We're going to get started here. Welcome everybody in the room, people on the webcast. Second and final day for Deutsche Bank's 2023 Transportation Conference. Today is Intermodal and LTL Day. We're really, really excited to have J.B. Hunt here, representing the company, President of Intermodal and Executive Vice President, Darren Field, Senior Vice President of Finance and Investor Relations, Brad Delco. Thank you, gentlemen, for being here. Really appreciate your time. There's a lot, a lot to talk about. There's a lot going on. We're in a freight recession. Things aren't getting worse. Maybe they're not getting much better as we would expect, but it felt like your comments on the last quarter call were cautiously optimistic around what your customers are telling you about inventory, where they are.
Maybe we can just start with kind of, Darren, your, your high-level view on the state of demand and what your customers are telling you, if there's any indication that we're coming out of this, this, this long, dark tunnel?
Sure.
The last 12 months.
Sure. Well, appreciate the conference, Amit. Thanks for thanks for having us, for sure. You know, when we came out of the second quarter and talked about the environment, that cautious optimism was maybe built from a few conversations with customers that had, had clearly dealt with their inventory and felt like things might return to what they would have called normal, but not every customer. That was the part of the reason for caution, is you had some customers that I think reacted faster than others and created a faster move back to what was normal for them. You had a lot of customers out there with a lot of unknowns about what the rest of the year would, would hold. Here we are in August.
I don't know that a lot's changed, meaning there are customers out there talking about, look, inventory's out of the system, sales are hanging in. We expect volumes to be more normal. I don't have any customers really predicting a significant peak season, so we're not hearing a lot about needs for capacity in an elevated manner for the holiday shopping season. Not hearing a lot of that. You know, at the end of the day, I think, I think we haven't changed a lot in that our customer base, while there are some that are a little bit more positive, there's still several that are not very positive at all, don't feel like they're going to have a lift, or maybe they're not yet back to normal.
That cautious optimism was built around a handful of, or the, the, that group of customers giving a little bit of positive tone, but it's cautioned by that group of customers still talking about weakness in their demand. We're, we're still in a little bit of a wait and see. We're still built for more. We're ready for our customers to have more, more demand. We feel like the services we're providing are, are standing up and showing improvement so that the customer experience is, is good. We feel good about where we're at as an organization. I think it's still just a wait and see on the economy in general.
Yeah.
What's going on there.
I think that's a very fair and balanced view. I guess my question would be, just on that, how much of that is kind of fully baked now for the rest of the year? Because when I think about what we buy for the holidays, the season, a lot of that got closed several months ago. It's been moved inland, a couple months ago, and it's staged for when we ultimately find it on our store shelves. Is there, is there an opportunity for maybe this outlook to change, or are we kind of in an environment now where if the rest of the several months we have left of the year is not fully baked, and now we look to 2024?
I would say it all relies on the consumer. How are those retail sales numbers? Certainly, the items that would have been shipped for what would be a traditional holiday shopping season, you're right. With availability of capacity, if a customer sees an uptick in orders, they can still react to get inventories here in time for a holiday season in this environment. That's different than what was the experience during the pandemic. Clearly, if you didn't have your plan in August, it wasn't going to be here. That's not necessarily the case. I don't hear a lot of customers believing that's going to happen, but they're all kind of saying, "Well, I don't know.
Sales are hanging in, but maybe it's, maybe it's not the kinds of items that would require real advanced ordering." I, I don't know. I think, I think it's a really big mixed bag in terms of the customer, but what can happen to change that outlook at this point, to me, is 100% reliant upon what's the consumer going to do over the next couple of months. Know that anybody's predicting it to change, I'm, I'm not, but that's the, that's the one thing that could change.
Looking at the last quarter, you know, the, the, the trends over the last several quarters have been, you know, eastern, eastern network holding up pretty well. Transcontinental, kind of the mix has definitely favored eastern. That changed last quarter. You saw a little bit of weakness in the eastern network. Obviously, truckload capacity has really moved, so, within the rail services is quite a bit better, especially with your eastern partner, Norfolk. What's the dynamic there in terms of what happened relative to the mix on transcon versus Eastern? Are we seeing any, any improvement on the service side in terms of.
