Good morning. Welcome to our 30th annual B of A Transport Airline Industrials Conference. I'm Ken Hoexter, B of A's transport analyst. Next up, we welcome Nick Hobbs, Chief Operating Officer and President of Contract Services, which includes DCS and FMS, in the middle. Brad Hicks right here to my left, EVP of People and President of Highway Services, and Brad Delco, SVP of Finance from J.B. Hunt Transport Services. We welcome Nick for his 5th time to our conference, Brad for his 3rd, Brad Hicks for his 3rd, and Brad Delco for his 4th time. This is J.B. Hunt's 16th time attending our conference in the 22 years we've hosted. I just wanna start off just obviously glad to have you here with us and just thank you for your continued support of our event.
You know, it truly helps us in understanding the industry and appreciate you coming up to Boston. Nick and Brad, let me open this up by turning it over to you for an update on your current view of the market, how 2Q is progressing on demand pricing, maybe basically just a message you would like to leave us with today.
You want me to go?
Yeah.
Yeah. you know, I'd start by taking you back to our Q1 earnings release and the way we spoke of the market conditions. Really we've not seen any material improvement since then. I think that that's not to suggest that things have worsened, but based on how we saw them early to mid-April, we've seen that kinda carry forward throughout the balance of April and into May at this point, which is atypical. Normally, we see a pickup in Q2 against Q1, things that are lawn and garden in nature, modest uptick in overall demand, and we've not experienced that thus far.
You know, everybody wants to know kind of where the bottom is or are we at bottom and it's hard to say, and we certainly don't have any better crystal ball than you all. You know, to say things have just been muted for the last 60 or so days coming out of Q1 is how I would position that from a contract services side of the not from a contract, but from our transactional services, intermodal and highway. I'll let Nick maybe speak to what he's seeing that's a little bit different on our contract businesses.
Yeah. I'll talk a little bit about dedicated just in general. Our business is consistent, but normally, like everything else, we'd see a little uptick with spring, with lawn and garden and various different things. I would say that's been muted. It's been steady. You would talk to our customers, we're pulling from inventory typically in the dedicated side. We're from the DC to the stores, and so we're seeing some inventory correction there. The key is gonna be the consumer and what they buy going forward. On the final mile side, I think is a really good indicator. If you think about big and bulky from appliance, furniture, exercise equipment, we're clearly seeing the demand fall off. Everybody purchased big in those areas during the pandemic, and the demand is not quite there.
We're clearly seeing that in the final mile in the more durable goods side of things, and I think that's very consistent with what we're seeing throughout.
You both mentioned gardening, so my wife and I, we bought a bag of grass seed and overseed our yard. You might see that, those numbers start to pick up.
We appreciate that.
Uh.
Did you buy 10,000 bags?
One was enough to carry. Shelley noted that we're in a, in a freight recession given the environment and the team noted that contract bid compliance was at all-time lows. What is the feedback from shippers like? I know you said it's been kind of a muted, you know, 60, 90 days since or 60 days since the report. Is there any green shoot that we're kinda finding that bottom or anything you'd suggest, or is it still really?
Yeah.
out at that lows?
It's hanging out at the low. I think that generally speaking, what we hear from our customers and shippers, they do carry a higher degree of optimism on the forward view, but we've not seen that materialize in any fundamental way. Compliance is still at all-time lows. It bounces around. It might trickle up just a little bit one week and kinda settle back the next week or so, but we've not seen it pick up materially. We do feel like, you know, Nick's mentioned that we've been steady from the DC to the store, and many of them are reporting or sharing with us that they feel like by and large, their inventory issues are or have been mostly corrected.
We're not yet seeing that inbound flow to fill back up their DC networks. That's really what we're all waiting for and we're certainly anxious for. You know, we can look at import data and are hopeful that at some point we'll start to see that recover or return somewhat from our current levels. That'll be, you know, demonstrate kind of more activity on inbound flow into the regional distribution networks that many of our customers have. Unfortunately, wish we had better news to report, but we're just not seeing it yet. Again, many times, our customers are always believing or portraying a better optimism, and we're just not seeing that in the data yet.
