Hey, good morning, and welcome to Ryder's 2024 Investor Day. I'm Calene Candela, and I've been heading up investor relations for about a year and a half now, and I've been with Ryder for over 30 years. It's truly an exciting time to be at Ryder, as we've seen the benefits from our transformed business model play out over the cycle, and we're even more enthusiastic about what lies ahead, which you'll hear about more today. Thank you to all of you who have joined us here in person. It's great to have you here. We look forward to talking with you during the break, as well as during the solution showcase following the event. For those of you joining us virtually, thank you for tuning in and for your interest in Ryder.
The slides have been posted to our website, and the webcast platform includes a feature where you can ask questions. So there's a few administrative items before we get started. As you know, the company is very serious about safety, so as such, please familiarize yourself with the exits from this room. There's one right over here, and it'll lead you directly to a staircase. There's two more right here, and if you head straight back, there are staircases on each side. Next, I'd like to point you to our forward-looking statements, as well as our use of non-GAAP financial measures. And finally, we ask that you put your phones on silent, and not to interfere with the audio and video recording we'll be doing of the event today. So we've got a very good agenda for you today, very exciting agenda.
Robert Sanchez, our Chairman and CEO, will discuss how our transformed business model under the Balanced Growth strategy, and how the next phase of this strategy will deliver even higher returns over the cycle. Next, Karen Jones will discuss our customer-centric approach to innovation, and how this is differentiating us in the marketplace. Steve Sensing will talk about our industry vertical expertise and our expanded capabilities in DTS and SCS, and how they're delivering solutions that are perfect for our customer supply chains. We'll then go to our first of two Q&A sessions, which will be followed by a short break.
Following the break, Steve Martin will discuss how DTS has transformed following our recent Cardinal acquisition, and Tom Havens will review the successful execution we've seen at FMS, as well as review some of the initiatives the team has working on to continue to enhance returns, as well as our customer experience. John Diez, our EVP and CFO, will bring this all together and outline a clear path to achieving higher returns over the cycle. Robert will provide some closing comments, and then we'll go into our second Q&A session. For those of you in person, I'd like to highlight that we'll be having a solution showcase.
I'm sure you saw some of the booths set up outside, and it'll be held out just outside the room, and it's going to feature business leaders who can talk to you and provide you with more information about some of the key topics and areas that we've discussed today. So you'll have the opportunity to learn more about the expanded capabilities we have in SCS. The Baton team is here to talk about the revolutionary TMS and visibility tools that they are developing. Learn how we're deploying warehouse technology and automation throughout our operations. You'll be able to experience live RyderGyde, as well as RyderShare demonstrations, so very interesting there. And you'll also have the opportunity to learn more about RyderElectric+, as well as how our business is very well-positioned for nearshoring opportunities.
So lots of great information, so I really encourage you to grab some lunch and speak with the individuals out there, as well as our management team, who'll be present as well. I'd also like to introduce Nicole Dominguez here in the front row. She's our Group Director in Investor Relations. I know a lot of you already had the opportunity to meet with Nicole, but if you haven't, please take the opportunity to chat with her and get to know a little bit more about her. Thank you very much, Nicole, for all the work you've done so far for Investor Day. It's been a really big effort on her part, so thank you very much. Okay, so without further delay, it's my pleasure to introduce our Chairman and CEO, Robert Sanchez.
Thank you, Calene. Listen, thank you all for being here, both the folks that are here in person and the folks that are on the webcast. I'm really glad that we did this here in New York. I think if we had done it in Miami, it would have been the first Investor Day with mask and snorkel because it's been raining in Florida, if you don't know, for the last 3 or 4 days, and I think it's going to rain for the next couple. So we were all able to somehow get here and just happy to be here with all of you. Listen, we're really excited about having this Investor Day. The last one we had was 2 years ago, and if...
You know, this is gonna be a look back of some of the progress we've made since the last Investor Day, and more importantly, talk about the future and all the exciting opportunities that we see at Ryder, and to continue to grow and also achieve even higher returns. So those of you that don't know me, my name is Robert Sanchez, and I've been with Ryder for 31 years. I've had the pleasure of leading this company for the last 11, and prior to that, at Ryder, I spent 20 years in various roles throughout the company, in the business and in support functions. So certainly made this my life's work and couldn't be happier with the place I'm at and the team that we have.
So if you ask anybody, what does Ryder do? Most people will tell you, "Rental trucks." Ryder rents trucks. That, I guess that was an ad in the 1970s that has stuck, and people are used to seeing our trucks on the road and figured that is Ryder. But that is a part of Ryder. It's about 10% of the revenues of the company. Ryder does so much more. You know, we lease fleets of trucks, we do deliveries through dedicated operations, and we run third-party logistics supply chain operations throughout North America, one of the leaders in that business. So people don't realize all the things that Ryder does behind the scenes to get them the things that they use in their everyday life.
So we've talked about it a lot, so, we decided for this Investor Day, we would start off with a little video that highlights so many of the things that you use in your everyday life that Ryder had something to do with getting them to you. So with that, let's go ahead and roll the video.
Every day when you wake up, you depend on America's supply chains to get you the products you rely on. At Ryder, we work behind the scenes to perfect these supply chains, providing warehousing, distribution, and transportation solutions, all powered by our proprietary technology and an industry-leading workforce with logistics expertise. The result? You have the goods you need at every hour of the day. Whether you start your day with a workout on your treadmill or sharing laughs during breakfast with your family, Ryder has delivered the products you need to start your day and make sure it keeps going smoothly. Trusted by leading automotive manufacturers, we help manage and move the parts for the vehicles you use to get the kids to school and you to work. We don't stop there.
Whether it's a flexible pair of pants and shirt for the job site or a comfortable outfit for the office, we help you stay in style through services like our Ryder E-commerce fulfillment network and the office supplies and equipment you use to get the job done. Those pass through our distribution centers and transportation network. When your workday is over and it's time to tackle your home projects, our Port-to-Door network and professional drivers keep store shelves stocked, so you always have what you need. As you gather around the table, whether it's a home-cooked meal or pizza night, we make sure dinner is served for you and your pets because they're part of the family, too. We enjoy working behind the scenes on the supply chains you depend on.
It's why we continue to perfect our Port-to-Door supply chain and transportation solutions, and why you can trust and depend on us to always be ever better.
I get a little choked up. I get a little choked up with that video, but hopefully it gives you an idea of all the, you know, some of the things that we do, and that's just a really small percentage. Think about it, we do business with over 40,000 commercial customers. So messages you're going to hear today: number one is that we've, we have a solidified position as an industry leader. We've outperformed throughout this cycle, and we've got a complementary portfolio of services that we provide in the transportation and logistics outsourcing business. We're very proud of having achieved a lot of our transformation milestones that we set out five years ago.
Some of those we, we talked about at the last Investor Day, but many of those have been accomplishments that we've achieved over the last couple of years, so we're going to talk about that. It's all been around executing on our balanced growth strategy. More importantly, we see, we see a lot of opportunity in the future. So you're gonna... We're gonna talk about the next phase of our balanced growth strategy, which is really around focusing on operational excellence, so being the best at what we're supposed to be good at. And number two, investing in customer-centric innovation, because we think the future of transportation and logistics is going to be very driven, very much driven by technology and innovation. So we want to be on the forefront of that, and that be a competitive advantage for us.
And then last but not least, you may have seen it in the press release this morning, we are raising our long-term target for return on equity from the high teens to the low twenties. So that'll be the second increase over the last several years of our returns target, which we think is the best measure of value creation for shareholders. All right, so who's Ryder? We're a leading provider of outsourced transportation and logistics services in North America. So we are focused strictly in North America, and we want to be the best at what we do in this geography. We did just under $12 billion of revenue in 2023, making us number 350 in the latest Fortune 500 rankings.
We have just over 50,000 employees, after the last acquisition that we just did. As I mentioned, we do business for, with over 40,000 companies, big and small. We, we have a fleet of 250,000, just around 250,000 vehicles that we maintain, so one of the largest fleets in North America. We maintain it with a network of 760 truck maintenance locations, which is really a competitive advantage. Very difficult to replicate that network. We also, have over 300 distribution centers that we run for customers in our supply chain business. Just over 100 million sq ft of warehouse space, making us the second-largest warehouse 3PL in North America.
We also manage over $10 billion of freight for our customers, where we act as a traffic department and we direct that freight for them. We also have a very diversified portfolio. We do business with companies across 20 different industry verticals. So, so how are we structured and how is Ryder set up? We're set up in 3 business segments, for those of you that aren't familiar. On the far left here is our fleet management business. So if you think about it, it's all about outsourcing of transportation and logistics activities. On the far left is the outsourcing of the truck.
So you can go buy your own truck, do your own maintenance, and deal with all the hassles of running a private fleet, or you can come to a company like Ryder, and we'll handle that for you in a turnkey solution. Second is our dedicated transportation. That's the outsourcing of the truck and the driver. So you need to run a private fleet, you can do it on your own, or you can outsource the private fleet operation, which is the truck, the driver, the management of that, and all the technology, and we do that for you. And then, on the far right is the outsourcing of broader supply chain and logistics services. Think about running distribution centers. As I mentioned, we run over 300 distribution centers.
