All right, great. Going to go ahead and get started, continuing on the rail track, at the conference this morning. We're very pleased to be joined by Norfolk Southern. From Norfolk, we have John Orr, Chief Operating Officer, and Jason Zampi, Chief Financial Officer. Gentlemen, thanks very much for joining us. I think I saw Michael Barr and Luke are also in the audience, so thanks, guys, for joining, and welcome to the conference.
Thanks, Chris.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
I think we're going to turn it over to you for a couple of intro comments. We can kind of get the ball rolling, and then we'll dig in for questions. For the folks in the audience, we do want to make it interactive, so if you do have questions, raise your hand. We'll make sure we'll get those questions asked and answered. With that, let me turn it over to you folks.
Yeah, thanks, Chris. It's great to be here, great to be in Chicago. Just coming in here this morning, it's a perfect day for railroading. Not too hot, nice and sunny, and I think that reflects on how the operations are running right now. Very scheduled, very disciplined, and as I look at the fundamentals of what we're doing, both from a connection standard, from a terminal capability, and how we're servicing our customers, things are right on track the way we would expect them to be. Very, very proud of the way the team has embraced our speak-up culture and really driving safety performance. It's really the enabler that allows us to be on a scheduled rail path, and I would say that, you know, very, very pleased on how things are going right now.
Yeah, and I think, you know, the momentum that we have on the operations side is really what's giving us a lot of confidence in, you know, some of the financial goals that we laid out from a perspective of $150 million plus of productivity and cost takeout. You know, made really good progress on that in the first quarter and moving strong there. Our goal of 3% revenue growth, and it will, you know, get into some of the components of that. Obviously, we've talked about the uncertainty related to tariffs and just the general macro there, but still feel good about that on that front. And then, you know, putting all that together, 150 basis points of OR improvement year over year. All in, you know, I think we're feeling good where we are.
The operations, like John said, are running really strong, and it's just given us a lot of confidence on where we're headed.
Great. Let's dig into that a little bit. Volume up, kind of mid-single digits, I think, quarter to date. Carloads have been moving nicely in that sort of high 130s, I think, on a weekly basis. Maybe we can kind of break down where you've seen the relative strength or where maybe there's some areas that are a little bit on the softer side.
Yeah. So, you know, overall, like you said, volume, we're up about 4.5% quarter to date. So, you know, pretty good progress there. I think the key things to think about are, you know, one, how does that volume growth manifest into revenue growth?
Yep.
Two, what do we see here as we are moving through June. On the first side, when we think about the volume growth going to revenue growth, you know, that 4.5% volume will not translate directly to 4.5% revenue growth. The reason is we have some pretty big headwinds, both from fuel that we have talked about as well as coal price. Those are two significant headwinds that we have laid out. To a lesser extent, we have some mixed impacts that are also affecting that. We would expect a lower revenue growth than that volume growth. The second piece is then, you know, okay, first two months of the quarter in the bag, how do we think June is progressing here? We are starting to see a little bit of softness, more than what we expected, probably.
Chris, you mentioned, you know, 130,000 units a week, high 130s, which is where we've been the last couple of weeks. That's a little lower than where we had been. It's a little bit, you know, broad-based. We're keeping our eye on it. It's something that we're definitely monitoring. You know, we'll definitely stay close to our customers on this and make sure we're looking at any leading indicators that, you know, point to any further degradation.
When you think about kind of how we thought 2Q might shape up, you had the potential for some lull in activity in the immediate aftermath of tariffs being implemented, and then maybe some pickup as China came back online after the tariffs were dropped from 145 down to 30. I guess, are we seeing any of that manifest on the network? You know, understanding you guys are on the eastern part of the United States, so a little less directly sort of exposed to that Western import market, but kind of how is that playing out?
Yeah, I think what we're seeing, there's kind of two things. One, you have some traffic that's kind of shifting back from West Coast to East Coast.
Yep.
You know, we had the disruptions, I do not know how many months ago that was, now a handful of months ago, you know, related to potential port strikes. Some of that volume is coming back, and we feel like we are well-positioned to handle that. From a, you know, air pocket or bubble, you know, we are not seeing that as significantly, maybe as what the West Coast is seeing, but it is there a little bit where, you know, our international volumes are ticking down a little bit there. Again, something to watch. I think the good side, John, is that when, you know, when that volume does come back or if, you know, we have any kind of surge that, you know, folks have been talking about, we are well-positioned to handle it.
