During the entire time of the session, just discussing probably two issues, right? Cycle and what's going on with AI. So, you know, maybe we'll kick right into it there, because we do only have about 30 minutes and just maybe talk around what you're seeing with the cycle. You know, obviously, there's been a lot of talk about truckload supply, you know, and I know we heard Covenant, you know, I don't know if you were in the presentation, but they seem, you know, to be very excited and bullish on the trajectory of, of things just based on what's going on with some of the regulatory concerns. So, you know, maybe we'll start it off there, Drew. You know, what are you seeing in terms of trucking supply, especially relative to what you would expect to see this time of year?
Yeah, I think whenever you look on it, you're definitely seeing supply come out with all the regulatory and things that are being pushed, whether it's non-domiciled or English Language Proficiency. You know, for us, we always track how that measures up and what is it actually doing on the tender rejection side. And so if you go back just a few months ago, you were seeing tender rejections in the mid-single digits. Since then, demand's actually come down, and you've seen the tender rejections touch double digits. It's gone even higher than that with some of the impacts from weather over the last couple weeks, but even before the weather, it was already hitting double digits.
So I think when you look, the structural changes that are happening in the industry, you can see on the supply side, and it's something that is very real that we're seeing across the business. And I think with that, one of the things that we're tracking closely is what happens with demand, post that. And so obviously, there was some encouraging news over the last couple weeks when you look at some of the things that have come out on the home building side, when you look at some of the things that have happened on the ISM reporting, there are some catalysts that could be there for demand, which could create a very strong market whenever you look at what's happened on the supply side if demand increases at all.
And obviously, on the supply side, you know, there are a number of issues that are in focus. You know, it's the non-domiciled CDLs, the, you know, ELP, the driving schools. Which of those, you know, would you say is front of mind for you? And when you think about what the potential impact could be on the supply population, I mean, is there a number that you have in mind in terms of percent reduction?
Yeah, I think, you know, if you take out some of the private fleets and things of that nature, the number, and we've had conversations with the Department of Transportation, the numbers that we've been quoted is anywhere from 20%-25%. That's a big number. I think even if it's low single digits and/or mid-single digits, that would be a big impact, but I think you could see what could possibly be there. I don't know that it's one driver. I think it's a multitude of things, whether it's non-domiciled, whether it's English Language Proficiency. There has been more traction on English Language Proficiency of pulling capacity out over the short term, but I don't know what that means for the long term of where things shake out.
And Bruce, if you size up the market, you know, there are about 3.2 million CDLs, commercial driver's licenses, that are out there, and the FMCSA has talked about at least 200,000 potentially being at risk as no longer being in compliance. But I think to Drew's point also, you gotta focus on that denominator in terms of what actual percentage of the market is attributable to things such as private fleets, etc. And then when you actually just look at the for-hire truckload market, you're talking about a denominator that's probably closer to 1.5 million. So when you think about the total impact on the market, I think you look at the move higher in tender rejections being at low double digits despite where we are on the calendar.
You know, it could be I think the language we used last week on the earnings call was we're in a pretty fragile state in terms of supply versus demand, and any improvement in demand could really go ahead and move the market to a higher state in terms of tender rejections, etc.
So obviously, short term, this has a compressive effect on gross margins as it does for anybody that's a buyer of transportation capacity. But, you know, when you think about the potential, you know, changes, the coming changes, how do you set up, you know, the RXO model to deal with that, you know, both in terms of ensuring that you have the right capacity for customers and in terms of making sure that, you know, you're in a position to serve those customers, you know, if and when that tightening happens?
Well, I think, you know, two things that I'd point out. If you go back and look at legacy RXO, we've always been at the top end of the industry of what's going on on vetting carrier capacity, and we had to be. You know, we built the business off of a lot of just-in-time automotive shipments, a lot of technology and high cargo value freight. So the carriers that you're using on that freight matters a lot. So our vetting process has always been stringent. The second thing is, after we acquired Coyote, we saw that they had a huge presence, which we did not, on the private fleet side.