Managing transportation for you, so you can have your own traffic department, or you can outsource that to a company like Ryder, where we can manage the transportation and also do brokerage services. E-commerce fulfillment. We have an e-commerce fulfillment operation that we can handle end-to-end for a customer, and then also last-mile delivery of big and bulky services. So we like to say we have a port-to-door services in supply chain, that customers can decide how they wanna interact and what they want to outsource to us. So why these three businesses? And what are the benefits of having these three businesses together? First, it's around the equipment. So all the equipment that is used, the vehicles that are used by dedicated and supply chain, are all provided by our fleet management operations.
That's 34,000 vehicles that are leased by our sister companies from fleet management. Having that operating fleet in dedicated and supply chain also gives fleet management a fleet management operations opportunities to redeploy equipment when we need it. Vehicles coming back from a lease early, vehicles in rental, we don't need it, we're able to redeploy those into applications in our supply chain dedicated. Also giving supply chain dedicated access to mid-life vehicles that can make us more competitive. Another important one is revenue synergies. So over 50% of the sales in dedicated come from fleet management. So we have a group of about 600 sales folks in fleet management that are out getting customers and looking for opportunities to lease more vehicles.
When they find an opportunity where it makes sense to not only leasing the vehicle, but also have the driver in the operations, they upsell to dedicated. That's good for Ryder, because if you for that same vehicle investment, if you go from leasing to dedicated, the revenue goes up 4-5 times on the same vehicle, and the margin dollars go up 2-3 times. So it's a great improvement in the returns for that operation. And then last but not least, shared resources. So our dedicated and our supply chain business both rely on the same driver recruiting network, which as you know, given the difficulties around finding professional drivers, that is a core competency at Ryder. We're in all the markets, and we're able to source drivers where most private fleets can't.
So that's an opportunity—I mean, that's a resource that is shared. Logistics engineering, all the designing of these operations, we've got a team of logistics engineers that are shared across dedicated and supply chain. One that we don't talk a lot about, but is a very important one, is the fleet management network, the 760 shops that we have in fleet management, they're scattered around North America. Those shops are used as relay points for some of the transportation solutions that we have in supply chain. So if you think about drivers that are relaying, you know, from one city to the next, we use these fleet management shops as relay points to be able to execute those relay networks for our customers.
So we're really, really, those are some of the key ones, but the one that is probably becoming most important, given where we're going, is technology, and the shared technology investments that we have across the organization. I'm going to talk a little bit about, in a few minutes, about, you know, where that's coming from, but there's technology which we've developed in supply chain that is also being used in dedicated, which will soon also be used in fleet management and vice versa. Our vision really hasn't changed since the last Investor Day: to perfect the supply chains that drive the economy. So perfection, that's a pretty high bar, but as Vince Lombardi said, "If you chase perfection, you may find excellence," and that's what we're trying to do.
The folks at Ryder wake up every day trying to figure out, "How do I provide a more perfect solution for my customer to optimize their supply chain?" So it's really what drives us, and if you look at the video that we just showed, so many things that are in the economy that flow through the economy come through the Ryder network, that it's really an exciting opportunity for us and goal to have. In terms of our values, they're really founded on establishing long-term relationships. Typical customer at Ryder, these are contractual relationships. So 90% of our revenues come from contractual, multi-year businesses. You're only going to be able to survive a long-term relationship if you're able to achieve these values, the biggest one being trustworthy.
You know, our employees have to be trustworthy because our customers have to trust us. If they trust us, we're going to have relationships that are going to last decades, which is typically what happens at Ryder. So we work every day to earn that trust from our customers and making sure that we're transparent and that we provide the service that they can count on. So 2019 was an important year in the history of the company at Ryder. We had been working through a prolonged and deep decline in used truck prices. We're one of the largest resellers of used trucks, given the large fleet that we operate, and we realized as the market continued to decline that we had to do something different.
So we sat around and tried to figure out what are the key important things that this business model needs differently to really take us to a different level in terms of returns for shareholders and, and performance, and that's where the balanced growth strategy was born. So there's three goals that we set out as part of the balanced growth strategy. The first one was to de-risk and optimize the model. So we realized, because of the extended decline in the used truck market, that too much of our return was dependent on that final sale of the used truck. So we lease a truck to a customer for six years. We do all this work. We keep the truck up and running.
We do all the hard work to keep that fleet and deliver for the customer, and the returns was all dependent on what the used truck market was doing after six years. And the way we were pricing it, half the time, we were going to do really well, and half the time we were not going to do so well, 'cause we were pricing to an average residual. We decided at that point, this probably isn't a good way to run this business, considering the volatility we were seeing in used trucks. So we lowered our residual values to call it bottom quartile, bottom quintile levels, and really just made more of the revenue come, make more of the cash flows come from the lessee.
So the lessee had to pay more, and it was going to be less dependent on the used truck market. And we knew by doing that, we probably wouldn't grow as much. We said: It, it doesn't matter. We thought that's the only way to make this, this model really perform at the level that we wanted. So we lowered the residual values, raised the lease prices, and that was the most important thing we did to de-risk the business. We also got out of the U.K. We had been in the U.K. for about 50 years, had never had great performance in that geography, and really sold out of our used truck out of our U.K. business and really narrowed the focus to strictly North America. Second area was around, we needed better returns.
Given all the hard work that we do, the returns at Ryder just weren't what they should be, given the value that we felt we added to customers. So one of the things that we did is we raised our target, returns for our leases, for... We had historically been, targeting 60 to 100 basis point spread. We raised that to 100 to 150 basis point spread. So that was back in, in 2019. So we're like five years now into, replacing the portfolio of businesses of, of leases that we have with these higher return, leases. The lowering of residual values and the raising of the spread are probably the two biggest things that have, that have, driven the transformation at Ryder.
Add to that, an initiative that we put in place in 2019, lowering our maintenance costs of our fleet, the maintenance that we perform on the 250,000 vehicles. We wanted to lower that by over $100 million. It was a multi-year initiative. We achieved over $100 million of lower maintenance cost as of 2023. So add that to the returns of the lease portfolio, and you just have a much more profitable lease portfolio at Ryder than you had five or six years ago. And then, last but not least, we knew we want to grow, 'cause a business that's not growing is not a healthy business, and we wanted to grow in the parts of the business that had less asset intensity and better returns, and that was our dedicated and supply chain business.
So we set out to accelerate the growth in those businesses organically, making investments in marketing and technology, but also doing acquisitions. And I'm, I'm happy to report that we have we achieved over the last several years, we've achieved the growth targets in those businesses, and we've closed down six acquisitions in the last couple of years. So a lot of good progress made on, on that side of it. So what are the results of all these actions? I think this has become my favorite slide, 'cause it really shows pre-transformation results to post-transformation. So in 2018, which, by the way, was a peak in the freight cycle, those of you who've been following freight, know that was a pretty good year.
Comparing that to 2024, which is a trough in the freight cycle, first thing to note is that the revenue mix of our business has changed. Our supply chain dedicated business in 2018 was 44% of the revenues. Today, it's sixty percent of the revenues. If you look at the financial metrics, we've really raised the bar across all those financial metrics. Comparable earnings more than double. Our return on equity has gone from 13% in a peak environment to, call it 16% in a trough environment. Our supply chain revenue growth has gone from 16% to 20%, and our operating cash flow, we can't forget about that, it's gone from $1.7 billion to $2.4 billion, so a 40% increase in operating cash flow.
So when you compare pre-transformation trough to post-trans... I'm sorry, pre-transformation peak to post-transformation trough, you're looking at double the financial returns that in the new model versus the old model. So we're very proud of that. We're very proud of the results that we've gotten to date, but we're really excited about what still lies ahead. This is just to break out for you where that improvement came from.
So if I just do a waterfall from 2018 to 2024, you're going to see it split between the improvements in our fleet management business, those things I talked about, the lower residuals, the higher spreads, the growth, but also that profitable growth and supply chain dedicated that we focused on is now a major contributor or a much larger contributor to the earnings of the company than it was than it was six years ago. And then also, because of the good returns, we've been able to do buybacks, and those buybacks have also contributed to the returns. So, $5.95 in 2018 versus $12.50 a share in 2024. So this hasn't changed either.
This has been the basis of our growth strategy for the last probably 15 years, which is we're in the outsourcing business. The vast majority of the segments that we're in have not outsourced these activities, so whether it's supply chain, dedicated, or transportation. So the red is what's currently outsourced to Ryder or other competitors, and the gray area is what's still to be outsourced. So all we need to do is chip away at that gray area a little bit every year, and we can get some very healthy growth in our businesses. Good news in outsourcing is the harder it gets for customers to do it on their own, the better it is for Ryder. So if it was easy, everybody would just do it on their own. As it gets tougher, you see more people outsourcing.
So the good news is, everything we're doing is getting a lot harder. COVID was a real shot in the arm for supply chain and logistics because it got more complicated. People focused on it a lot more. Companies were figuring out how to be more resilient. Then you got the decoupling with China, so all the nearshoring activity. Companies are looking at their supply chains, and that's good for us because typically when there's a lot of focus on it, they're going to call in folks like Ryder. The other area is just around hiring professional truck drivers, hiring technicians. There is a shortage, and there will likely continue to be a shortage in those fields as less people want to get into them, and the folks that have been in them are beginning to retire.
We think that's making it a lot harder for companies that don't do this for a living to find qualified drivers, to find technicians, and they look to companies like Ryder to help them out. The third one has been the increased cost and complexity around vehicles. Diesel technology didn't change much for probably about 40, 50 years, until 2004, I think, was the first one, then 2007, then 2010. Then there's been an ongoing change in technology driven by the EPA and the drive for cleaner air and safer roads. So that creates more cost, more complexity, more difficulty in maintenance, and that's good for us because more companies are likely to look for somebody that can help them with that.