It's usually the truckers that are the ones with the optimism, not the. Historically, Nick, I'm gonna jump into a numbers question right now.
Yeah.
Historically, we've seen an overall 80 basis point operating ratio improvement between first and second quarter, and a 50 basis point improvement in intermodal. I know you don't forecast, so I know Brad's gonna jump in and say, we don't forecast, but is there anything that stands out in terms of seasonality or lack of seasonality that I think given the volumes, does that automatically lead to a sub-seasonal second quarter? Is there a way you want us to think about that?
First, Ken Hoexter, we actually do forecast. We just don't share that with you.
Yeah, yeah, publicly. Yeah, that's what I meant.
I just wanna clarify that for the audience. Nick, go ahead, you can answer that question.
Thank you. I would just say on the dedicated side in particular, that we had tremendous growth the last two years and selling over 2,000 trucks each year. Our sales is not gonna be near what those were. I think we'll hit our normal ranges, so we'll have some startups in there. You typically see we kinda come out and do better. I think if you look at historically what we've done, we're gonna consistently do what we've done previously. Is typically what you see, but there's a lot of factors in that from, and I'll throw out some factors in that we're running about 1,500 trucks over our normal age. They normally would have traded. We're waiting on product from the OEMs. We're getting that.
We got a few extra trucks that we're flushing out of our system, maintenance costs, labor. In general, you should be able to kinda see what we've done historically and be good with that.
Maybe I'll clean up a little bit of that 'cause your question was for the whole company, but then specifically in the dedicated. I think it's well known, you know, when we think about the startup costs, we do see margin pressure. We are still starting up new business, we're still seeing startups. Some of that's being offset by the fact that we are going through our Customer Value Delivery process, where we go to the customer and say, "Hey, we're running 12 trucks for you. We think we can re-optimize and drive efficiencies and run 10." We aren't seeing the same fleet growth. But when we are not growing at the same pace, surely you do see margin expansion because you don't have the same level and degree of. Obviously, Nick Hobbs was alluding to that.
Where the areas of pressure are for the enterprise, generally speaking, maintenance costs are still elevated. Parts are up. Some components of that is labor. Driver wages are still up year-over-year. Maybe we're not seeing to the same degree, you don't have the same sign-on bonuses, and you don't have the same advertising and things to get drivers in the door. There's pluses and minuses on the cost side. From a macro perspective, though, you know, I think it's well where we are in the contract process. We'll have more business in Q2 under new contracts versus Q1. From a pricing perspective, that may mean a little bit more pressure. We just have to respond.
On the cost side or also maybe get some improvement in volume to help us absorb some of that fixed overhead cost.
You're talking overall for the.
Oh, yeah, I was trying to give a.
Yeah.
macro view.
While I've got you then just talking about that, anything on intermodal in terms of, or is it would be the same kind of normal that Brad was talking about progression in terms of margin?
I mean, yeah, I would say our comments are pretty consistent across.
Okay.
We haven't seen much of a change from what we communicated on our first quarter call.
Yeah.
Volumes have not seen the sort of seasonal lift you would have expected. What we have to do is do what we can to manage ourself on the cost side. I think people are aware of from a macro perspective for our company, where our biggest cost buckets are, purchased transportation being one of them. We have a little bit more of a fluid arrangement with purchased transportation and highway and even on the rail side, and so that's a big cost bucket. I think that allows us to insulate ourselves a little bit from some cost pressure. Other than that, we're still, you know, we're still having to go look and figure out where we could be more efficient in our business.