I think the inventory reset was a big factor throughout the first half of the year on transcon volumes. Really, a lot of customers had inventories. Imports were down. You could see that in the port data. As that volume has improved from all-time lows in the first quarter, there has been a benefit there. I think the pricing cycle gave us an opportunity to win back business that maybe we couldn't bring on during the pandemic, so that was a good opportunity for us to just kind of fix the balance out there. Mostly it was a slight lift in imports, driving more transcon volumes.
In the Eastern network, as much as anything, in 2022, we weren't able to execute as much volume there as was available to us, just given we the longer velocity and the tightness in equipment. As the first part of the year went on, we had available capacity to onboard business that was in the Eastern network. You had better service from NS. We do use both railroads in the East. We use CSX, too, certainly, and are have seen better service from both. We know that we have to compete with the highway, both from a value proposition, but also on service, and feel like they've both performed well for us.
Are we through the pricing cycle this year? I mean, we've obviously taken two pretty big step downs sequentially in pricing the last couple of quarters. I think the majority of the new pricing has been implemented, and you've got a little bit left to go in the third quarter. What's the latest? Because, you know, the volumes are kind of in a race against the pricing to, to protect the margin. In the second quarter, the margins were below your expected kind of target, long-term target range. Are we gonna have a little bit more of a reset on pricing and yield in the third quarter before we start to recover? Yield is a little bit of them before. Maybe talk about that.
Well, we've, we've long said that the pricing cycle for the 2023 calendar year pricing for us begins, we'll call it October 1st, just as a put a stake in the, in the ground to, to identify when a cycle begins. We have always said we implement roughly 10% of the prices in the fourth quarter, 30% in each Q1, Q2, and Q3. There, there is material implementation of the current cycle throughout the, the third quarter. I gave you the traditional 10, 30, 30, 30.
There was pull forward.
I think there was a pull forward, it, it might be a little less than what is what we would consider more normal. I don't have a number for you on that.
Yeah.
Certainly, there is some left to implement throughout in the third quarter. Then in the third quarter, you have a fully implemented second quarter. You know, while you know, some bids are implementing in May and June, until you get to the third quarter, you don't, you don't see the full impact of what implemented throughout the second quarter.
Volumes kind of lackluster sequentially, another, you know, step down in yield, maybe less, less meaningful than what we saw over the last couple of quarters. I mean, all your cost leverage sits in volume. I think you've talked about this quote spring analogy for a while.
Mm-hmm.
These third quarter kind of look a lot like, at least the intermodal business, a lot like the second quarter. You know, we're now kind of waiting for the volume recovery to, to, to absorb some of those fixed costs better.
Well-
Third quarter is just looking a lot like, maybe even a little bit worse than before, like...
Everybody else admit you're gonna have to wait for the third quarter to finish.
Yeah, I know, is there anything, is there anything in that logic that doesn't make sense? There's only three variables: volume, pricing, costs.
Certainly, our costs remain elevated, and we have more equipment than we're using. That was true in the second quarter. That will be true in the third quarter. That will be true in the fourth quarter. Yeah, with prices, and we've, we've highlighted, kind of, you, you can see where we were at in the second quarter, and I'm, I'm certainly not delivering anything positive on price right now. Logic would say you're not gonna see moves there. I mean, at the end of the day, volume remains the big, the biggest trigger for us.
Yeah.
You know, we're, we're still. We're built for more than we're doing. While we have some customers that are growing, we have other customers that are not, and so it, it remains kind of a mixed bag. Yeah, we, we would anticipate as the year goes on, we continue to get benefits of an improving service environment. There are still highway conversion opportunities that trickle in. It's not. These aren't big volume swings. You're, you're not gonna see anything substantial until we see the economy and the import flows really, really improve.