And then finally, all the disruption, whether it's e-commerce, that changes companies' supply chains, zero-emission vehicles. Everybody's looking at when is that going to happen, and, and what do I do about that? Our customers are, are always asking us, "When is the time, and when am I ready?" So again, more complexity, more difficulty, good for Ryder. So talked about the balanced growth strategy, the three goals that we set out, five years ago. We're really excited about the fact that we've been able to execute on that. So these are the, these are the new goals. This is the next phase of the balanced growth strategy. The first one is really around, focusing on creating value through operational excellence.
That's going to be a continuous improvement mindset that you're going to hear about throughout the day from each of the segments about the focus that we have on just always trying to get better, this idea of perfecting what we do. So by being really good at what we're supposed to be good at, we're going to keep customers, and we're going to be able to bring on new ones. The second one is around customer-centric innovation. So the future of transportation and logistics is going to be driven by technology and innovation, and we want to be on the forefront of that. We want to have technology that really provides a competitive advantage for our company, and we'll talk a little bit about some of the initiatives that we've got going on there.
And then last but not least, with an eye on returns and an eye on growth and profitable growth. So all these things we want to do while we continue to improve the full cycle returns of the company and continue to grow. So I'm not going to talk about all these. Each of the segment leaders is going to talk about their initiatives around this, but around operational excellence, you see an example in fleet management. We talked about the $100 million+ of maintenance cost savings that they delivered. We're announcing today another $50 million multiyear maintenance cost savings initiative, so we think we'll deliver that over the next couple of years, but we're focused on continuing to refine our maintenance operation.
To put it in perspective, we spend about $1.3 billion a year maintaining trucks, so continuing to chip away at that and getting better and better can really provide a lot of dividends for the company and for the shareholders. Second is around... in supply chain, it's around over the last few years, we have acquired multi-client networks. So you think about our Ryder Last Mile operation, our e-commerce operation, our consumer packaged goods multi-client operations. These are warehouses and networks that are multi-client, therefore have more leverage. So over the next couple of years, one of the important things we need to do in supply chain is to take advantage of that leverage to help us grow.
Then around dedicated, you're going to hear Steve talk about our flex operating model, operating structure, which is really going to help us leverage customers, or, or optimize customers, not just within the customer, but across customers. Around technology, you'll see a nice video here in a few minutes about each of these, but these are, proprietary technologies that Ryder has rolled out across each of the segments to help us differentiate the services that we provide. RyderShare being the one that's gotten the most press, 35%-40% of the new sales and supply chain and Dedicated are coming because of RyderShare. It's a visibility and collaboration tool that helps our customers really see what's going on in their supply chain real time. But behind all of that is this acquisition that we did, in 2022 called Baton.
So this was a company out of California. It was a startup that was working on optimizing the delivery for truckload operations. We invested in them through our Ryder Ventures operation. We really like the team, and some of them are here today, so you get a chance to meet them. We liked what they were doing, smart folks out of Stanford and MIT, and we really liked what they were doing and felt that the application they were going after was good, but we felt there was a better application for them to go after, which was this Ryder ecosystem that we have of all the trucks that we utilize, the trucks that our customers are running, and the trucks that we have in supply chain dedicated, and how do we optimize that?
So that team is currently working on technology that's going to help us optimize not just within Dedicated or within a customer or within supply chain, but over time, optimize anybody that's inside the Ryder ecosystem. So we're really excited about the work that's coming out of there. It's currently being rolled out to our dedicated operations, and the feedback has been very positive to date. So finally, around improving returns. So in FMS, it's continuing that replacement of the portfolio. So we're 5 years into a six-year portfolio of leases, so we got one more year left of continuing to drive after. In 2025, we expect there'll be a total savings of $125 million compared to what we were spending in 2018. So we'll have had a full portfolio now of the higher return businesses.
Around supply chain, it's cross-selling to some of the higher return operations and share in co-manufacturing, co-packing. That was an acquisition we recently did, but we think there's good opportunity to take some of the logistics customers that we have and then cross-sell them some of these services. And then last but not least, this is a really important initiative for dedicated. We talked about it on the last earnings call. $40 million-$60 million in synergies from the last acquisition we just did of Cardinal. So Steve Martin will talk a little bit about that, but really, realizing those synergies can—we, we feel really good about the opportunity to do that and can produce $40 million-$60 million in cost savings by 2026.
A good chunk of that is just getting the vehicles that Cardinal had run through the Ryder network, as opposed to leasing them and owning them and maintaining them on their own. There's significant savings just by being able to leverage that. So this is our money slide for this meeting, and it's really we're raising our long-term target ROE target over the cycle. We think that's the best measure of shareholder value. If you go back a few years ago, our target was mid-teens over the cycle. We raised that to high teens back in 2021, 2022, and now we're raising it to low twenties. So what does that mean? That means average over the freight cycle, Ryder will deliver low twenties return on equity.
So in a peak in the freight cycle, we're probably gonna be in the mid-20s, and in a trough in the freight cycle, we're gonna be in the high teens. And we feel, we feel that's a good range for us in terms of the returns of the company, and based on the initiatives that we have ahead of us, and we think this could be, this could be what, what we, what we deliver over the next freight cycle. So there's the cycle. It's... You're in transportation, it's a life we've chosen. We got your ups, and you got your downs. So 2022 was a record year in earnings for Ryder.
Not only were we in a peak of the cycle, you think about post-COVID, it's a shortage of everything, shortage of trucks, spot rates went through the roof, used truck prices went through the roof. We were selling used trucks for more than we had purchased them 6 years earlier. Nothing, nothing we'd ever seen before. Rental was really hot, so we delivered $16.37 a share in 2022, and we knew that there was oversized earnings from rental and used vehicles, so if you remember, we even talked about a core earnings number of $10 a share back then. And we talked about, look, that's $16.37. That's a little bit of an anomaly. We're not expecting to be there anytime soon. So you saw what happened since then.
Sure enough, the outsized gains in rental have gone away, and the $16.37s come down to $12.50. But in the meantime, the core earnings, the earnings from our contractual businesses, the earnings from the initiatives, has gone up. It's gone from $10 up to $12.50, which is core earnings is equal to our comparable number this year. So as you look forward, we believe, we all believe we're in a trough. We don't know when this trough ends. Hopefully tomorrow, but it might end in three months, might end in six months. There will be an upturn, and when that upturn happens, obviously, we continue to have the earnings growth from the $12.50, and the core earnings will continue to move up as we sign new business and supply chain dedicated and leasing, as we execute on our initiatives.
But we're also then gonna get the tailwind from used vehicle sales and from rental. So we believe that we are positioned to well exceed the $16.37 during the next peak. Now, that next peak, when's that gonna happen? Could be 2026, maybe 2027, but we, we've got good visibility to, to having an earnings number well above that $16.37 as we get into, into the next peak. So really excited about that. Again, higher highs and higher lows. That's one of the key goals from our, from our return story. So these are our, our long-term financial targets. Not a lot. There's two things that really changed here. We talked about the ROE target moving up, and we're also moving up the fleet management solutions earnings leverage. So that's earnings before tax as a % of operating revenue.
We were in the low double digits, so call that 10, 11. We're now saying low teens, 13, 14. And that's because of all these initiatives that we've talked about, right? We've, we've got the more profitable lease portfolio in that business, and we've got this maintenance initiative that's really, we see that kicking in here over the next couple of years, that is gonna help improve the earnings. And then we get growth. We have growth in those businesses, so we feel good about the opportunity to hit that new target. So sustainability, just a few points I want you to walk away with from a sustainability standpoint. Number one, everything we do at Ryder is focused on optimization of supply chain, reducing costs, reducing, and reducing waste, and that typically translates to reducing environmental impact.
So the nature of what we do tends to drive a better impact on the environment. We also have a history of setting and achieving, publicly setting, emissions targets, reductions, and then achieving them. So we plan on continuing to do that, and we do follow the CDP and other metrics that are verifiable and that folks follow. Second one is around safety. So safety is at the core of Ryder's culture. Way before I got to Ryder, it's always been about safety at Ryder. As an example, we were one of the early adopters of in-cab camera technology. So when that came out, very controversial. What are drivers gonna do? We now have 13,000 drivers who work for Ryder, professional drivers.
At the time, we had 10. We said the benefits of doing this far outweigh the risk and the pushback we're gonna get. We implemented it. We actually were able to get drivers to adopt it and realize that it's really more of a friend to them. It exonerates them 99% of the time. And that program, since we launched it in 2017, so from 2019 to today, has reduced our collisions by 60%. So very impactful, very important for safety, not just for our employees, but also the driving public. Around—And then the last one I'd talk about is around diversity.
We do have a program where we regularly check the pay parity across different groups and make sure that we have solid pay parity, especially at the management levels. On the frontline levels, there is pay parity because you're just paid based on your position and the years you've been with the company, whereas on the management side, we make sure that we get that. So we have a great board. I'm sure everybody tells you they have a great board, but we have a strong, independent lead director. This board is accountable and engaged. It's made up mostly of former and current senior leaders across diverse businesses.