Yeah, I think the capacity that we created to take on more business is helping us through the ebbs and the flows. The discipline on resources, the discipline on how we engage from, you know, over-the-road transit times and cranking the structural wheel on our zero-based plan has helped us get ready for the variability. We have got the resilience built in with a huge amount of discipline around cars and locomotives and even people. At the same time, we are able to respond on both sides of that equation, which is a strong fundamental that I was talking about earlier.
As you see carloads tick down a little bit, maybe a little bit of softness here picking up. John, from your perspective, what are the sort of the near-term or the immediate type of actions that you can take on the ops side to kind of help mitigate some of that?
Yeah, Chris, it's a strong continuation of the transformation we're under. Maybe it puts more emphasis on some aspects of it, but where we've seen ability to surge up, you know, we've rallied the team around every opportunity for revenue so that we don't get lost in the macro. Staying there connected with the commercial team has helped us, you know, jump on opportunities, whether it's center beams or coal or other markets that are going to come up, at the same time being ready in places like Chicago where there's a high degree of interchange from the West Coast or to and from the West Coast. I think those fundamentals and the discipline around that. Then we have the compounding value of the discipline around fuel and our energy management systems.
We're seeing some really strong productivity on fuel, so train, yield, weights, tons on top of, you know, new skills that we're building in to manage fuel a lot more fully. Those things are starting to really show up, and we get ready by being really good at being ready, and that resilience philosophy is giving us the ability to surge when we need to and be disciplined around our expense structure.
Jason, you had talked about some of the areas that there were areas of softness. Maybe we can dig into that a little. Anything specific jump off, you know, off the page at you in terms of what we should be thinking about? We obviously understand the dynamics around coal yields specifically, but within the commodity set, what is what sort of, you know, work and what's not?
Yeah, so I think maybe just kind of walking through them, you know, on the coal side, you've seen our volume trends there. You know, utility coal is really strong right now.
Yeah.
that's really due to a restocking phenomenon there as, you know, coming out of the relatively harsh winter into the summer. And then, you know, we've seen the net forward natural gas prices, you know, what's happening there. I think kind of building up those stockpiles as we move into the next winter season. Utility is looking pretty strong. On the export side, two things in the quarter. One, we have the comp versus last year with the, you know, the Baltimore port closure there. You know, we didn't move as much volume, but actually, John and the team did a great job of pivoting, so we were able to mitigate that some, but that is still a comp issue.
The other thing we're seeing on export coal, you talked a little bit about price, Chris, but we're actually starting to see that price degrade production a little bit. And, you know, again, something we're keeping our eye on. We recently had one of the mines that we serve on our lines announce, you know, the possibility of them closing down. I think it's, again, that the price point has finally reached, you know, a place where some of that production is being impacted.
Okay.
That's kind of the coal story from a volume perspective. Again, I think on intermodal, we talked a little bit about what we're seeing there on the international side. Domestic is probably relatively stable from, you know, the last several weeks. Then on the merchandise side, you know, kind of some puts and takes there. We're seeing some pressure within the steel markets, within grain, within our aggregates markets. So, you know, there's definitely some pressure there on the merchandise side.
Okay. So in terms of some of what you guys have laid out, you talked about the operating ratio improvement. I think, you know, on the last call, we talked a little bit about the potential for improvement in 2Q and 3Q, potentially getting those numbers down into sort of the, you know, maybe sub-64 kind of range. Maybe any thoughts around, you know, progress and puts and takes as you think about maybe getting that progress and, you know, hitting those numbers in 2Q, 3Q?
Yeah, I think for, you know, 2Q, just like you said, we kind of laid out, you know, normal seasonality if you think about going sequentially from 1Q to 2Q, 150-200 basis points. We're definitely going to outperform that from the 67.9 that we had in the first quarter. Also, the first quarter had some kind of unusual or, you know, one-time items with, we had really bad weather that we had to, you know, contend with. We had costs related to that as well as, you know, fuel headwinds and some, an incentive comp true-up adjustment. You kind of take out those things as well as the normal seasonality, and that really brings us to the, you know, the sub-64 for the second quarter. Feel good about that.