Over the last three or four years, you've had, I think, kind of had a lot more opportunity, more opportunity to make more money than you did because you did the right thing by the customers. You were there, you honored the commitments, even though there was plenty of opportunity to make more money. I think that's a credit to kind of how you look at the partnership you have with your customers. It, it feels, though, that-
... Back to your shippers, it's not necessarily reciprocated at the same level.
Well, you know, at the end of the day, the customer is the customer. We knew that in 2020, when we honored prices while costs were increasing, and we were catching a lot of heat over our margin. We felt confident that over the long-. Asking for extra capacity, and then they only use a smaller percentage, we begin to build in that history of that customer and kind of plan our capacity around that. In an environment where you run out of capacity, then I think that customer, that's when that sort of what is our experience with that customer comes into play. The bid compliance became a subject over the last five years as customers really began to elevate their bid volumes.
I think bid compliance throughout the back half or the second quarter really did see some improvement, not because volumes improved, because the customers began to reflect a more accurate volume in the bid. Where maybe they had bid 100 loads in a lane previously, they dropped it to 60, all of a sudden, bid compliance is now on that particular bid on that lane, maybe 85%-90%. Right. It's because they took volume down. I don't know that our willingness to honor our commitments in pricing means that we can hold the customer any more accountable to the volume they put in their bid. We wanna win business that's valuable to our network, when we see a bid in the environment we're in today, we're not pricing portions of lanes, you know.
There have been times in the past where you maybe had to manage your capacity a little tighter, we're clearly nowhere near running out of capacity at this stage, we're happy to win what the customers have.
You guys have been pretty price disciplined, and, you know, your staffing costs is... You're not leaning into volume opportunity with price, and you're suffering a little bit with bid compliance. That also implies kind of what the upturn could look like when volumes come back. Because the pricing underneath it all is actually still pretty good. It's down, but it's still pretty good. You've got this... I also think, like, you guys talk about people first, and I don't think you've pulled, like, the headcount lever at all.
If I look at J.B. Hunt, J.B. Hunt historically has run a little bit heavy on cost because that's what it's taken to deliver a good service, and I assume that's kind of what you mean from a coil spring perspective. Talk about, like, the positive... I, I don't really know what I'm asking here, but, like, I, I think the question I have is that, we think of J.B. Hunt as kind of a longer cycle pricer, pricing story. Actually, when volumes come back, because pricing has been relatively decent, there's a big amount of positive operating leverage from the pricing and the people side- Sure. -that I don't think is appreciated. Do you think that's a fair statement, or are we going to wait till the second half of 2025?
Well, I think it's a very fair statement in that the negative pressure on price today, we anticipated and expected that the, the, the ability to raise prices in the weaker velocity time window from 2021 and 2022, there were costs that existed from every load took more days, so to have more assets tied up on a load for longer, and you had to price that in, and then the market allowed for that. Well, as velocity improves from the rail system, better, better service from our railroads, customers are unloading the equipment faster. We fully anticipated and expected customers to get a benefit from that, and that's part of the, the downward pressure and price. You're right in that overall revenues per, per load is, is hanging in above, say, pre-pandemic levels.
Certainly. Sure. Yeah. Sure. Sure.
Important distinction that we get compared to a lot of peers that don't realize that some of those metrics are with or without fuel. Yeah. Yeah. Worth pointing out.
Yep. Absolutely, the, the, the coil spring analogy is meant to highlight, as volume returns, volume is maybe worth more to us in this environment than it ever has been. I, I will always say, look, price will move the margin needle faster than volume, really, all the time. Yeah. In this current environment, with our asset base and the makeup of our equipment, it's, it's a little bit more weighted towards volume. It's not worth more than price, but it's worth more than it used to be, given how much equipment we own and where we're at with the asset base.