They play not only an important role in the governance of the company, but also are very engaged in helping us develop the strategy, and and they work to hold us accountable to execute on that strategy. So we're very blessed to have a very good board. And then this team, you know, I really couldn't be prouder of the senior leadership team that we have at Ryder. It says they're cycle-tested and execution-focused. I would also say that they are global pandemic-tested, because this is the team that really helped get us through that the last several years, and really, this is the team that has delivered on those initiatives that we just talked about.
So we're really excited, not only to have this team, but the progress that we've made with this team, but also the opportunity that we see ahead. So you're gonna hear from a lot of the folks that are on that slide. The rest of them, I think most of them are here, so if you, during the break, you also can get a chance to speak to some of them. So now I'm going to hand it over to the person who has the funnest job at Ryder. She gets to deal with all the exciting innovation and technology. She's brought a whole new level of thinking to Ryder.
She's been with us now for, I think, 11 years, and she told me when she got here, she was gonna make Ryder cool, and she's done a pretty good job. Well, I don't know how cool we are. My kids don't think we're very cool, but I certainly do, and she's doing a great job of leading that transformation. So, Karen?
Thank you. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate that. It's great to be with you today. Delighted. I see some new faces in the room and some familiar faces in the room, so thank you for making the time to come hear a little bit more about Ryder. Appreciate it. As Robert said, I've been with Ryder for 11 years. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for the company, but I also have the privilege of heading up our new product innovation and development efforts, and also our Ryder Ventures capital fund, looking at companies that we invest in through that lens. If I'm effective today in my communication, I hope that you will be able to walk away with an understanding on these key messages.
The first one that I want you to take away is that we are investing in and developing emerging technologies that really holistically address customer needs and, quite frankly, lead the industry. The second key message is around customer-centric technology. A lot of companies create technology for technology's sake, and I hope that after our conversation today, you have a better vision of the focus around customer needs that really generate the innovation and the technology that we embrace. And then thirdly, I want you to understand that we have a disciplined, strategic approach to investing. Again, we don't invest for investment's sake. We invest because there is a reason and a purpose. It's tied back to strategic initiatives that we have as a company. So I'm gonna start with...
A lot of times I'm asked, you know, "how, how do you know what products and services you need to be offering to the market? And how do you go about thinking about those things that you actually do invest in to bring to customers?" And so, you know, in 2014, when I joined the company, we, I brought a practice that I'd used at other companies, called Customer Advisory Board, and Robert thought it was a boondoggle, to get a bunch of customers together and play golf or do that kind of stuff, but it really is quite a rigorous process. We have about 60-plus customers, you can see some of the names represented across the bottom, that we do pre-interviews with to really understand their mindset about what's happening in their environment today.
We ask them: what keeps them awake at night? What kind of challenges do they have that have not been able to be solved? And then we take that input over a two-day session, we go back, and we look for solutions. We either build, buy, or partner to then create products and services that will meet those needs. We believe that those 60 customers are really representative of the microcosm of the 40,000 customers that we have. So if they're confronting and facing these issues, the likelihood that all other 40,000 have the same issues are, is pretty high. So we use that as our, our guidance for are we on track, are we off track with the services that we provide?
The one that comes to the forefront, and many, many ideas have come from that forum over the years that we've done it, but the spotlight really is around Ryder Share. That's the one that you've probably heard the most about. The genesis for that came from our customer advisory boards. So as we think about, you know, again, what we wanted to invest in, about seven years ago we got together as a leadership team. There was a lot of disruption happening in the industry at that point in time, and we looked at everything from blockchain technology to 3D printing and all the trendy things that were happening then. And we said, "Look, well, you know, we can't do everything. We can't address everything, and not everything has equal importance to our customers.
So what do we really want to focus on? What's going to have the biggest impact to our business?" If you look across that top bar, we segmented four areas where we wanted to put our focus. The first is in digital technologies. As you know, we've been a very manual-based industry for many, many years. We knew that technology needed to be implemented to kind of revolutionize the way that we actually transact and do business, so we put a very strong focus there. In the area of e-commerce, we did not have an offering to provide to our customers, and we knew the growth of that was going to be very strong, and we needed to start thinking about what we were going to offer in that case.
In the area of asset sharing, both capacity and assets, we decided we need to put a focus. That has an opportunity to disrupt us, and if we don't have answers to that, we could be challenged as a business. And then in the final area of advanced vehicle technology, which today comprehends EV and AV, autonomous vehicles, we knew that we needed to place a pretty good focus, on having some answers to that and solutions that we could bring to the market. So in the build area, which is really highlighted on this slide, you'll see that we have been quite busy building our own capabilities over the last seven years in earnest.
And, the benefit of taking this approach, and really the approach that we did, is that by building, partnering, and buying the right things for our customers, we're able to create that customer stickiness, that we're all looking for, right? It's so much easier to keep a customer and sell them up than to go get brand-new customers, but we want to keep the customers that we have. We've improved the experience that our customers have from Ryder, and, we know that we've expanded the share of wallet by focusing in these particular areas. And I will say that I don't know another logistics company, at least maybe it's only my opinion, but, that has done really the effort that we have in really leading with technology and innovation.
So what I wanted to do next is I could stand up here and tell you about each one of those products and that little segment there, but I thought what I would do is share with you a video. It's always more powerful to hear from real customers who actually use our stuff than me talk about it. So let me, let me, have them roll the video for this.
My name is Taylor Ferlak. I am the fleet operations manager here at Krispy Kreme. I have been here about 5.5 years and have been working with Ryder since day one. Krispy Kreme has a fleet of approximately 500 vehicles spread across the country. We're mostly focused in the Southeast, but we also spread all the way out to California, and we use the RyderGyde system to pull information about our vehicles, to check on reports, to see what PMs are needed, and lots of other things. The most important functions of RyderGyde are the reporting. It's easy to get information on my entire fleet. I like to go in there and gather information on my vehicles, make sure I understand what's in service, what's being out of service, check on what's in the shop.
It makes it easier because it's accessible at the touch of a button. RyderGyde helps us to improve our cost savings by making the data very accessible, so I have information on all our maintenance history in RyderGyde. It's really important to be able to access that information as quickly as possible. A lot of the times we need that information for outside vendors or just to understand what's going on with a truck, so it's great to have it just at the click of a button. I worked a lot with the RyderGyde development team to help them understand what a customer might need, and I really appreciated that Ryder was open towards hearing customer feedback.
My name is Bobby Burg, and I am the Chief Supply Chain Officer for Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits. Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits is a beverage wholesaler, and we service markets from Maui to Maine and 5,000 brands. In any given year, we move around 400 million boxes, and RyderShare has brought instant visibility to all of our movements, whether they're on rail, whether they're by truck, whether they're on the ocean, which dramatically improves our ability to keep our commercial team in the know about when products will be available and be in the warehouse and available for sale, and then at the retail level has dramatically improved our fill rate in the last mile. Prior to going with RyderShare, we used to tender our loads weeks in advance of products being ready.
Now we tender those loads three days before we need to pick them up, and it's given our team a lot of confidence in being able to predict when loads are going to be there. It's all now transparent to not only us internally, but to our salespeople and to our suppliers, who can go on and watch their loads moving around the country and around the globe en route to a final Southern Glazer's destination. Partners just means a company that will put every effort into making it right for the customer, and Ryder has made exceptional moves to make it right for us.
I am Brad Velpel. I'm the SVP of supply chain here at Serena & Lily. Serena & Lily is a high-end furniture and decorative accessory retailer. We're headquartered in Sausalito, California. We have two distribution centers. When I think about customer service, it's delighting the customer from the time when we meet the customer to the time when that order is delivered into their home. Our customer's time is valuable. The technology that Ryder has developed is, you know, industry-leading in the final mile space. What makes our job easier within Ryder View is the ability for the customer to schedule a delivery, and the flexibility around that scheduling. They make that very effective and efficient, as well as Serena & Lily is able to do some brand messaging within that scheduling application.
RyderView also has a unique capability, to allow our customer service team to even schedule that delivery. So if we get a call from a customer, we can schedule that delivery for the customer right there on the phone. A really nice feature, within RyderView is being able to consolidate our orders and our deliveries into the home, which streamlines that delivery into the customer. We have quite a few items within Serena & Lily that are extremely heavy going into the home, and, being able to ensure that we have enough people on that delivery to make that, make that delivery a success. You talk about, communication, visibility, Ryder really, nails that.
The moment the delivery team arrives, we have pictures of the product going into the home, the final placement of the product in the home, and those pictures tell a big story about that delivery. At the end of the day, with RyderView and the platform, the technology that Ryder has, you know, we don't have to manage Ryder. We have the utmost trust and confidence that Ryder is going to execute and make that delivery and delight that customer.
My name is Mike McGee, and I'm the head of customer experience at Mugsy. So at Mugsy, we make damn comfortable and insanely good-looking clothes for guys who want to make the most out of life with style and comfort. It's incredibly easy to fulfill our orders with the Ryder Ship environment. Before starting with Ryder Ship, we were constantly worried about where our product was, how it was being inbounded and outbounded, and what shipping rates were being selected. Now, we never have to worry about that. It's super transparent. Ryder Ship helps us to optimize, to make sure that we're getting things to the customers when they want them, but at the most cost-effective route. It's become very predictable for us to know how much it's going to cost to ship our product, to store our product, to fulfill that product, and then get returns.