Maybe I'll just go through each segment and we'll maybe we'll run that way, and then we'll come back to kind of the progression of these volumes. Nick, on dedicated, you know, Brad just mentioned you've got some more or continuation of new business that is constantly coming in. Is the scale just given this environment, does it decrease and so therefore with less startup costs it aids performance, or is there other costs involved in that?
Yeah, there's some other costs involved, but I would just say that, we're still selling, and I would say we're back to selling at our normal guidance pace.
Okay.
Is probably where we're gonna be.
Normal guidance was what? $2,000 a year?
No.
No.
No.
$1,000.
$1,200.
1,200.
Yeah. Thanks for helping me out there, Brad. Yeah, we're in that range and we're on that pace. We feel pretty good about that. We still have some startups that we sold last year that extended out because we're waiting on some specialized equipment, whether it be trailers or some trucks. We're waiting on some of that. We have that coming in. We got that cost, but not at the same scale as we did before. We do have some elevated maintenance cost in there, and then our people costs are up some. All that we're trying to focus on our cost so that we can pick up some margin as we typically do.
Really, just to add to that, you know, we were 2x of that growth target the last two years.
Mm-hmm.
The reality is 1,000-1,200 trucks is a significant amount of new sales.
It is
...in our industry. Sometimes even we feel like, oh, man, you're 50% of what you were, but very robust growth in 2021 and 2022 for dedicated. It doesn't feel like it, but.
Yeah.
1,200 trucks growth is a great year in dedicated.
Yeah. No, it sounded like I thought in first quarter you highlighted this slight pickup exiting the quarter, right, in terms of the new sales?
We had some stuff come in and we still have deals come in every week. We're still selling. When you look at the whole year though, if you look at our truck count, we're probably gonna be flattish from where we ended last year. That's a combination of some of our existing customers are contracting. Also at the end of last year, we were carrying a lot of extra trucks because our fleet was way older than we're used to. For our high level of service, we have to keep some extra trucks. We're flushing those out and really focusing on our efficiency in and out of the shop and gaining some of that.
We think we'll be flattish, on our truck count, but we think they'll be a lot more productive.
I guess I just wanna make sure I understand. Last quarter, you posted a 90 basis point sequential improvement in OR. Usually it deteriorates at the end of the year. You're saying that's not just because of lower net orders coming on. I'm just trying to read how that sets it up for the rest of the year. Does that mean you're... You're not gonna give an outlook anyway, but, you know?
Let me clarify. If we're starting up fewer accounts, that usually is a margin tailwind.
Tailwind, right.
The way we report, on a GAAP basis, we have revenue, which is inclusive of fuel, and our cost, which includes fuel. If fuel is a pass-through for us, lower fuel prices, believe it or not, is a margin tailwind, albeit it has no impact on EBIT dollars. You know, the headwinds or another tailwind would be, I think, our recruiting costs and getting drivers in the door. It's not costing as easy.
Yeah.
Lower turnover helps us. There's a lot of tailwinds to the margin % question you're asking. The headwinds are, hey, we still have old trucks. It costs a lot to get mechanics to work on this equipment. Those are the offsets to some of those benefits. Of course, we won't tell you what margins are gonna do going forward, but, you know, those are the pluses and minuses.
Inorganic opportunities in dedicated as the market moves to the bottom, is that something that you look at? I know you've had some tuck-ins lately, you know, which has been very out of ordinary for J.B. Hunt. Is that something you continue to look at?
Yeah. The tuck-ins, for the most part, have been over on the final mile side. I'll talk about that here in a segment. On the dedicated, I would just tell you that, we're not gonna go purchase a competitor. We're not really looking to do that. We think we do acquisitions every day when we take over private fleets. We just don't have to pay a premium for them and have an intangible. We'll go purchase a company's private fleet, run those more efficiently. We view that as acquisitions. That's what we do constantly. As far as going and buying a competitor on the dedicated side, I don't, I don't see that happening. We've not done that in dedicated, and I don't see that happening.