You know, more volume unlocks efficiencies that might be harder to see with our drayage fleet. I mean, we have 7,000 drivers out there, and layering on volume actually makes that driver's time more effective and more efficient, and that spits out margin benefits or, or cost take out, not just container utilization. That's always the, the metric that gets the most attention. Certainly our drayage operation is enormous, and, and efficiency pickups in that group can be very important. How can we work with our rail providers to give them an opportunity to be more efficient in their terminals? Volume actually can do that. It helps everybody.
I think the point is that we don't think about J.B. Hunt as inherently a very high operating leverage business, because so much of your costs are variable, at least if you purchase transportation. You prove that out in this downturn. Incremental margins are very, very low on a year-over-year basis. The point is that the incrementals can be quite high on the upturn.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's the point. That's what's different maybe this time.
You, you kind of had this in your comment before, we've been consistently delivering a message about remaining committed to our investments. Those three investments are people, technology, and capacity. You kind of started the question or statement off before when, when Darren answered it, you know, It's, it's not necessarily different this cycle versus prior cycles. You know, we think we've been a company that has always thought about taking good care of your people, because your people take care of your customers, and you take care of your customers. That's how you build a company that can sustain long-term growth.
What is unique or different, maybe this cycle, is the amount of capacity available with intermodal, really based on the announcement in March of 2022, going to 150,000 containers, and what we think the opportunities are well beyond this quarter, next quarter, and even next year.
Any questions for J.B. Hunt?
Well, I think about this cycle, if you look at your long-term, like, forecasts for e-commerce growth, like what you have now in capacity, it's probably not even enough for that, right? Massive destocking right now. Like, e-commerce is a secular growth, right? Like in two, three years, half the destocking cycle, you're probably going to need that equipment. How do you kind of square those two things between, like, the interim of a destocking cycle and the long term of, like, e-commerce is still growing and still not as big a part of retail sales as it probably will be?
Well, I mean, the, the, the mission will always be to talk to our customers, learn what their expectations are, try to be out in front of the, the capacity additions. I do think that the announcement of up to 150,000 is just a starting point. We don't want to stop when that's done. We would anticipate.
Right.
further growth, and we gave the three to five-year window because we wanna speed that up or slow it down to the extent that we can. Naturally, right now, we've probably taken a little pressure off that. It's just being prudent with our, with our investment dollars. Our ability to, to be in front of the capacity demand is very important to our customers, and it does create a lot of loyalty, maybe not in the form of bid compliance, but it certainly creates a lot of, of loyalty out of the customer base to know that we're out in front and acquiring that equipment. You know, hey, the pandemic hit us, and we ran out of equipment. At the time when the customers needed you the most, we didn't have enough.
There's a lot of reasons for that, and it, it gave us. You can't prepare for that scenario. I mean, there is no such thing as prepared for what happened, right? Certainly, being out in front with capacity and talking to our customers about their expectations and what their plans are. More than anything, we price millions and millions of loads every year that are still on the highway, that intermodal is the right answer for. As we add this capacity and work with our rail providers to see a better service program that we can deliver to those customers for their business-to-business transactions, we can continue to grow intermodal for some decades. There's.
Yeah, this is a question out of left field, but any way to convert those trailers into pup trailers and move some ocean loads to the middle of it? It's a joke. It's a joke.
One thing I wanted to add, though, I mean, your question really is, you know, I think we've effectively said we have 15%-20% latent capacity in our intermodal system today, and that's, there's-- that's on the whole networks, that's people, that's chassis, that's trucks, that's drivers, that's also containers. When we're thinking about making these investments in containers, one, you know, the cost of containers, not that much, but these are 20+ year assets. When we were modeling out what the return on this investment would look like, there was certainly an expectation that, the long-term secular trend, whether it be e-commerce, whether it be retail, whether it be demand for intermodal, wasn't going to be a straight line. You know, again, when we think about making investments, we're always thinking longer term.
Sure, we have too much capacity today, but again, over the next 20+ years, I think Darren and our whole company feels very confident in what type of returns those investments would make.