RyderShip's integrations with e-commerce platforms for us has been a huge unlock for our growth. So as we integrate with Shopify, we're able to seamlessly get customers updated with their shipping, make sure that they are understanding where it is in the process. All of our returns that come through go through Loop and Happy, and when we're able to do that seamlessly with our warehouse to be able to get product back in stock, it just allows for easy integration and allows us to sell really well. Our operational costs way back before we joined Ryder were anywhere from 12%-15%, and we've been able to take those costs down almost close to 10% and below. And that's allowed us as a business to reallocate some budget that we thought would hit operations into other areas of the business.
RyderShip has been a game changer for us and what our operations will look like, not just now, but in the next five years as we scale.
Always great to hear customers, you do, and, you know, I think much more powerful than me telling you how great our technology is. You know, we don't always have to build on our own, though. I think we come from a position of strength at Ryder, in that many companies want to partner with us. And so we leverage that as well in bringing solutions to our customers. In the area of partnering, I think the biggest focus that we've had there is around our autonomous vehicle partnerships with Kodiak, Aurora, and Torc. We still are working with those companies to maintain their fleets that are running these operations, leverage our facilities as hubs, learning how the operations are actually going to work for the autonomous world, and we've made some great headway with all of those companies.
Very proud of it. I think the area that probably gets the most interest today really is around electric vehicles, and clearly, we have partnered with a number of leading OEMs that have all created their own brands around electric vehicles and continue to leverage the work that we do with our partners around that. I want to switch gears for just one minute and tell you about what's going on in EV and kind of what we're seeing. It's always a hot topic wherever we go. I think we are very well-positioned as a company on the EV front, but let me tell you a little bit about what the journey we've been on in the last couple of years. Actually, last May, we introduced Ryder Electric+ .
That is our turnkey vehicle solution for EVs into a customer's fleet. What we provide with that solution is we actually give electrification advisors who will sit with a customer, understand the application, understand their environment, and what vehicle would actually be the best for them, and what applications could actually leverage electric vehicle technology. We then clearly lease or help finance those assets. We also have partnerships with charging infrastructure companies, and so we bundle those services with that. Our RyderGyde product is tied to the telematics of those electric vehicles. We can tell a customer what the state of charge is on that vehicle, the maintenance that's required, and clearly, we provide the maintenance. I'd like to say that it's been a roaring success, but I would be less than candid with you.
We have sold, since last May, 60 electric vehicles. Okay? Not where we want to be, but the reality is the environment continues to change there. And so what, what I wanted to just kind of paint for you, we, we launched a white paper, last month around the total cost to transport, and we did an analysis of looking at light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles. And the reality is that the cost to transport, if you're doing like for like, truck, fuel versus energy, drivers and labor required to do it, is exponentially higher on the heavy-duty side. The truck and all of those applications cost about two times more.
So you can imagine a customer that's needing to change out an entire fleet of heavy duty has some pretty insurmountable costs that they have to overcome, which we know what happens with that. If we're forced to do it, those costs then transcend and roll down to you and me, consumers who pay for the goods moving on those vehicles. What we have seen, though, however, is that on the light-duty side, we have more cost parity, and so that's where we have been pretty successful. It's trying to begin to move the needle on EV adoption. Of course, the infrastructure is a challenge. Sometimes it takes up to two years to get all the permitting and electrification done at facilities for those Class 8 vehicles. On the light-duty side, much easier implementation, from that perspective.
But I think one of the biggest challenges that we still face with that is the changing regulatory environment. So we know from the EPA to CARB, there's been a lot of fluctuations over the last year and even in recent months. So difficult to say where it's going to be headed. I think the thing I want you to know is that when it takes off, Ryder is ready. We have the solutions, we have the products, we have the team in place to help our customers navigate through that. Okay, buy. Sometimes we go out and buy capabilities, so we have more to offer to our customers, and I'm not going to repeat every one of the acquisitions that we've made. Those who follow us know them very well. Robert mentioned them earlier.
The one that I want to highlight and spend just a few more minutes of time on is Baton. We made an acquisition of a California start-up that was looking at how do we eliminate waste from the supply chain, and, you know, the bottom line is, they have a Silicon Valley pedigree, is what I like to call it. Really smart guys, MIT, Stanford, and the team that's out there, we have recruited from some of the best technology companies, in the world. So we have people on the team who are from Meta, Google, Apple, NASA, just to give you an idea of the intelligence that we have that's tackling the problems of how do we eliminate waste in the supply chain.
As I said earlier, I'm not sure that I know another logistics company that's actually taken this kind of an action and put serious teeth into having a group that's solely focused with the pedigree that they have on solving transportation challenges and eliminating waste. Our vision, I just wanted to share with you a little bit about kind of and give you a little warning. It is a vision, right? But you've got to have one. And this is how we hope and plan to use the group that we have with Baton. We believe that long term, we need to create a freight ecosystem, and that freight ecosystem will give us visibility to all freight across all businesses at Ryder, so including our fleet management business. So imagine the power behind that.
If we're able to do that, we can increase the visibility of what's moving across the entire Ryder network, if you will. We know that we will eliminate waste because we will find examples of where customers might have more than what they need, or there could be a cross-sell opportunity or upsell opportunity to make their supply chains more efficient, move people from FMS into DTS, and even into supply chain solutions. So this is the work that we've undertaken. I want to just explain a little bit about what's on this page. In the first segment, where you see customer data, load data, truck data, driver data, that is what we have actually done to date, is we've standardized the data around that from multiple systems across Ryder.
You have to start with a great data layer in order to be able to do these things, and so that was the first part of the journey. The second part is then exposing that data to our operators, so that's called the internal-facing technology, and that's what you're going to have an opportunity to take a look at today, through what Baton is going to be demonstrating. But taking that information, giving it to our operators, so they can make the smartest moves for moving transportation, freight across our transportation networks. And ultimately, all of that information that's internal is made visible to our customers through our customer-facing technology layer, which is RyderShare and RyderGyde. So if you think about it in those buckets, it's getting the data right......
giving that data to our operations and the operations leaders who are making those decisions every day, and then ultimately giving the customer the visibility to the outcome and the outputs of those operations is extremely important. Now, no conversation would be complete without talking about AI, so let me tell you a little bit about how we envision the optimization of artificial intelligence on that. So think about each one of those areas, right? From the data to the internal operations, to the external customer-facing components. And our goal is to overlay AI onto each one of those areas. So let me give you some examples of what we mean by that and what we anticipate people could be able to do by overlaying that technology application. So I'm going to start in the middle with our operator execution systems.
Imagine an AI layer that will enable you to go in and ask questions on a daily basis, in the moment, whatever it may be. So, for example, some of our operators could actually go in and say, "Based on the trucks, the drivers, and the commitments that I have this week, plan me the best route possible." And I could have that information in seconds versus day-long planning, week-long planning, et cetera, et cetera. Again, eliminating waste and creating the optimized solution for that day. On the customer-facing perspective, we have a vision that, customers will be able to go in and actually query the system through artificial intelligence and ask: "Help me compare my maintenance performance at Ryder to Ryder's other customers with like fleets. Where do I fall short?
How am I performing overall?" So think about it from a benchmarking standpoint, being able to look at how you compare to other like companies. And finally, if we're looking at that core data segment, we believe that AI can help us improve our internal operational efficiencies. So we could, at some point, be able, through AI, say, in the data layer, "Show me all the customers that have the largest cost to serve in our portfolio," so that we can start chipping away at looking at that, and then again, driving and eliminating waste and creating greater efficiencies. So as you can see, that's sort of the building blocks that and the journey that we're on. We're pretty excited about it. We've already started making headway on it.
It is going to take us a little bit, so the timeline is now through 2027, but each day we continue to add capabilities to that. It's pretty exciting, actually, and the power of what we may be able to do is excellent. So I was just going to highlight, and I'm not going to go through the details of each because I just spent a lot of time on Baton, but as we think about artificial intelligence at Ryder, we have kind of two approaches to this. We think about it in two separate buckets. The first bucket is really around operational efficiencies and improving operational efficiencies. And for that, our IT organization, as well as our operators in the company, are looking at and evaluating off-the-shelf technologies that can help improve business process, customer service orientation, whatever those may be.
In some cases, we are going to build our own capability internally with artificial intelligence to be able to look at that information and improve business processes. But the area that we believe has the most long-term value to our customers is to do exactly what I mentioned earlier, which is to take our own data, the millions of freight moves that we make every year, and the data-rich environment that comes off of that, and integrate that and embed that in our own products. That is what is truly powerful and differentiating for us as we move forward. So stay tuned. We're going to start sharing a lot more with you, I'm sure, over the next couple of years of how we're achieving those goals. I'm going to round it out with my last slide here on Ryder Ventures.
Many of you know about this, but if you don't know, we started a venture capital fund, if you will, inside Ryder three years ago. We're three years into this process, and our goal was to spend and invest $50 million over five years. We've done a pretty good job of that. We've made 15 investments to date. Even though we have this fund of money, we don't go out and frivolously spend it, because again, we want to tie it to those four areas that we talked about, and when we see something, we invest, but we're not going to invest for investment's sake or getting to that $50 million as fast as we possibly can. Incredibly important for us, we are a strategic-focused investor, not a financially-only investor. We do seed through C series rounds.
You know, the great thing about partnering with us on this front is that we are an early test bed and a pilot opportunity for many of these startups to perfect their product and to really have a laboratory to see how their business models work. We take the key learnings from that, and that clearly influences our strategic roadmap for products and product development. So I can't say enough good things about having the opportunity to do this and the importance that it plays to Ryder. I wanted to spotlight just a couple of these companies for you real quickly. Gatik is somebody that you really should pay attention to. They are an autonomous vehicle company that does short haul.