On final mile, we've done four or five small tuck-ins really to help us get on the furniture and really help us get in the fitness equipment and off-price retail. Those segments, along with appliance, which we had a strong position in, we think we're good where we're at. We're always, if deals come to us, we'll look at them. For the most part, I think we're settled, and now we're just gonna try to execute. As we've talked about in final mile, we're really focusing on improving the bottom line and putting some business at risk now that we've proved our service. We're having quite a bit of success in doing that and retaining some business and some's exited. For the most part, we've kept it with better rates. You'll continue to see us improve there.
On the final mile side, we've had some pretty significant wins recently from some of our competitors and service issues that they're having with some customers. We've picked up some business at appropriate margins there. We are seeing some growth in final mile. Other than I say growth in sales, I shared also that our volumes are down on furniture on our existing stuff, so that we're facing some challenges there. A lot of that, we got variable PTE in there as well, because a lot of that on the final mile side is non-asset.
It's interesting to step away from intermodal for a minute, you know, especially dedicated, almost 30% of revenue is 40% of EBIT, so it's good to hear the different things. Brad, let me just jump over on brokerage ICS for a bit. You flip to an EBIT loss now. Seems like the segment getting increasingly competitive, maybe just from an analytical point of view, segment turned to a loss from a profit, which happened earlier than expected, right? If we go back to fourth quarter 2020 during the COVID demand wave. Volumes down 25%. Some of your peers were able to post some volume growth. What's the outlook for J.B. 360 ICS? And do you see that more competitive landscape or, you know, what's your view?
Sure, Ken. you know, a couple things come to mind for me. You know, we did kind of outperform in the 2021, 2022 windows versus our expectations, and I think that that did demonstrate kind of the power and the benefits of the technology investments into J.B. Hunt 360°. You know, we'll give ourselves a good check there that technology enabled the scale that we had spoke of previously. In doing so, what we did find ourselves maybe different than many others, we got a little, disproportionate in the mix of our, contractual volumes versus our spot volumes, and we were actually inflected. Normally, we would be in a 60/40 relationship contract versus spot.
We found ourselves through the disruption of the pandemic, and that accelerated growth, we kinda found ourselves in a 40/60. I do feel like while that might have benefited us in 2021 and 2022, it hurt us towards the end of 2022 coming into 2023 with what happened to the spot market and just the dramatic shift that we've seen there, which really was unprecedented. We've certainly seen flips before, but not that severe or drastic anytime more recently. That kinda put us at a disadvantage coming into Q1. Obviously, as we've been working our way through bid season, our goals and priorities were to grow back our contractual volumes. By and large, feel like we've been successful at doing that through the bid season.
However, bid compliance, as was referenced earlier, has not been anywhere near historical expectations. That's further dampened what we experienced in Q1. The dramatic shift in volume, we touched on this at our quarterly earnings. Some of our volume disposition was not market loss. It really was that we were a good outlet to support the other businesses in J.B. Hunt through the peak demand cycle of the pandemic. That meant that we were supporting a lot of overflow freight for dedicated, and needs maybe where we were short drivers at certain points in times. Maybe we were an enabler for them to start a fleet when they couldn't get the equipment.
We would start that, supporting it with brokerage, and then it would transition into dedicated as Nick was able to onboard the tractor power or trailing commitments that we needed there. We saw that similarly in Intermodal. Another example of Intermodal is that, you know, in the disrupted port West Coast, rail service, a lot of shippers wanted to convert their freight to highway, and so we were a great outlet for that. In brokerage, we've now seen a lot of that go back now that the volume is not creating kind of turbulence in the intermodal service system. We see that go away. We see Nick shore up his fleets and that business dried up for us. When we evaluate externally, it doesn't look great.