As we move into third quarter, you know, really ready for any volume surge that we see there. I think those mixed with all the productivity initiatives that John and the team are working on, you know, gives us a lot of confidence in that sub-64.
Got it. The $150 million of productivity improvements, I felt like that was a number you guys were highly confident on when we talked last, I guess, as we sit here.
Yep.
Kind of halfway through, is the kind of thing that you'll be sort of north of 50% of the $150 million as we get through 2Q? Is it like, how do we think about sort of the cadence through the rest of the year?
Yeah, I'll kind of hit it high level, and maybe John can talk about some of the specific components. But, you know, if you think about just the cadence of the year, obviously the back half of the year is, you know, a tougher comp. That's really when, you know, when John and the team hit the ground running, started pulling out a lot of costs. So we had to get more than 50%. We have to get more than 50% of that $150 million in the first half of the year. So we're well on our way there. I think the only other thing I would say is that the initiatives that are in place are really, you know, absent any volume, right? We're just, those, we will hit those regardless of what happens on the demand and the volume front. We proved that last year.
We had, you know, pretty much flat revenue, and yet we still took out almost $300 million of costs and improved productivity there. Again, I think we're feeling really good on that front.
Yeah, and as we work through it, Chris, the flywheel impact of, you know, continuous improvement from the structure of terminal performance, over-the-road performance, we're seeing the discipline of accurate car management manifesting itself into lower rents. We're looking at better over-the-road capability by reducing our drain stops through our war rooms and really digging into root cause analysis on why things are not moving the way they should and solving them in near real time. Eliminating waste and at the same time creating value through our better cycle times for unit trains, better cycle times for over-the-road performance. That has allowed us to get into our zero-based plan, which is a huge crank of the wheel for, you know, structural improvement. Taking out handlings, removing time from train schedules, and putting more emphasis on the management of the plan. The teams responded nicely to the challenge.
We have other elements that are just starting to come into their own, you know, returns through our mechanical discipline, the fuel initiatives, not only on how we burn fuel, but how we source it, the categorization of our resource management. You know, we just finished our 100-day review. Now it is into an implementation phase. That will start to bring yield across a wide swath of expense that we have. I think that balanced approach that is creating more capability than we have ever thought of, and at the same time taking out costs, is really pretty inspiring, and people are really catching on to it.
So you're about a year-ish, a little bit more than a year into the process.
Yeah.
At NS, and so maybe you can give us your view of the state of the railroad in terms of, you know, maybe what you thought coming in and where you stand now in terms of maybe the bigger picture opportunity for not just OR improvement, but of course we're interested in that, but just sort of in general getting the network, you know, operating efficiently.
Yeah, and look, when I came to NS, I had spent a lot of time in the East, in Canada particularly, and then the U.S., kind of Midwest. I know it to be an industrial complex. There are a lot of moving parts. There is a lot of discipline around how we serve customers and customer expectations. Layering on top of that, some of our biggest customers, you almost look at a product level because of the discipline around how we service first mile and last mile and really helping them compete. While we are looking at waste reduction, we are also looking at service improvement. We are stepping that up through our intermodal franchises, through our merchandise franchises. It is not one or the other. It is several items at the same time being elevated.
I would say that the maturity and the capability of the team has really amplified our ability to do all those things at once. I'm really, really pleased with the performance of the team, the environment that we're creating, and the skills that we're fostering in able to sustain the improvements that we've got. That's why I'm really confident on the $150 million. I know Jason and I, we hold ourselves to a much higher standard than that. We're going to push each other hard to get the most out of the network, create the most value we can, sustain really high levels of service for our customers because we want customers to be inspired to come to us. That's how we really create value, and that's the agenda.
I guess when you think about you joining the firm, I think, I do not know if it is fair to say you inherited some OR targets I think the company had laid out. I guess those still, those seem right? Do they seem, you know, conservative, aggressive? I do not know if you could put a finer point on what you think about sort of that $150 million over a multi-year period of time.