They are probably having the best success out of the majority of the AV companies out there because they are doing these short, predictable routes from distribution center to final retail location. I think, they have a, an, an awesome business model. They are doing work for customers like Tyson and Kroger, who are finding incredible value with being able to have those repeatable routes done autonomously. We're excited about the partnership with them. We're going to be in California in another week or two, talking about how we take it to the next level. But, clearly, they're leading the way on autonomous vehicle capability. G2 is a reverse logistics company that we invested in. Everybody is trying to figure out, how do I get my inventory back and back out into the market as quickly as possible so I don't lose revenue?
We have three different pilots going with their technology right now across our Ryder Last Mile business and also our e-commerce business. Then, Cargado is a really interesting capacity-sharing company that just launched actually a couple of months ago. They are in Mexico, so believe it or not, no one had ever done a capacity-sharing platform for Mexico. Think about Mexico being the number one trade partner now to the U.S. For us, it's just a wonderful way for us to learn more about what's happening in that operation. We put our first eight customers on it last month, and we're looking forward to seeing how they continue to evolve and how they continue to take advantage of all those market dynamics that are happening in Mexico. That's really it.
I'd like to just sum up with again, just hopefully I did a good job of communicating, and that you take away from us today, that we're investing and developing in the technologies that actually make a difference to our customers. They're customer-focused-led solutions, not just things we dream up, and that we have a very disciplined and strategic approach to where we're putting our money and where we're placing our bets. So with that, I'm going to turn it over now to our President of our supply chain division, Steve Sensing, who probably has the second most fun job at Ryder, port to door.
Great job. Good morning. Great to be here. As Karen said, I'm Steve Sensing, President of Supply Chain and Dedicated Transportation Solutions. Started my career straight out of college almost 35 years ago, as a dispatcher for a private fleet, and actually, we used Ryder FMS for our maintenance solution back then. Great day in my career was when we converted over to a dedicated solution. I became an employee of Ryder. Continued to dispatch and work in Dedicated for about 8 years, and then cut my teeth in supply chain in the late 1990s. In 2007, I was VP of the technology and retail vertical, and then in 2015, was fortunate enough to become President of Supply Chain, and in 2020, took over Dedicated Transportation, working with Steve Martin. So again, great to be here.
So the key themes and what you're going to hear today, we're going to continue to be a market leader in third-party logistics, providing Port-to-Door services across North America. Think of that as a one-stop shop solution for our customers. We're going to continue to capture a large and growing market. Our teams are focused by vertical industry groups, so we're focused on automotive, industrial, consumer packaged goods, and then omnichannel retail. So it's great when we go to a customer meeting and see the interaction between our team and our customers. It's often very difficult to tell who works for who, as we have our teams have great knowledge of those industry groups and their supply chain. We're driven by data. Think about our lean, continuous improvement mindset. We've got a several hundred engineers.
We've got a great operations team, but we're focused on continuous improvement and lean principles. And then finally, we're going to continue to capture market share by investing in technology. You saw some great, case studies there and, and customer testimonial. So a quick snapshot of who we are. When we were together two years ago, our gross revenue was just a little over $3 billion, so we've almost broke the $5 billion revenue, target. The warehousing square footprint has increased from 80 million to a little over 100 million across North America, so that's a great accomplishment there. Robert talked about what we do in, in our, transportation management organization. We procured almost, or a little over $10 billion worth of freight across really every mode, but primarily truckload and LTL.
As you see across the bottom, we've got a great diversity in our, our services portfolio. I'll just call out one item in the middle. Our e-commerce and last mile was 10% just two years ago, so we're up to 19% of our, our total revenue. So our contributions to the transformation are really around four areas, and if you recall, we really wanted to diversify away from the, the automotive sector that we had. We're not. We're continuing to sell in automotive. We serve all the major OEMs, but we wanted to build up consumer packaged goods and omnichannel retail to become more of, more of the mix. So that gives us great flexibility as we're going out and sell to our customers.
Secondly, we needed to change our contract structures to really allow us and our customers to respond to inflationary pressures quicker. So whether they go up or down, we have that relationship now that we can handle those quicker with our customers. You're going to continue to see what we're doing in continuous improvement. I've got a couple of slides on that, so I'll hit that a little bit later. And then we've completed the acquisitions of Whiplash, Midwest, and Dotcom. So those were great bolt-on services that our customers were asking for, and we can deliver now for them. So from a market perspective, very large market, $1.4 trillion, only about 18% is outsourced, so we feel like we're very well positioned for the secular trends.
These have really kind of gone unchanged over the last couple of years. You're going to be able to hear more in the breakout session around nearshoring and what we're seeing there, but I think we're positioned very well to capture profitable growth as we go forward. So how do we win? Again, just think about, think about that deep vertical expertise and being able to go in front of a customer and talk in detail about what they do. In automotive, again, we serve most of the major OEMs across North America, and that's where we're managing hundreds of suppliers, thousands of parts that have to be picked up across North America, sequenced into these large manufacturing locations.
So very, very complex, and, as Robert said earlier, we're leveraging off our expertise in Canada and Mexico, but we're also using the shop network to be more competitive against our competition. Consumer packaged goods. Primarily, 10 years ago, it was food and beverage. The team's done a great job of diversifying there. We've gone now into pet care, health and beauty, cleaning supplies, so I think we've got a good, diverse base there. And then omni-channel retail is really focused around apparel, technology, footwear, and then e-com, big and bulky. So again, great deep vertical expertise there, focused on our customer. You know, we are focused on North America. While our customers used to search for global providers, they always make decisions regionally, so we're really focused on US, Canada, and Mexico.
We can provide them a seamless, customer service experience, as well as visibility across the, across the geography. And then, if you think about continuous improvement, as Robert said, it's, it's core to who we are. You're going to be able to go out in the breakout session two and, and get a good understanding of how we're implementing value-based automation, across, across North America. So let me dig a little bit deeper into our port-to-door strategy. On the left-hand side, you see our core services that we've offered for, for well over 40 years. Transportation management is where we're procuring and optimizing transportation networks for our customers. So again, that could be truckload, LTL, multi-stop. We've got a great operation and, and, control towers across North America. Dedicated transportation for supply chain is primarily in automotive and industrial.
So again, think about inbound to manufacturing, and then we also provide retail cross-dock store delivery in a dedicated solution. So we're running the cross docks and then sorting that product and delivering it to the actual store. On the right side, you can see our acquisitions. I'll start from the far right. MXD was 2018. It's been a great addition to our portfolio. E-commerce, Whiplash, back in 2022, really kinda expanded our drayage capability out of the ports, but also allowed us to deliver packages to the end consumer's home. And then IFS, I won't go into this. I've got a slide here in a minute, but Darren's got a... Darren Cooprider, our Senior Vice President of CPG, has got a great display out there.
You may even want to steal some of the product that you see out there. I don't know what we're going to do with it when we get through, but it's a great, great display there. So as you think about IFS, I'll just really kind of hit on a couple of things here. Think about co-manufacturing. So that's where we're actually taking our customer's recipe, if you will, and then blending that and putting it into the final consumer package. So think about, you know, toothpaste as an example there. And then co-pack is where we're taking that end product, and we're configuring it specifically for the retail, so you'll see some great examples out there, but it's been a great acquisition. Again, I think a great message from our customers. They've asked for this capability.
We used to do it kind of one-off in certain warehouses, and now we've got a platform that we can expand for our CPG customers. So again, a great, great story there. Next three slides, I want to go through some case studies. And this is a great example here of a 56-year relationship with General Motors. I'd like to tell you how we won it, but I was born 56 years ago, so I don't know all the details. But this network is very comprehensive. You can look down the middle, and we're not only designing routes, but we're managing carriers. We actually fulfill parts in one location, so we're taking parts off a truck, we're optimizing those parts, and we're actually feeding those to the General Motors assembly workers. So, great story there. Very integrated solution.
We're proud to say that we've been Supplier of the Year 11 times, but again, a great, great operation, procuring almost a little over $1 billion worth in freight. So we also do dedicated transportation in that network as well. Next example is a recent win with Pabst Blue Ribbon. So as I talked about diversity in CPG, we expanded into the adult beverage side. We run some warehouses, but for Pabst, we're managing their transportation network. So again, they were in a relationship. It was a competitive bid, and I think the real differentiator here for us was RyderShare. Gave them the visibility that they needed in real time and provided great value to their customer service organization as well. So, you know, a deep relationship here.
We've been there for two years and already resulting in significant savings in their network. Then the final example is Stance. So they are an omni-channel retail customer. So think about, they're in the socks and apparel business, and a new and growing company. We've had that relationship here for about five years. You know, great relationship, great example of port-to-door capability. So we're actually receiving their product in the Port of L.A., in Long Beach, and we're fulfilling that into one of our warehouses, multi-client facilities out in L.A. We're then doing pick, pack, and ship, and managing the parcel carrier and optimization to the end consumer's home. So great, great relationship. We've actually got lean and continuous improvement embedded into their operation, and we've brought automation to them that makes sense for their business.
So I think, some great examples there for you to think through. So what about our strategic initiatives? As you think about... You know, we're very excited about the future. We're focused on operational excellence, certainly continuing to invest in our customer-facing technology, as you've seen the testimonials, and then we're focused on profitable growth. Robert talked about leveraging the multi-client network. You know, we've seen some volume declines over the last couple of years, but as the economy comes back, I think we're positioned very well, to continue to grow Ryder Last Mile, multi-client, and, in our e-commerce portfolio. One technology solution that we haven't talked a lot about is Ryder OpsBox. You see that in the middle section, and think of that as a labor management tool for our warehouses.