When we look at it kind of breaking out those subcomponents, we're still not satisfied with where we landed, but certainly the picture did improve. Now it's really about trying to rebalance our cost to today's flow of volumes and the market that we find ourself in today. Brad mentioned this, you know, it is a variable model, pressure and downward pressure on purchased transportation, that's our largest expense, in brokerage, is top priority for us. I think you'll see continued improvement in fundamentals, as we turn the quarter, and as we work through the balance of the year in terms of managing costs. I will mention that the other side of my responsibility, which is JBT, that's our predominantly our 360box product.
We did see double-digit growth in Q1 in that area, and we continue to be excited about the prospect of that business. You know, both of those are leveraging third-party capacity at this point. We've slid over all of our owned tractor assets that were in JBT into our dedicated contract service business unit. Most of what we had when we made that shift were dedicated light fleets. Some of them had evolved into to really legitimate fundamentals of dedicated, meaning that's a long-term contract with fixed and variable economics and inflationary indices. It just made sense for us to continue on that journey. Fundamentally, we have no tractors that we own inside of any part of highway, whether that's JBT or ICS.
We're leveraging all of our third-party capacity, and that's a hybrid of independent contractors, small fleets that contract with us, as well as brokerage capacity. Just making that best decision about sometimes it would have been a ICS-reported load, but we'd like it to help move the network on the 360box. We will haul that inside of JBT. So it does get a little harder to understand the makeup, which is why we've been talking and kind of, you know, referencing the business as Highway Services. Really for me, it's about drop trailing needs is our JBT side of that. Live load needs is our ICS component of that. Really we're trying to manage those two networks closer together today to drive efficiency.
I was gonna come to the blending and the moving of assets, but let me just stick with brokerage for a quick second, just 'cause I want to understand. We had such a swing, right? We went from making money quicker than we thought to now seeing losses. Is there a timeframe to working back to profitability based on-
Yeah
...thoughts on the market?
Again, we don't give guidance. We're certainly working hard every day to better balance our cost position and our purchasing position against the flow and the volume. You know, it's hard out there. In the brokerage world, it's a fight. You know, eventually we'll see capacity start to exit at a more material pace. We have seen some exits, and certainly there's a thought that there's a lot more to come.
You're not seeing an accelerated pace of capacity exiting.
Not yet.
...on the brokerage side?
We're not. We're seeing some, higher than normal, but I wouldn't consider it an accelerated disposition at this point.
Not like capacity capitulation?
Not yet. Now, you know, we pay real close attention to what rates are and what we believe carriers' cost foundation is, and we do believe that they're in a loss position today. Have been probably seven, eight months running, and it's worsened. We've seen in other cycles that it can take 9-12 months before you get to that accelerated disposition of capacity. I do think that we're nearing that. You know, there's not a lender today that wants a truck back and certainly a truck that was secured during the pandemic at a very elevated cost. You know, we know that lenders are working deals and extending terms and foregoing payments, trying to help the survivability of some of those carriers.
Ultimately, that will come to a head and we would anticipate that sometime in the second half.
Just wanna kinda, you both touched on some of the moves you made from one category to the other, and LTL brokerage was pulled out of ICS into final mile. LTL seems to have been a more stable market. Does that make ICS.
More volatile in terms of taking out the stability of LTL or.
Yeah.
Am I looking at it the wrong way?
You know, we didn't look at it that way. What we wanted to do is make sure that we best position each of our businesses in the business units that make most sense. I'm gonna pivot to Nick on the LTL with one of our most recent acquisitions, and what that acquisition did for final mile and the complementing nature of LTL. We just felt like it makes more sense for us to service that mode inside of final mile, which was really what drove the assets that we had in JBT into dedicated. When you think about what our vision for JBT is 360box and managing our box network. We don't need tractor assets to be able to accomplish that.
Nick manages 13,000+ tractor assets in dedicated, and so we just feel like it positions us to give a better, comprehensive solution to our customers. I'll let you go a little deeper on Zenith.