Yeah, look, I'm completely confident in what we published. You're right. I wasn't a part of the authorship of that, but that's life, right? You have certain expectations that you can create yourself and others that are created for you. The nice thing is our entire management team is aligned to achieving those objectives, no matter what their genesis and beyond, because we're committed for the long term in value creation for NS. We see what our network can give. We see where the customers want to go, and we're in the right place. We can be really highly competitive where we need to be, but also highly complementary in extending reaches of respective networks and even other modes of transportation that can really have a value plus plus when they work with NS.
I think too, one of the other things John talked about, you know, that the team is completely aligned. The other thing that's really great about this team is, you know, productivity isn't John's responsibility. Growth isn't Ed's responsibility. Everyone is engaged and involved in hitting these targets. It is really nice to see kind of, you know, everyone aligned and working towards these common goals together.
Let's talk a little bit about price. You know, obviously there's the coal piece in international export coal, and we understand that's a function to a degree of the commodity price. Maybe putting that aside for a moment and thinking about the opportunity that you see, better service, you know, opportunity, stable sort of backdrop from a freight cycle perspective. We'll see how that kind of plays out.
Right.
There's been cost inflation the last couple of years that the rails have probably underperformed in terms of capturing through prices. It's an opportunity this year. Do we need to wait to 2026 to start to see that pick up?
Yeah, so I think when I think about price, for me, the easiest thing to do is to kind of break it into a couple buckets. I'll talk about this absent fuel, right? I mean, we know we have some fuel headwinds, some significant fuel headwinds this year. If we break it into components, we talked about coal, right? The seaborne coal price is going to drive a significant headwind there. On the intermodal side, you know, heavily dependent on what's happening in the truck market, and that's really been kind of a gating factor for us this year, if you will, and, you know, feel like it's stabilized a little bit, but we don't have a lot of that upside baked into our plan, right? We're just assuming kind of flat going forward.
I think where you've seen and where we've really been able to achieve some good pricing is in our merchandise business. We've done that over, you know, over time consistently. I think with the service product that John and the team have created, it really helps, obviously, with those pricing discussions. Not just that, but it helps to bring share back onto our railroad, right? We had a period of time where, you know, we didn't have a great service product that was consistent enough for our customers to trust. You know, now I think they're seeing, hey, we can come back to NS, bring that freight back to them. The service product is really a double coupon there from a standpoint of we're getting price because of it, but also being able to attract volume back onto the railroad.
You know, I think what you should expect to see in the merchandise side from a pricing, core pricing, again, when you take out fuel is really, you know, inflation plus pricing. There is always going to be mixed effects in there, but I think we are, you know, feeling good about where we are from a price perspective in the merchandise business compared to our plan.
Intermodal was positive, I think, this last quarter, ex-fuel. So that, you know, I guess there is at least some degree to get, you know, and I do not know how much of that is mixed. It is a little hard to tell coming through the way you guys report, but I guess that at least is not flattered down in the context of a truck market that is probably not super strong at this point.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I think the way to think about it, you know, I think we might have been up 2% ex-fuel in first quarter, you know, kind of again, flattish from here. You know, so we'll see how it plays out, but we're not anticipating a significant rebound there.
Okay. John, I wanted to ask you about some of the potential regulatory FRA type of changes and maybe what that can open up in terms of productivity, whether it be on the inspection side or some of the other things that maybe there's going to be a bit more latitude for you to do on the ops side. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we at the AR and the SAMSI committees have really aligned around how do we implement technology to augment what people do and then to really create more consistency and capability for the rail. We embrace it at NS. You know, I turn to our portals, which give us a really good snapshot of the health of our cars and how we've developed over the course of the last eight months since our war room started on how do we deal with deviations. We've been able to energize the capabilities of not only the portals, but the technology around that. We found things that I would never have dreamt possible, you know, in such a short period of time. I'll give you an example. I was here at Christmas time and we had a broken wheel.
Because I was in Chicago, I went to the derailment and let my team sit in Atlanta. It really made me reflect on how do we get technology to find these things, not only on us, but on our partner railways much more quickly because this wheel came off of a short line. We were able to develop an algorithm and start identifying broken wheels to the tune of finding almost more than a dozen over the last few months that prevent real-time derailments. When I go to the FRA and talk about the implementation of technologies to inspect cars, it's not meant to replace people, but to identify things faster, protect our infrastructure and protect communities faster, and use the people that we have to learn more about how we maintain cars, third-party ownership, and to fix them a lot more quickly.