Our customers can have visibility of that as well, but we're able to manage that labor and optimize that labor inside a warehouse. So it gives our operators visibility to not be as reactive as we were, call it three or four years ago. We're seeing that information in real time. We can deploy extra resources as we have bottlenecks and opportunities. So, great example there. And then profitable growth, continue to expand across sub-segments. I talked about CPG. If you think about our automotive solution, it could apply to motorcycles, recreational vehicles, so our team there is focused on expanding that. And then we're going to continue to focus on our and invest in our Ever Better campaign, and we relaunched some new commercials this past year with Sam Ryder, so hopefully you've gotten to see them as well.
So one core, you know, piece of who we are is continuous improvement. I wanted to take some time to kind of walk you through the wheel, and it really always starts with the opportunity with the customer. So we will receive a request for quote, and it's typically in a competitive bid situation. Once we are awarded that piece of business, we sit down with our customer in a collaborative design solution forum. So we'll spend several days with them, making sure that we understood exactly what they were asking for and that they understand what we're going to deliver. So then once we complete that, our teams will then implement the solution.
You've heard me talk over the last several years that we invested about five years ago in our startup effectiveness team, and that organization really goes in and does all the infrastructure for a warehouse, and that allows our customer-facing team to work with the customer to start up that business. So it's been a great investment, and our customers really enjoy the approach, and it is a differentiator in the market. So once we get up and operating, we're really always looking for continuous improvement. So how do we do that? We get thousands of little ideas from the frontline workers. So the people that are picking, packing, and shipping product will give our teams feedback. We'll then look at the data.
We'll go through a process, a Kaizen event, to really specifically figure out the value of the change that we're going to make to the process. Then we implement it, and then it's rinse and repeat. We're continuously doing this. It's really one of those journeys that's never complete. So I think it's a key piece of why we win. It's a key piece of how we drive value to our customer and give them proactive solutions. So before I start the video here, I want to kind of give you some details. This is BJC. It's a healthcare hospital network in the St. Louis area. And the interesting thing here is the relationship actually started 15 years ago in our consumer packaged goods industry.
So the customer that we managed then left, went into the healthcare space, knew about us, trusted Ryder. They knew we could drive value for them, and then they were part of the selection team, and they, they selected Ryder back in 2020. These operations, you'll see, is very complex, highly automated location. I was actually out there a couple of weeks ago with our customer and a new prospect, and it's a showcase in our industry. So we'll roll the video.
Our health organization is located in the Midwest. The traditional model of healthcare and distribution wasn't working, and we knew we had to look outside of healthcare, and that's why we chose Ryder as our partner.
I think Ryder stands out in our healthcare solution because we bring expertise from many different verticals.
We decided to work with Ryder because they brought the right technology, the right solutions, and they helped us solve this in a way the industry had never solved before in healthcare.
When we knew we wanted to build the building, partnering with Ryder worked terrific and led to some of the best collaboration I've ever seen in my career between a distributor and a customer. Part of transforming our supply chain was building for the future, and part of building for the future was adding automation into our building. Traditional models have required throwing a lot of bodies and a lot of labor and usually bring the person to the work. The automation we put in this building, including the pick module and the AutoStore, flipped that on its head and bring the work to the person.
...The most immediate impact we've achieved for our customer has been in fill rate to the hospital. Prior to Ryder, our customer had a 90% fill rate. Six months after go-live, Ryder improved that fill rate to 98%.
Prior to RyderShare, we often didn't know what we were going to receive until we actually opened the package. But now, through Ryder and through RyderShare, we have visibility all the way back 60 days or more into our supply chain.
So that means that the product is available for the clinicians to care for their patients when they need it. They don't have to wait for it. They have a sense that we're going to be able to deliver that product to them on time and on budget.
We've seen levels of service improved by as much as 40%, and we've seen our cost per PO be a third cheaper than it was before.
Ryder provided us a turnkey solution. They were able to bring together a building, the labor, the automation, the integration, and the transportation to really deliver optimal services to our organization.
We are trying to upend how business has been done in our industry for 20 years, and we couldn't do that with somebody who's not forward-thinking and who isn't willing to collaborate with us and learn with us. It's been that partnership with Ryder that's been the greatest success.
So again, a great story there. Just to kind of give you an idea, we started the RFQ, or request for quote, back in late 2019. We were awarded the business in 2020, and it took us really two years to design that network and get it implemented. I think it, you know, they're really looking out to transform the healthcare industry. You know, this is a self-service model, and certainly equally as important as our other customers, but we're impacting patients' lives every day in the operating room and in their hospital room. So, so I'll close up here with our takeaways. Again, continuing to focus on Port-to-Door services and capabilities across North America. We're going to continue to diversify in our portfolio of verticals, with our deep expertise there.
Data analytics and lean continuous improvement is core to us, and then we're going to continue to invest in technology. I thought you saw some really good examples today. Targets remain unchanged, low double-digit top-line growth, high single-digit on the bottom. John will go into a little bit more in his section. So with that, I'll turn it over to Calene. I think we have some Q&A. So thank you.
Thank you, Steve. So we're going to take some Q&A, both from the audience, in the room, as well as virtually. I just want to remind you, this is the first of two Q&A sessions we're going to have, so we're asking that you limit your questions to the first three presentations that you've seen so far this morning. So I'll have Robert, and Karen, and Steve come up and join me. And for those of you in the room, Amy and Ray will be walking around with microphones, so if you could just wait until they get to you, so people on the webcast, as well as the presenters, can hear your question. All right, so we'll get started. Jordan?
Hi, Jordan Alliger, Goldman Sachs. You had mentioned on the supply chain side that one of the transformative areas was elevating the contracts that you had. Can you maybe talk a little about what you've done to make them more robust, and where you feel more confident in sustaining the margin target?
Yeah, so if you think about, think about our contracts, Jordan, it's, it's, a majority of our contract business on the warehousing side is cost plus, so that's kind of a little bit, you know, easier to manage through. But what we found through COVID, as we were seeing wage rates go up, you know, 20, 25, 30% in some, in some situations, we, we only had, like, a normal CPI of, like, 3%-4%. So what we put in is the language where we're using, some databases to really attack the wage rates in key markets, and then we're aligned with our customers so they can see that transparently.
I would just add to that, that also you're going to see in dedicated, we did the same thing.
Yeah.
We had the same issue with driver wages going way up and not having the ability to move them up as much. We've gone through and restructured most of those agreements.
Go ahead, Scott.
So Robert, you talked-
I'll get you.
Thanks. It's Scott Group from Wolfe. So Robert, you talked about a $125 million uplift from the repricing strategy. How much of that is incremental in 2025? And then once you get through that five-year, is there an opportunity for another sort of pricing uplift beyond that?
Sure. So there's another, call it $20-$25 million left in this last year, if you think about the multi-year initiative. So that would get us... I mean, that's why you're seeing the earnings power of the company have gone up. It's, it's certainly that, along with having reduced the residuals. So going forward, it's going to be- I think it's going to be more driven by cost takeouts and continuing to manage the cost side while maintaining the, the price. The 2027 model years come in, we're always going to be looking for ways that we can, focus on the segments of the business where we add the most value and try to get a little bit more. But right now, maintaining that, I think, provides us a really good foundation, and then continuing to find ways to be more efficient.
'Cause, actually, one thing I didn't mention is, it, it wasn't just about raising prices across the board. It was really around looking at the market segments where we add the most value and focusing on those. There were certainly some segments which are much more difficult and competitive. Moving a little bit more towards the truck side versus the power side also is an important piece, as we saw better opportunities there. So we're going to continue to look for those market segment, segments where we add the most value.
Jeff?
Thank you very much. Jeff Kauffman, Vertical Research Partners. Two bigger picture questions. If you look back at the last cycle, I think we could say we got out a little bit over our skis in terms of capacity additions when the market headed down, and it led to a couple of years where earnings were absent, and you've made some changes to adjust for that. I guess my question is twofold. Number one, how do we make sure, with it being more expensive to invest in trucks now and probably in a couple of years as well, so the capital requirements-
Mm-hmm
are rising, too? How do we make sure we don't get over our skis again? We've raised the ROE targets, but why? Should we be generating more free cash flow over a cycle, or have the investment requirements of the business gone up, so we're not generating more free cash over a cycle?
Right. So first of all, how do we make sure we don't get out over our skis? I think that's a good question. It's really maintaining that pricing discipline, right? So you remember, one of the most important things we did was really reduce the back-end risk of our investments, of our leases. And we're going to maintain that discipline because I think that's going to keep us in good stead. And years when used truck prices are good and the freight cycle is strong, we're going to over-earn to a certain extent. We're going to make more than we had rated. And even on the more difficult years and more challenging trough years, we're still going to get the return that we expected.
So we don't have any plans of certainly changing our philosophy and our strategy there. So as we as the market evolves, I think... What was the second part of your question?
Free cash flow.
Oh, free cash flow.
Investments going up.
So, sure, with investments going up, that's going to put some pressure on our free cash flow. Pressure being, you know, we're going to be in that... This year, we're looking at being slightly below, maybe break even. As we go into next year and the next couple of years with the pre-buy, you're probably going to see us again with some pressure on free cash flow. But I think the broader story, and you're going to hear this from John later, because of, you know, our balance sheet and the returns that we're getting, it's really about the debt capacity that we have on the balance sheet.