And so being able to continue to expand the capacity there and look at ways to do that, when you're going on the private fleet side, typically, we're getting a contract rate to the carrier, and we already have a contract rate to the customer. So that actually creates more stable margins through a down cycle, and it's not playing as much of what happens in the cycle.
So let's pivot maybe to talk a little bit more about demand. But I guess, you know, first, I would think that in an environment where you're seeing a supply-driven, you know, tightening, but, you know, as you pointed out, demand is still pretty soft, and we hit, you know, some of our lowest levels fairly recently, you know, is this enough of a cycle-driving catalyst, you know, to really benefit your model in terms of, you know, an absence of demand but, you know, tightening pricing?
I wanna make sure that I'm following your question. You're saying without demand, what happens?
Yeah, so, you know, do you see enough spot opportunities, I guess, essentially being created in an absence of demand?
Well, if you look at what happened in Q4, we saw more spot opportunities, especially later in the quarter in the month of December. We saw more in January, but it was not enough to outweigh what happened on our contractual gross profit per load. When you look at, we saw contraction on our contractual gross profit per load. Our spot gross profit per load was significantly higher, but it wasn't enough to offset what happened on the contractual book of business.
Okay, and then just in terms of the demand picture, you, you know, alluded to it a little bit, but, you know, you recently acquired Coyote and, and integrated that business, big presence in, you know, CPG, a lot of, verticals that, you know, you didn't traditionally have exposure to. You know, just wanna see, you know, kind of your perspective on how the different end markets are shaking out right now. Obviously, we had a, you know, pretty solid ISM print, but, you know, any comment on the different demand end markets would be great.
In Q4, we saw a continued improvement within our industrial and manufacturing, which is about 20% of our vertical mix within truckload. Some of that was due to some special projects that we were winning. So, don't wanna read too much into that as it relates to overall demand trends, but to Drew's point earlier, the ISM reading from last week with the new orders component in particular hitting 57, highest level since 2022. If you see a few more of those readings, that's certainly a bullish indicator in terms of what may happen in the rest of 2026.
If you look at automotive, we saw automotive, which was a pretty big headwind for RXO in 2025 because we are highly specialized within automotive in terms of managed expedite, but we did see truckload volumes within our brokerage business ease from down almost 30% earlier in the year to down mid-teens in Q4. And we do expect automotive for RXO to no longer be a year-on-year headwind in terms of company-wide gross profit dollars, 2026 versus 2025, which is certainly encouraging. And then in terms of the rest of the other verticals, you know, pretty much in line with our overall truckload volume, which was down low double digits year-over-year.
Maybe just talk to us a little bit more about that automotive expedite business because I don't think it's something that, you know, the investor community has spent a lot of time with recently. But what, what is the right set of, you know, kind of market circumstances that really lead that business to outperform? You know, certainly, we're looking at a lot of potential trade disruption, you know, this year, continued trade disruption. But, you know, what, what makes that business tighten up?
That business thrives during disruption, or it thrives whenever things are ramping up or down one way or the other. So if you have production increase, typically, it leads to more expedites. If you think about the way the transportation typically works for automotives, you've got the rail, you've got truckload, then you have deviated truckload, which is truckload just at a higher price and higher standard service, and then you have the expedite world. Where we play in is the managed expedite world. We're the largest manager of ground expedite shipments in the country, and it's for managing the business for some of the largest OEMs in the country whenever it gets there. There has not been a lot of disruption over the last year within that market. The SAR market has actually showed okay, and SAR data has showed okay.
When you look at disruption in the market, plants coming up or down, that's typically whenever you see more expedite volume. Because those are Just-in-Time shipments and it's mission critical, and if you're late, you're talking about million-dollar fines, typically, those shipments have higher profitability to them.