Just on that point, because it gets a lot of attention, but the structural cost of the box is not really significant over a 20, 25-year useful life, and the variable costs can be year zero if you stack them. I mean, I think, I think when the market turns, everybody will be happy that you have that capacity on the ready than, you know, where we are today. So, so we get it. Sequentially, it's tough right now. We're waiting for volume to recover. So that's all very clear. I remember I was in your office in Arkansas on March 14th of last year, and you shuttled me out of there by noon very quickly because that's the same day you announced the BNSF Northern, you know, joint initiative is what you were calling it.
I remember, Darren, I met you the last, 11:00 in the afternoon, there was very, you clearly think there is a massive opportunity to grow this business. You know, I was reading Progressive Railroading a few months ago, Kathryn Farmer, she's the only CEO of a railroad that actually mentioned a partner like J.B. Hunt. It's very clear that you both are on the same page about the opportunity to grow this business, they're investing billions of dollars in box out from other, other, other intermodal terminals. Just, you know, we, we get caught up in so much of the cyclical day to day, week to week, month to month, but just talk about if you sit back and see, what does this business look like in three or four years? How much...
You're moving two million loads a year now.
Yeah.
Can that be 2.5, three million? I mean, what, what is the opportunity?
Well, like I said, we price millions and millions of loads. It's, you know, upwards of 10 million loads a year that we see where we think intermodal is the right answer. The customer is not buying intermodal for a reason. How do we eliminate the hesitancy to use intermodal? That relationship with BNSF is so important to us because we can build out a way we communicate together, frankly, different than what we believe can happen when there's multiple channels that are all needing to sort of live inside a set of rules based on how that railroad wants it to, to function. When there were multiple channels on BNSF, that's how it functioned for us, too.
It was, "Hey, these are the conditions, so you have to execute this way." Soon as the other channels exited, I think that Kathryn Farmer comes into our office and meets with John Roberts and our executive team. We talk to each other. What do we need to do that isn't available in the market between an intermodal provider, drayage provider, and a railroad? What can we do together that's different? I think that that's what we're in a series of discussions about. We have employees on site inside their operating center today in Fort Worth, Texas, that are making a difference in the way our service product rolls out to our customers. That's never in our 30+ year history with them, we've never had employees working in their offices. Now they have people in ours.
It just helps provide a better service experience for the customer, which gets at that highway conversion opportunity where there is still freight out there, moving over the highway, that customers hesitate for whatever reason. Typically, it's a business transaction for that customer. They're shipping to their customer, and they're not using intermodal for whatever reason. We have to eliminate what those are, and it, it all is inside a combination of speed and consistency. I think that that's where we're energized by our relationship with BNSF, because we have each other's attention around, "Look, we can't be successful unless they are, and I'm not sure they can be as successful as they want to be unless we are.
Is that just as simple as having a CEO that's, you know, that knows the intermodal business really well, that's more growth centric? Certainly, Norfolk is like that now, too, and that's been different over the last five, six years.
Well, look, I think, you know, BNSF is the largest intermodal provider railroad by a significant margin. Norfolk Southern, I think, moves more volume than UP intermodally.
Yep.
They're both committed. They both have excellent networks to support intermodal services in the population bases. CSX does a great job, and we use CSX, too. I don't ever want to not highlight that. CSX serves markets that NS doesn't, and NS serves some markets where BNSF, or CSX doesn't serve. It's important for our network to be able to answer for our customers that we can really serve North America without any gaps. That's important to us. I think that Katie's experience with intermodal in her past is helpful, but I think that her mindset as a customer service, customer-focused leader is what's really driving a lot of this. I think all of the railroads care deeply about their customers.
You know, I'm not familiar with the Union Pacific, but the rest of those railroads, I mean, they all want to, to have growth with their customers. I think Katie and BNSF, Alan, with NS, I mean, they've been very focused on: What do we have to do to give you a better service product to go convert that freight? Their actions are, are following up with real, real efforts that make a difference. I don't know if it's because of experience in intermodal or not. It's just they want to grow their railroads, and that's one of the methods they're using to grow their railroads.