That is the same approach we are taking with our engineering. We have deployed technology on locomotives that give us the same effect as a geometry car that is self-propelled and inspects the health of the rail and the rail infrastructure. Now we are regulated to inspect about 125,000 mi, 200,000 mi a year of track. Now we do 125,000 mi a month with these inspection vehicles. We are asking the FRA to recognize the use of that technology to allow us to move away from something that is 1976 vintage regulation and get to modern times so that we can use our workforces to get out there and fix the rails faster and reinvest in capital in different ways. That is kind of the environment we are in with the FRA. I have met with them a number of times, as I always have.
They're very responsive to acting, you know, in accordance with the science. We're having really good discussions with them. I think that's the approach that we need to take.
When you maybe sort of widen out the lens and think more about technology and, you know, we spent some time recently looking at what we thought opportunities could be, you know, in the rail space, are there others beyond inspection, I guess, as you think about that? Is it something that you think might have a real impact on sort of profitability as you get out? Maybe it is not this year, maybe it is next year or the year beyond. I do not know how you think about sort of some of the stuff that is out there.
Yeah, you know, I remember distinctly having a mind shift as a result of PTC, positive train control. Here was a regulated imposition of a safety overlay and then realized that this opened up a whole new aperture for operations technology, field-centric to back office. I think there is a tremendous amount of work we can do with the right regulation and the right structure to reap a dividend or ROIC from that kind of capital investment as it reduces regulatory obligations that may be steam engine days. We still have a few of those. I think when we can get an open mind on what is the real value, whether it is a better way to run trains, whether it is a better way to oversee crew capability or other things like that, there is a lot of places in that, robotics included.
There's a number of things we think about. It's just the call for capital. He keeps me highly accountable to having a relatively high ROIC, which is good. We all want that.
A lot of these projects that are technologies that John's talking about, it's, you know, obviously from a safety perspective, it's a no-brainer for us. We should absolutely do these. It's also creating a lot of efficiency and productivity, you know, stopping line of road, you know, failures, things like that, taking our employees and instead of them, you know, being the ones that find all this stuff, they become the fixers and, you know, really enhancing that efficiency on their behalf. You know, John talks about return on capital, obviously crucial. These projects are, you know, right in that sweet spot from a safety perspective, but also truly enhancing efficiency. The topic of rail M&A has come up quite a bit more often.
There's been some discussion in the press and obviously folks like me ask the question, folks like the people in the audience ask the question. I'm curious your thoughts on what you think about the potential for maybe another wave of rail M&A and specifically maybe transcontinental mergers. Is that something that you see as a possibility?
You know, I think the Trains article that came out, whatever it was, three, four weeks ago that we've all read and, you know, interpreted, you know, for ourselves. I think that's kind of maybe what started this last round of questioning that seems to come up every handful of years. I think from a, you know, transcon merger perspective, I think there's a lot of benefits in doing that. You think about the growth synergies that you could have between, you know, between two transcon mergers and taking out interchanges, things like that. Obviously it seems like there would be a lot of benefit there.
As I've said before, I think the, you know, the regulations, the regulatory environment and really the political environment are kind of the, you know, the two things we'd have to work through there. Yeah, I think it's, you know, there would be value there. As I've also said publicly, I think, you know, we don't want to get distracted with this. Our focus is really on, you know, enhancing productivity, making sure we're providing a great service product to our customers and operating safely. That is where our primary focus is on right now.
John, from an operations perspective, anything that sort of stands out as you think about the potential of transcon?
Yeah, I think Jason said it best that, you know, we all know that the story is out there. We all know the hypothesis. We're really staying focused on the absolute and the transformation that we're under right now. We've got a lot of value to create. You know, having gone through and testified at some of the merger hearings between CP and KC, obviously as an operator, the more linear an operation is, the more repetitive it is. There's a lot of points from a transcontinental perspective that you could argue make sense. Like Jason said, I think there's time for thought and there's time for doing. We're in the doing zone and the markets do what the markets do.
