every customer will have a little different conversation. It is obviously too early to tell, but we are already starting those conversations. I could not say today what pricing is going to look like next year, but we are not satisfied with our returns. Now we are down to timing of when can we get appropriate returns and appropriate price from our customers. We are going to start those conversations, and we will see where those land.
Hey, Justin, I'm going to just not necessarily add, but do put a plug in here because I think it's good to sort of remind the investment community that there's a lot of pressure on companies across all different industries to reduce their carbon footprint and carbon emissions, right? Everyone has a different plan. Craig Harper, if you know the name, he has been at J.B. Hunt for 31 years and had a lot of different roles and impacted a lot of different people in our company. He is involved and engaged with customers consistently on, "Hey, how do we create a more resilient, more sustainable supply chain? We want to look at electric, or we want to look at hydrogen fuel cell, or we want to look at natural gas," whatever.
Not very, he's one of the smartest people that I know, but he said, "Let's just put a menu together for our customers and show them what options we have." We have this tremendous dedicated product. If they want to build a fleet of electric trucks, let's show them what the cost is of an electric truck. Let's show them what the infrastructure needed, the charging infrastructure. Let's tell them what conversations they have to have with the utility companies in terms of how much power they'll need. Let's price that option for them. We show them, and then eyes pop out of people's heads, and we go to the next option. We look at hydrogen fuel cell, or we'll go to the next option and look at natural gas and what some of the limitations or the challenges are there with uptime.
I think there are improvements being made across all these, and all these will be viable options at some point in the future. You can look at intermodal, which is available today, which could cut your carbon footprint by 60%. Oh, and by the way, instead of it costing you $300,000 for an electric truck, this is actually a discounted truck. When you think about how we create value for customers and what the opportunities are, it is really just making sure you present where things are today. I would tell you, if you look at particular how our performance was in Q3, we did service our customers extremely well. Railroads are performing significantly better.
The value proposition of intermodal today with where service levels are, with where elevated fuel prices are, customers may not necessarily need the same speed that could be provided to them with truck, but the value proposition of intermodal today at a discounted truck is very strong. Again, as Darren Field said on our earnings call, that gives us the opportunity to have that conversation with customers.
Of course.
Are there any parallels you can run to 2008-2009 today that seems like, in other words, the dashboard and the signals that you're staring at on a week-to-week basis of demand and supply and whatnot? Is there anything, because you were there back then as well, that seems similar or different?
The question was, any parallels between the current environment and 2008-2009?
I've been saying for months, even before we publicly stated we were in a freight recession, that this is so reminiscent of 2008-2009. Sitting in our boardroom and having conversation, just the volumes, what we saw was happening. It's really what gave us boldness to say, "Okay, we're in a freight recession, and here are all the reasons why." I will say things are just different today. If I go back to 2008-2009, I do know what the price changed. The price changed significantly, and it changed significantly the next year. I don't know if I can draw the same conclusions that's been 13 years ago or nearly 14 years ago. Supply chains are different today. I can say we have a lot of history. We have a lot of history with our customers, and they have a lot of history with us too.
They know what we're capable of doing. They understand where we're at from a return perspective. This is across all of our businesses. As we're putting our plan together, it's difficult for us on a couple of things. When I think about what the market is doing, how much money did small truckers make over the pandemic that they have had in their bank account? For how long will that last? Is that part of what's happening from a capacity perspective? Does that change at some point? We're having those conversations with customers like, "Hey, where do you see next year? What do you think about small carrier capacity?" I think that's important because that's a signaling of tightening across what would happen in pricing, all those things. I think we're using our experience with customers for many, many years.
Both Darren Field and I have a long pricing background. I've been in pricing 27 years. I've seen a lot of bids, a lot of cycles. We're using a lot of our experience to determine what's going to happen next year.
Can we talk about the Quantum announcement that just came out? We saw the details in the release, but I really wanted to ask about the addressable market for that product. If you look at your intermodal business today, what percentage of the business would be a good fit for Quantum? Maybe the same question about the addressable market for intermodal conversions. How much of that would make sense in Quantum versus a traditional intermodal service?
I talked about there being $120 billion of bids that we see. And of those bids, we have identified 7-11 million shipments that we believe has the opportunity to move over to intermodal off the highway. If that doesn't necessarily sound right, take half of that. There's a percentage of that you could make your own assumptions on, but the amount of conversion is significant. If you just look at the share that intermodal has lost over the last several years, it has been dramatic. It's a full 1% of the truckload market has moved back to truckload versus into intermodal. So at a minimum, that share is a significant number in total. When we think of Quantum, Quantum is a result of us coming together with the BNSF to say, "Hey, what do our customers want?
What can we deliver for them? Part of what we've heard from customers is, "My most service-sensitive freight is my own customer." If I'm a CPG company, and I'm going to the retailer, that business is very critical in the supply chain, and I may be more nervous to do that. I'm going to truck that. Maybe you do not have service that will get that for me five days a week, so I'm just going to truck it all five days. In reality, if we can build a plan with that customer where we move it intermodal for three days and we can truck it for two days, it's a very customized answer for our customers. We've been in pilots since this summer working with customers that we know has an opportunity to do this.