In terms of the long-term opportunities, so we get to 150,000 containers, I think we're at 115 now or something like that, and maybe you've done them 1.7x, 1.8x . I, I don't know if stock trends is even that interesting right now because there's no demand or very little demand for all this to-.
I hate looking at the number right now.
Yeah, I mean, it's.
Mm-hmm.
But if we get to, like, that 1.7, 1.8, we were at two several years ago, now we're at, like, 1.3, 1.4, whatever we're at, I mean, maybe not that low, but 1.4. If we get to 1.7, 1.8, I mean, 50% uplift in volume. Is that, is that crazy? I mean, is that, is that, is that the opportunity over the?
Not in, not in our opinion, it's not crazy at all. You know, the opportunity to go grow the highway conversion I mentioned, and then continue to see expansion of the transload opportunity, that's an enormous market for, for us. You know, there's, there's kind of three ways for us to grow intermodal. Organic growth with our customers will always be important. Highway conversion, and then where a international piece of equipment is going intact intermodal, how and why should domestic intermodal take over that move?
Sorry. When do we see that idiosyncratic opportunity? Because a lot of the investments BNSF is making are long cycle investments, Barstow not going to be around till 2027 maybe, or something like that. Are we just now in a cyclical mode over the next 12 months, or do we start to see some of that relationship that you've been working on for 1.5 years, really start to translate to, like, real idiosyncratic opportunities?
I would anticipate it starts before they open Barstow. That's not the only element-
Sure.
To getting that opportunity. I think what we're doing with BNSF to improve the service product can get us benefit more on the shorter term.
Sure.
As we convert off the highway. Our opportunity and belief that volume will return, you know, later this year, next year, I don't know when.
Yeah.
We're built for it and ready for it. I don't know how to tell you the when, I just know that we're prepared and we're delivering excellent service. Our customers believe in our product, and when they need it, they're going to use more of it. I think the transload opportunity, that takes a little longer to kind of talk a BCO through that process. That's. That takes a little bit more effort. We'll continue to see how does, how does, how does that work? In today's environment, the steamship pricing into the interior is not. It's a little harder to translate the value to the customer, just at the moment. I don't know how long that will last.
Transloading has been a big thing.
Mm-hmm.
especially during the... Sorry, Richard, sorry. Just in terms of the pandemic, a lot of the 20 ft, 40 ft equivalent didn't want to make it way in, and so it drove a lot of transload. Is that, is that still an issue? I mean, transloading obviously makes a lot of sense, probably economically, but is there, is there a little bit more relaxing of the need for transloading, which obviously disproportionately impacts-
I think just with imports being down, it might look like that. I think transload has taken share from intact intermodal for the last decade, it's been growing. We used to say, of the imports that came through Los Angeles, a third stayed local or were consumed in the market, a third went intact, and a third transloaded. I don't know what the number is now, but it's more than a third are transloading, and I, I believe that over time, that shift will continue. The other element is just how much business found its way to an East Coast port instead of the West Coast during the pandemic, and just all the different adjustments to supply chains customers had to make. Will, will, will any of that business come back to the West Coast? My opinion is, yes, it will.
I mean, there's, there's too many advantages to the supply chain through the West Coast. We would anticipate that there's an opportunity to see maybe a growth in volume demand in the West Coast that might not have been an opportunity for us when it imports through the East, or at least it was more of a highway opportunity. I'm not sure intermodal was the right answer for a load to Atlanta coming through Savannah. We're not going to participate in that, right?
Right.
Maybe there's the, the opportunity to convert that to a West Coast. It just depends. Every customer will, will, will build their supply chain for their needs, but we believe the West Coast opportunity gives the customers a, a, a best option when importing from, from Asia.
Hey, Darren, I know you're reluctant to give any real guidance, so just on... Going back to your macro framework, a little bit, you know, I think the commentary around you not hearing a lot about Christmas, a lot about a significant peak season, customers still not being really very positive. I think those are taking that incrementally more negative. Just curious if that was your intention, or just to offset that, are you seeing green shoots?