Yeah. With our acquisition of Zenith, it was a furniture LTL company that we purchased and really like that. What we're gonna be able to do, basically take first mile, middle mile, last mile in the furniture space, and they were the best in the LTL business for furniture. We think with the LTL coming over on the other side on the non-asset, we can take some of our systems, hopefully integrate them, and it just fits more nicely with us handling the LTL portion over there where we're very familiar with that. We were just trying to put it where we can execute it and focus on growing it the best.
That wound up in final mile, and then, what we would call, the dedicated, very similar dedicated in the truckload business. We execute that, and they just rolled into our normal business without any headcount or anything like that.
For me, Ken, you know, our mission statement at J.B. Hunt is to create the most efficient transportation network in North America. Through that lens, that's where we felt like it's best positioned there for us to not have duplication of an offering. Nick was starting to get much heavier into LTL capabilities. We just feel like putting those things together, and then we made the decision. First the criteria was, let's put them together. The second criteria is where does it best live to be supported now and in the future. In those examples, it was dedicated and final mile.
Let's, let's jump to intermodal as we've got a couple minutes left here and the big kahuna within J.B. Hunt, right? If you think about the deceleration in intermodal volumes, you talked about down 2%, down 4%, down 8% last quarter. You know, we talked about not seeing any change. Has that stabilized at that kinda exit level, or is there any continued deterioration that you would talk to?
Sounds like a guidance question.
My response to that, I mean, I'd say, again, similar to what Brad had already mentioned, we haven't seen much of a change from March. I'm not gonna necessarily specifically call out that that means year-over-year percentages haven't changed. We'll repeat what Darren Field shared. April and May a year ago was actually when things in intermodal really started sort of taking off and we felt rail network was performing well. We were onboarding a bunch of new bids and awards that we were receiving before the rail network really, and the fluidity challenge really peaked in kind of the late June, July period.
We do have a little bit tougher comps in May and June, but we haven't seen much of a change in sort of the volume or demand outlook since what we saw in March.
The only thing I would maybe add is that we have been optimistic about the awards that we've been getting through the bid season in intermodal, as well as in highway. Unfortunately, going back to that bid compliance, it's just not materializing in real freight. You know, you go into a bid, you have a strategy. You wanna grow in these areas, you want this amount of volume, and by and large, we've accomplished those things. With compliance at an all-time low, it's just not translated into incremental volume the way we had anticipated through the bid season that it would. Yet, anyhow.
Can you put that into perspective in as much as you can describe it in terms of what happens with pricing in this part of the cycle, right? You're not gonna answer a specific intermodal question, but in this part of the cycle, when you have truck availability so weak, what, you know? Compare your amount that's under consistent contract and people looking for capacity versus how you have to compare and contrast with the spot market. I think if I remember right, you're pretty kind of as opposed to trucking, which is all that March through May bid or overwhelming amount is much more balanced at intermodal. Can you give perspective on that?
We talk, I think, in intermodal, and I think it's a little bit different on highway, 30-30, 30-10. 30% implemented in first quarter, second quarter, third quarter versus fourth quarter. And if you think about when that pricing action occurs, it's the quarter prior. We effectively reprice 30% in Q4 that implements in Q1. You would expect us to be about 40% through with new awards, new implementations by the end of the first quarter. In light of this environment, we've seen shippers pull their bids forward. I think we shared on the first quarter, we were about 50% through new implementations. That doesn't mean that we have 50% of our business all under new contracts in Q1. That's where we kinda landed at the end of March.
You'll obviously have a greater portion of your book of business repriced in Q2 versus Q1 and Q3 versus Q2 before, I guess, October, so we'll start the process all over again. In terms of, I think your question was relative to the truck market, our transcon volumes were down 9% in Q1. That is typically where you see the widest spread between a truckload rate and intermodal rate. You know, say historically, that's 20%-25%. What's driving that weakness in volume is largely related to imports coming into Southern California. What I've shared is our SoCal, Southern California outbound volumes are obviously worse than the down 9, you know, maybe other elements of the network. For example, inbound SoCal is doing better than that down 9.