Yeah. Okay. That's helpful. Certainly, if anybody has questions in the audience, let me know. Happy to get you involved while they think about that. Maybe to kind of summarize some of the opportunities and the guidance that you guys have talked about. So I guess from a revenue perspective 3%, you guys talked about macro uncertainty. It sounds like you're seeing a little of that macro uncertainty here in the second quarter, but I think you also noted that there's maybe a possibility of a little bit of more freight moving in the third quarter. So I guess as you think about that, is that still the right way to say it's 3%? We'll see what the macro does. There's maybe a little bit of weakness here, but maybe potential strength coming?
Yeah, I think that's the right way to think about it. You know, that when we laid out that 3% revenue growth, it was really all volume related. You know, we talked about the headwinds on the pricing side that were, you know, kind of got us to a flat RPU perspective. It's, you know, we still think that that 3% is doable. At the same time, we've got to stay really close to our customers, make sure we're, you know, understanding what they're fully seeing and looking at any, you know, leading indicators to, you know, figure out if something's changing there.
We know there's a bad sub-effect. I mean, there's some sloshiness, right? We saw it after the long shore activity, even from the uncertainty around the next iteration of what that CBA could look like. We're watching what's going on in the West. We're seeing what's going on in the East. We can anticipate where that sloshiness is going to hit our interchange locations. We've got great relationships with our Western carrier partners. We're prepositioning resources in places like Chicago, in Memphis, in New Orleans just to be ready for that surge and give us some elasticity in the event that we have a locomotive failure or something happens that we can get on things really quickly because it'll be incumbent upon us to pull that sloshiness out and smooth it out as fast as possible.
We do that by having really reliable, engaged understanding of what's happening and delivering and executing as fully as we can. That is how we're running the business, you know, staying ahead of the market as much as possible. Where we can't, just being ready to go as fast as we can.
Maybe my last question would just be on buyback. I think you talked about that in the first quarter. Maybe give us a little bit of an update of how you guys are thinking about the opportunity here for 2025.
Yeah. So, you know, we had a lot of calls on cash over the last, you know, two years really related to not only the East Palestine incident, but we also purchased the Cincinnati Southern Railway. So, you know, we're at a point where we feel like we've really kind of rebuilt our balance sheet, seeing strong profitability and, you know, got back in the market, which we were, you know, really happy to do. You saw we purchased around $250 million in the first quarter. You know, maybe not as high as we have been in prior years, but we think that's a, you know, a good rate to be at and, you know, taking that opportunity to continue to buy shares.
Obviously, share repurchases, when we think about our priorities, you know, we invest in our business, we pay our dividend, and then share repurchase is kind of that last lever. Again, feel good about where we are from a balance sheet perspective. Done good work working with our, you know, partners at the rating agencies to get our metrics back in bounds. You know, pleased where we are on a profitability perspective.
CapEx tracking towards the 2.2 for the year?
Yes.
That's the right way to think about it.
Yep. Yep. Which is a, you know, $200 million reduction from where we were in 2024. And a lot of that is because of the, you know, the fluidity on the network that John's been able to create. You know, always going to continue to invest in rail ties and ballast and the safety of our infrastructure. But we don't need to spend as much on locomotives. We've got several hundred locomotives stored. We've got freight cars stored. You know, we don't need to make as many purchases there. That's really what enables us to be able to take down that CapEx a little bit.
I guess I miss spoke. One last question just on headcount as we're just thinking about it, kind of rounding out all the guidance points. Flattish from kind of Q4 exit rate, I think over the course of this year. Is that roughly the right way to think about how the head's going to look?
Yeah, I would say that. I would just remind you, Chris, as we talked about it, we're hiring. We're hiring conductors. We're hiring for attrition. We're hiring where we want to make sure that we've got the right number of people. We do not want trains waiting on a crew. You know, I think we've got two or three hundred brand new conductors that are out there running. We've just moved our field training, technical training over to our safety department. Our stickiness with our new hires is a little higher now. They're coming out much more capable and we're really, really, really pleased with how we're progressing on that front.
Fantastic. Thank you, gentlemen, for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you, Chris.