Yeah, the guidance thing, I get beat up by this guy anytime I say the term "green shoots." What. All I can say is, hey, we've got customers that are talking about growing, and we have customers that are saying their sales are depressed. When you mix it all together, it's cloudy. There's a cloudy picture out there. I don't, you know, in terms of the rest of the year, I don't, I don't think I-
I guess, it's, it's a good question because, you know, on the conference call, there was cautious optimism, and now. I mean, I don't, I don't know, are you trying to signal that maybe that cautious optimism, three or four weeks later, is-.
I'm not trying to signal anything.
Yeah.
I'm trying to-
Maybe just.
to say, I can't, I can't get from where we were in July until we get October. You can see the results of the third quarter, I'll be happy to talk about them then. I can't give you any kind of-
Yeah
-Directional movement. We continue to believe in our product. We're seeing great service out of our rail providers. We have, you know, the, the comparisons to last year at this time changed quite a bit from the second quarter.
Yeah.
You know, we continue to believe intermodal is the, the best answer for our customers, for their long length of haul transportation. We're going to keep working every day to grow it.
Let's just hit a couple other. Anybody have any questions on intermodal?
Can I just on, on that real quick? The, just for a couple of quarters, you guys were talking about the customers sort of saloon-dooring you, telling you, "Hey, we're going to have a lot of loads," and then kind of pulling back on it after you had committed to giving them the capacity. Today we see Target guiding down. Just, is that the type of thing that you saw? Was it on the retail side? Was it a different customer base?
It's kind of across the board. I don't have a specific industry, vertical. I'm not going to call the retailers worse than the food shippers or the industrial products. I mean, everybody asked for more capacity than what they were actually using. As... I think they believed it when they asked for it.
Yeah.
As their own economies began to say, "Okay, what am I gonna-- what are my sales gonna be like?" They saw a decline in their, in their need for capacity. Nobody was. I don't know that I would say it's. There may be a little bit of intentionality to maybe 10% more capacity than I'm going to use, but nobody was out asking for 50% more than on purpose. I really don't believe that they were doing it.
I guess you're curious, I'm just wondering how many times it's pulled back like that and how many times it's flipped the other way, where they're like, "Hey, I need to-
Bid compliance over the last decade has gotten progressively worse over time, and it has never fully reached back to, you know, 10 years ago, bid compliance was high 80s, low 90 percentiles. Customers would actually tender you those loads. Then I think we got into maybe the polar vortex in 2014, created a little bit of a unique change in the way the customers bid, and over time, they've increased their bid volume and then used less of it, and we've taken that into account. I don't think that when we win a bid, that we're saying: Okay, I don't need to win any more freight because I just filled up my capacity. It's not, it's not creating any kind of behavior from us that's different than it would be if their compliance were stronger. Does that make sense? I don't know.
Technology probably has 360, and the visibility into alternative capacity is also better than it ever has been.
We get opportunity to talk about the other four areas of our business.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. J.B. Hunt has more than just an intermodal business that, if people didn't know.
I'm the intermodal guy.
Yeah, he is. Yeah, Darren is the intermodal guy. I want to talk about dedicated and brokerage. Dedicated is very steady, very resilient, been actually a great performer. What's kind of right expectation from your Brad, and then, and then ICS, it just feels like it's been, it's been a little bit disappointing, in terms of bottom line performance? When do we start to see, like, you know, ICS get back to black and, and more meaningfully so? I know it's a tough environment, but maybe you could talk about that, too.
Yeah, I'll hit dedicated first, and Darren, if I miss something, please step in. You know, the, the pipeline, as, as Nick alluded to, on our call, is still active. We sold, I believe it was 370 trucks in the second quarter, 200 trucks in the first quarter. A nice little acceleration. There's still opportunities out there to convert private fleet into a dedicated arrangement. As a just hit on for the benefit of folks that may or may not know, dedicated, these are typically five-year deals, underwritten to ROIC targets. There's annual price escalators built in around ECI and CPI, and the capital that we deploy to service the customers in with these contracts is all success-based. The contracting process is typically about 15 months, 12-15 months.