I think that we've had success with those customers. We're going to continue to have a conversation over the next year. We really want to make sure that we prove out the value that we can create. That is really competing with truckload. We think we can develop a customized answer for every single customer. We have people on site with the BNSF, and they certainly have the team. We have a full team working on what do we need to do for each individual customer. We put the plan in motion to say, "This is the best way to execute on this customer's freight." What happens when something goes wrong from the plan? That is what the team is there to make sure that we can execute on that.
I will tell you, all the business isn't going to be Quantum because all of our customers don't need to pay the premium for what that product is going to be. It's going to take more cost for us to execute on that, but it should also create more value and save our customers over the long run. We are excited about that. We are talking to our customers. We want to continue to expand services. We hear our customers say, "We want a lot more of what you have." How are we going to continue to build products and services? Quantum is an example. Also, our release about Mexico yesterday is yet another example where we are giving optionality and allowing our customers to have multiple channels, more capacity, faster throughput, more resiliency in the supply chain. That is really our focus with our customers.
Okay. Great. Any questions from the audience? David, maybe I'll double back with you. You talked about fleets downsizing and you helping in that effort during this freight recession. Have you seen any stabilization on that front? Do you think there's potential as we kind of look into the next 12 months for some of those fleets to bounce back?
Yeah. No, that's a great question. I would say we're not done. I think there's still ongoing efforts, and we will still downsize some accounts. I think the pace of that has certainly slowed. I think we've gotten through the majority of that. I can't predict the future. We have a lot of different customers and a lot of different industries and in different situations. You can't necessarily predict exactly what their volumes will look like. I can tell you without a doubt that the pace of that has slowed down. When those trucks come back, and we're highly, highly confident that they will collectively, the timing of that, not only it's hard to predict, but it's also not based on just one thing.
There's not going to be a point in time where now all those customers now are in better shape and their volumes are increasing. It's going to be staggered, I feel like. We have different industries, different customers are going to have different timing. I certainly look forward to that day. It's hard to predict when it would be. If I had to guess, for whatever that's worth, I would suspect it would be certainly by this time next year.
Is there a way to frame up the magnitude of the pressure you've seen in the fleet from this activity? Is it a few hundred trucks? Is it more than that in terms of just fleets downsizing?
Can I just take that for a second?
Yeah.
David had his mid-year review, and I went to that. One of his very first opening kickoffs, which is why we brought him, by the way, I told him he's way better than Nick. I told Nick that. Just teasing. One of the things that I was really impressed with was David's lean-in to making sure that the leaders in dedicated knew that we wanted to be offensive with our customers. We needed to be out in front. We don't need our customers to come talk to us about what volumes are doing. David said, "Listen, don't look at that as a bad thing. If a customer has 10 trucks and we know that their business really is going to justify about 8, let's have that conversation with the customer. Now let's get something for that." I don't think we've talked enough about that.
David, you do not just walk into a customer and say, "Yep, we will just take you down two and we are in good shape." There is a reciprocity in that process that says, "Oh, let us extend the agreement or let us do X, Y, or Z." Again, you think about our long-term nature and how we talk to customers. David, you have every right to say, "So sorry. I know you have 10 and you need to pay for all 10." That does not build long-term confidence in our customer base that we are going to ebb and flow. By the way, during COVID, we needed our customers to work with us even outside of our contractual agreements around drivers and what we needed to do there. I think David has done a really great job in that.
Yeah. It is not necessarily just as simple as saying, "Okay, you have 10 trucks. Now you have 8." It is, "We will go to 8, but we may need to extend the contract. We may need to if those two trucks, there are different dynamics. If that changes the economics, we are going to save you that money, but we need a little bit extra here to make up for whatever we might have, whatever changes might have taken place." It is a give and take, but it is certainly, without a doubt, driven to help the customer.
Okay. Shelley, you mentioned capacity attrition earlier, and I think everybody's wondering how that plays out into next year. Are you seeing any acceleration in the market on that front?
I mean, I think there's publicly available data. We've seen the same data points that everyone else has. We've done the math on how long we think it will take. We're not the best predictors since COVID. Neither are our customers, by the way. I don't think we have anything to add past what we've seen overall, but certainly capacity needs to work find its way to a better balance in the market.
Okay. Last question is on kind of what your customers are saying on that point. They may or may not be correct, but you talked to a lot of customers, specifically in the retail consumer environment, where I feel like there's a bit of uncertainty as we move into 2024. Could you just share what the tone is now on the outlook for next year and how you're thinking about the economy as you budget the business?
We're not economists, so we're not very good at doing that. I will say our customers, they're uncertain. They're asking us a lot of questions about that also. They don't see again, I've said this now for several periods. Our customers don't see a significant downturn. Outside of we knew the inventory correction. We talked a lot about that, but our customers don't see a downturn. I think they feel okay about 2024. I don't see anybody with a major catalyst that creates a big boom. I think our customers are in a more neutral to slightly positive position. I think that's the best information we have right now based on feedback we're getting.
Okay. Great. We'll wrap it up there to stay on time. Thank you so much to the J.B. Hunt team for being here.
Thank you, Jason.
All right. Thanks.