That does have a mixed impact on our business in terms of yield or revenue per load. What I think is important, though, is our East Coast volumes were up 1% in Q1. You think about the network, the shorter length of haul, where we're gonna compete in intermodal more directly with truck, it's in the East. You know, at least I could still say we grew volumes in Q1 in the East, which is the most truck competitive, granted they were up 1%. What happens in highway, what happens with contract truckload rates will influence what's happening intermodal. I would say it's probably not to the degree, probably doesn't see the same volatility.
Maybe just, you know, we had the Chairman of the STB here, you know, talking about the continued and sustained poor performance on the West Coast from the rails, and their need for employees. How is the, you know, Burlington's network had a, had a bit of an overall too, right? They've moved off Swift and Schneider and Hub Group years ago onto the UP network. How has Burlington's network responded in as much as you can talk about your service levels, and, you know, from the railroad?
Yeah, I mean, I'll share what Darren shared on our earnings call and say that, you know, we've seen meaningful improvements in rail velocity and fluidity and service in general, and that I think at the time, we were saying we were, you know, pretty close to being at pre-pandemic levels from a service perspective. I think the caveat there, hey, pre-pandemic service levels weren't necessarily great, but we've certainly come a long way in the last, call it, 12 months from where we were to where we are today. There's a lot of capacity on the rail system where we are. Now we certainly have a lot of capacity with our Western rail provider, and so a lot of opportunities for growth in the future, and that's obviously all the investments that we've talked about that we're making today.
Maybe they're not for the second half of 2023, but you know, J.B. Hunt's always managed its business for the long term, and a lot of the investments and things we're doing with our people, things we're doing with our facilities, things we're doing with our capacity and our containers and our chassis and our trucks and our technology are all for what we think that opportunity looks like three and five years from now.
Nick, I guess we're kinda getting to the end here, but, you know, how do you think about, you know, long-term ROIC levels, you know, given, you know, your prior chairman talked about the Purple Cow type of investments, you know, where to focus and how to pivot. You know, given new investments in brokerage last mile, dedicated, you know, outside of dedicated intermodal, how do you think about, you know, how to direct that capital and what that can do for JBH?
I mean, that's our North Star is ROIC. We have targets for each of the business units on how we wanna deploy our capital. We still feel very strongly about all five segments. We're investing heavily in them for the long term. We're not worried about the next two quarters. We wanna execute the best we can there. Our vision of where we're gonna put our capital and our trucks on the dedicated side, we don't buy the trucks or the trailers until we have a signed ink on the contract, it's kinda a pull system. On the intermodal side, we made that announcement on our capital on our containers, we're in it for the long haul.
We think we got a lot of capacity available on the BNSF to fill up, and so we're still making those capital investments there. On the brokerage side, we're still making some small investments on the technology side from a capital standpoint, but we've got past the big hurdles, I would say, in that. We are very disciplined on our capital, and if there's another area that we think we can invest in that's logically adjacent, we're always open to it, but we're driven by what our customers need and want. We try to give a proper return back to our investors.
I think the way our CEO says that all the time, what do our customers need or want? Do we feel like we can be successful at it, and can we generate a fair return? Really, as long as we can answer those three things, Ken, it would open up ideas of where we might go next, if we feel like we can say yes to all three of those things.
I guess just to wrap it up then, if I hear you right, and again, you know, I want to get your input on this, but no real green shoots continued, no real changes from March. Still low bid compliance, some tailwinds on operating ratio, whether it's lower fuel, but you counter that with some rising costs, need to replace equipment. Still tough backdrop. Any other message you would wanna leave with us?
It's a matter of when, not if.
Matter of when, not if.
That's what our CEO said at the end of our first quarter call, and we'll stick with that, so.
Outstanding. Brad, Nick, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you.
coming to the conference.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank y'all.
Thanks, Ken.