When we get the signature, we'll go out and procure the trucks or the trailers. Yeah, so success-based CapEx being, being deployed, with a, with a contract that has teeth to it, underwritten to ROIC targets. Really like that business. I think you're seeing some of the resiliency of that business here in the, in the more recent quarters. In terms of, you know, if, if I were to add any cautionary comments around dedicated, you know, there are opportunities where we will want to make sure we're serving our customer as efficiently as possible, where we will redesign how their freight moves, and as a result, we may pull trucks from that account.
We've seen that, and so that's when we think about the gross sales and adds we've had versus where we are seeing maybe a 20 truck fleet shrink down to 17. You put that over 750 accounts, and that sort of stunts the growth, if you will. The language I think we shared on our second quarter earnings call was that we would expect our fleet count to stay relatively flat for the remainder of the year.
Yeah.
But still seeing success with growth. We... Is there anything on dedicated?
Well, I was just going to say, too, throughout the pandemic, we had, you know, a, a backup in supply from the OEMs, and we held trades, and so those fleets have been a little heavier on truck count than intended while you're dealing with an, an aged fleet, and you had a little bit more downtime for maintenance. 2023 has given us the opportunity. There's a little bit of right-sizing of the fleet size in 2023 as we catch up on the trade cycle. That's going to inherently take some trucks out of that. Well, out of both, intermodal and dedicated, we had a little bit of extra equipment...
... While we were holding trades. Yeah. Then quickly on, on ICS, it is, as, as most people are aware, it's a, it's a challenging market in the truck market. Contract and spot rates are been under a considerable amount of pressure.
Yeah.
As we were making a lot of investments, in that area of our business, you know, the focus was on scaling, and that was scaling the investments we made in technology as well as, brokerage is very much a people business. We have been a little bit less reactionary, and on certain areas of our cost. We remain committed to our investments, as I said before, around people, technology, and capacity. I think there's a lot of work being done, both in truck. There's some unique demands for power-only services. We call that 360box. Some of our competitors combine power only in their brokerage or logistics businesses, and we, we sort of have those separated, but volumes were up 6%.
I would tell you, our power-only volumes were up significantly more than that. There's, we still believe, a really healthy long-term opportunity to, to provide drop trailer and capacity, leveraging J.B. Hunt 360, to source those third-party carriers to move freight more efficiently. I, I just think when you think collectively about intermodal and the opportunities there, dedicated and just, you know, it's a very well-oiled machine. It's, it's, I don't want to say that the business is mature, but the, the processes and how we go out each and every day and execute on a model that seems to have a lot of opportunity for growth. We think the addressable market's $80 billion-$90 billion, I believe, is where we landed on that more recently.
Then, then still, how do we tackle and address and provide services in a very large truckload market, but in a way that we're comfortable with making investments because of our discipline around ROIC? Then, you know, we haven't hit on it yet, but final mile, and I, I want to make sure that we call out that that was a business we said, "Hey, we're going to focus on, making some improvements in profitability. We're going to put business at risk." We've made so many investments in our service, that now we're going to make sure that, that we're getting appropriately compensated for a differentiated service product. I think you started seeing a little bit of that as well here more recently.
I think across the scroll, a lot of opportunity and a lot of good work, and I think that's why, you know, we always remain focused on the long term, and we know that it's a little choppy right now, but we'll get through it, and we'll look up in the future, and we'll have a lot of more things to talk about.
I think quality and consistency kind of went out over time. Listen, when you guys are hopefully here and support our conference next year, and you're here at the same day, at the same chair, we'll be talking about an uncoiled-
Like that.
spring, and all the good things that come with that. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it, guys.
You bet. Thank you.
Thank you. Okay.