So we're looking at, you know, over the next several years, continuing to have a lot of leverage capability on the balance sheet, where we can either invest, you know, in good returning leases, or we can invest in some of these other technologies, or ultimately, we can give money back to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. We feel really good about where we're at. You know, we're investment-grade balance sheet that's strengthened over time, and we see opportunities even when we're going to have more investments because of the higher vehicle cost of still having the balance sheet capacity to do these things.
Brian?
Thanks. Good morning, Brian Ossenbeck from JP Morgan. Question for Steve. I know we're talking about the themes of operational excellence and improving that over time and through the portfolio, but didn't see that move up the way it did for FMS with some of the initiatives you're looking at here. Maybe, is that being invested into growing more across the different verticals? And maybe give some examples of, you know, what that leverage in the multi-client network is, and also automation where it makes sense, because I think that's something you can probably-
Right
... get more value for as well.
Right. Yeah, I think as you, as you think about our business, each one of our opportunities outside of the omnichannel retail, excuse me, the multi-client networks, is specific to a unique customer, right? So there's very little leverage in that, in that type of business. But we're going to continue to invest in technology. I mean, those are decisions we make. That has really kind of fueled our top-line growth, too, and has been a differentiator. I think the marketing campaign that we're going to continue to invest in is helping us, certainly from a pipeline perspective. On the automation front, again, I think it's value-based. If you think about warehouses in the U.S., only about 10% of those warehouses actually need automation.
So I think we're investing more into robots in our omni-channel piece of the business. It's helping us to win new sales as well. These highly automated facilities, we have probably four or five of those across the U.S., across multiple verticals. But they are, you know, heavy investments, got to have really a ten-year contract, and the customer has to be on board as well. So...
Ken?
Robert, I know Ken Hoexter from B of A. I know you mentioned you were just throwing out there, next peak could be 2026, 2027. Who knows? But what are customers saying now? Are you... You know, given your exposure to a wide base of customers, is it just still more malaise? Are you seeing any-
Yeah
-signs of green shoots? And then, given the exposure to the market, why are we not seeing a more normalization in the market that's out there? So you mentioned what goes on with your used fleet. Why are we not seeing more of the bankruptcies on the smaller carriers or just more stabilization in the market today?
Yeah, that's the $25,000 question, right? Is this downturn seems to be taking a lot longer to get out of. So what are we hearing from our customers? You can certainly ask Tom on the leasing side, but there's certainly. We're at a period where there's a wait-and-see attitude, right? Customers are taking longer to make decisions. "Why should I sign up to a lease right now when I can wait? And let's see." There's a lot of uncertainty in the market. Not unusual. Whenever we see uncertainty, that's what happens. Customers just take longer to make decisions. Clearly, on the where we see the impacts of the freight cycle, rental and used vehicles, we're still seeing kind of bumping along the bottom, still some softness there.
I think it's just a matter of getting enough capacity out of the market, and then, and then the economy coming back, right? So we still believe this is probably, you know, see this theory with third, fourth quarter, but wait and see. We haven't seen yet that turn. You know, our rental, we'll talk about it later, our rental utilization is kind of where we expected, but it's not great, and our used truck pricing is kind of bumping along the bottom. On the tractor side, still coming down on the truck side, maybe at a slower clip, but, yeah, we're still, we're still in that troughy type environment.
... Are there any other questions in the room? Okay, great! So we have time for a break, so why don't we try to get back here, maybe 10:25 A.M., and we'll start for the next three presentations. Thank you.
I know you think about it, how my body makes you feel. And we can fool about, but I don't wanna have to steal. I understand you're not mine, babe. Why, why, why, why, why? Even when you're with me, you lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. And I know it will never change, but I still can't say goodbye. Old habits you walk about. You are my weakness. Take my lead, this has to end. You are my weakness. I thought you would take your rest. I thought that you... So now I have to start again. I understand you're not mine, babe. Why, why, why, why, why? Even when you're with me, you lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. And I know it will never change, but I still can't say goodbye. Hearts, hands like sweaty palms. Hearts, I feel body showing signs. Hearts, fear body shy the way.
Hearts, my feet start to shake all day. Hearts, hands like sweaty palms. Hearts, I feel body showing signs. Hearts, fear body shy the way. Hearts, my feet start to shake all day. I understand you're not mine, babe. Why, why, why, why, why? Even when you're with me, you lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. And I know it will never change. I still can't say goodbye. Home is where I want to be. Pick me up and turn it around. I feel numb, born with a weak heart. Guess I must be having fun. The less we say about it, the better. Make it up as we go along. With my feet on the ground, head in the sky. It's okay, I know nothing's wrong, nothing is. Oh, I got plenty of time. Oh, you got light in your eyes. And you're standing here beside me.
Out of the piss in the dark. Never for money, always for love. Cover up and say good night, say good night. Home is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there.
...She lifted up her wing, guess that this must be the place. Oh, I can't tell one from the other. Did I find you, or did you find me? There was a time before we were born, and someone asked, "This is where I'll be." Where will I be? Oh, we drift in and out. Oh, sing into my mouth. And out of all these kinds of people, you got a face with a view. Oh, I'm just an animal looking for a home. Share the same space for a minute or two. And you love me when the world stops turning today. Eyes that light up, eyes look through you. Cover up the blank sky, give me your name. Ooh, ooh. Out of all the way, I feel a bit too.
Okay, we're going to get started with our next three presentations, so if I could ask everybody to take their seats. Then I'll have Steve Martin, who runs our DTS business, come up for our next presentation. Welcome, Steve.
Thank you, Calene. Good morning. Steve Martin, Executive Vice President of our Dedicated Transportation Division. This is my 37th year with Ryder. I actually started similar to Steve on our front lines, dispatching. I've had the opportunity to run operations, lead customer accounts in our automotive, high tech, and international groups, as well as lead functional supports in engineering, quality, lean, and our startup teams that support all of our verticals.
One of the things that I have really enjoyed about 37 years here at Ryder, and I think it's not just unique to Dedicated, it's part of what we do, is getting very close to a lot of different customers' operations and businesses, and the insights that that brings, and the value that that provides our teams and our leaders to be able to talk with customers about how their business is running within the broader industry, and giving us better benchmarks and better opportunity to learn new things from our customers because we are so integrated in their business. So if I do a good job today, as Karen said, I hope to leave you with these four key messages: transportation solution space, and that really, that customized dedicated space.
With Cardinal, we are now the number two largest dedicated provider in our industry. The second thing I'd like to leave with you is that the acquisition and the integration of Cardinal, and the synergies that we expect is on track and on time, and I'll go into more details of that in a little bit. Third, from an operational efficiency standpoint, the leverage that we are now able to gain from our scale and density with Cardinal, we've initiated a flexible operating structure, activity, and I'm going to talk more about that in detail. You'll see the value that we're going to bring to customers, and bring to our business to really drive operational efficiencies.
And then fourth, that we are well-positioned to continue to drive profitable growth and, prepare for the upcycle, in the, in the industry. So dedicated. You know, as Robert talked about, what dedicated service is in terms of bringing the, full-service lease and drivers, together for customers that want to outsource their private fleets, I would add to that this technology that you've heard us all talk about, and that really has become a more critical part in, in the dedicated operations that we provide customers.
Our ability to interface and integrate with our customers' businesses, based on the data that we now have available through our technology platforms, that's helping customers see near real time proof of delivery, exception management within their customer service teams, that's allowing our customers to add value to their customers by making better decisions, quicker decisions, or resolve issues that may be occurring at that point of delivery, as well as providing improvements in the cash-to-cash cycle time. So they now have visibility to that, final delivery, customer signing of the material. They're able to push that right back in and begin the invoicing process, rather than waiting for paper to return back to a terminal, processing through customer service.
So you put all that together, that enables us to really provide a dedicated service that's different than just normal transportation, normal tendering to common carriers. Last year, this is the numbers at the top here are pre-Cardinal, so we ended the year with $1.8 billion in total revenue, about $1.3 billion in operating revenue, and I'm really proud of the earnings that we achieved in 2023. We're on the high end of our target, with 9.3% earnings before taxes. So since 2019, we've achieved these milestones as part of our balanced growth strategy. You know, we have increased the scale of our operations with the acquisition of Cardinal. We're adding about $1 billion of total revenue, most of that being in Dedicated.
We've added density with Cardinal, where we've seen an increase of about 60% density in areas where we have a large concentration of drivers. As part of the de-risking activity over the last couple of years, we've achieved about 95% of our contracts are now upgraded with language that allows us to move through that conversation quicker with customers when we have to adjust costs based on driver wages or other inflationary costs, and we've implemented a value-based pricing model that allows us to ensure that we're getting the returns for the type of service that we're providing each one of our customers.
We've also enhanced the process with FMS, not only from a sales standpoint, which is a very strong part of our business model in terms of building new leads and pipeline and converting customers from full service lease to dedicated, but we've been working with FMS on the operations side and really improving the interaction with our drivers in the shops, which has added value from an operational execution standpoint. The investments we've made in technology, I'll highlight one here with Ryder Drive, which is our driver application, which has allowed us to really fully digitize that trip management.
So when drivers go out, they're able to now perform various functions for customers based on their needs relative to proof of delivery, exception management, as I mentioned, but we can do a lot of activities with this application in terms of training drivers and providing-