When we think about the amount of cross-border activity that's happening, you know, in, in automotive but, but also otherwise, how are you all investing in that opportunity? How are you thinking about that, especially in this kind of, you know, unpredictable trade environment?
Yeah, automotive for us, automotive is one of the key verticals, certainly, that plays into cross-border. And cross-border is, you know, call it high single-digit % of our mix, across the company, a little bit more geared towards southern border versus northern border. But when you when you think about the presence of RXO, we've got a huge presence down, in Laredo, Texas, right off the, World Trade Bridge, and we also have a presence in Mexico as well. We do firmly believe if you look over the next, you know, 10, 20, 30 years, as you think about just more manufacturing coming back to North America, any kind of, presence with respect to nearshoring and what that means for the overall economy, Mexico and Canada are certainly gonna be a part of that, and we continue to think about that business pretty strategically over the long term.
Maybe just pivoting towards some of the more structural elements of your business, you know, you've obviously just completed a major transformative acquisition in, you know, Coyote. Maybe you can give us a postmortem or perhaps postmortem is not a great word. We'll call it a diagnostic on, you know, how that process went, what benefits you think this adds to the model long term, and then, you know, what you see ahead just in terms of M&A versus organic opportunity in the market.
Yeah, so I think, one, whenever we went into the acquisition, we went and focused on three things: people, customers, and technology. And an asset-like business, people are the most important things, and make sure that you're holding onto the people. And the retention rate, I think last number we put out had voluntary turnover had been low single digits. And so when you look at that, it is the ability to come to a company like RXO who knew and understood brokerage, it was the core of what we did. There was excitement there. I think when you look on the customer side, we saw customers continue to do business with us, off of that. I think 99 of the top 100 customers are still there today. We did see customers take a step back coming out of the acquisition.
I think there was an unknown as Coyote was put up for sale. I think customers pulled back some volume off that. We didn't see the same pullback on the legacy RXO business as what we did on the legacy Coyote. We saw it pull back on the legacy Coyote. We've started to see that return this year coming out of bid cycle. Customers had to get to know those customers who didn't know us had to get to know who we were, how we were gonna service the business, how we were gonna build relationships with them, how did they understand our technology. And then on the technology side, you had a system that was, was great at the time that it was built in Bazooka, and it was transformative in what it was doing in the early 2000s within the industry.
I think it was 2006, 2007 or whenever it was initially rolled out. It was really good on the carrier side, but you had people who had operated on that system for 10, 15 years. So them learning a new platform was something that took us a little bit of time, but we're there now. We're past the technology side of the integration, and we're getting good feedback from the people that are using it. We're continuing to see opportunities to build out our system that we've got there.
I think the profitability of Coyote and RXO together was not what we thought it would be coming out of the gates, but as we start to look at what we've done over the last year of stabilizing some of the volume decline, of being able to build out a strong pipeline, of winning managed transportation business, we're very confident in where we are and where we're heading going forward. As far as future M&A, you never know. I mean, M&A's hard to pin down on what it looks like. We see and look at a lot of things. We're laser-focused on running the business right now and making sure that we do drive shareholder value for the long term out of that.
But, you know, I mean, if there's something out there that we think makes us a better company for our customers, a better company for shareholders, then it's absolutely something that we would take a look at. Our bar is very, very high. We've seen a lot of deals that have come across our desk, and we've only gotten one across the finish line. But if there's something out there that made us a better company, it gave us more scale in brokerage, it gave us more scale in managed transportation, it was an ancillary service that we thought that we could cross-sell well, then we would take a look at it.
So you mentioned the volume declines, you know, post-Coyote and, you know, gaining some of those back. And I think that's an important thing to focus on because that may have worried some investors, but I think your point to me after the call was that, you know, a lot of that was due to intentional pricing decisions that you made. You know, maybe just walk us through that process and how you see that resolving in the coming year?
Yeah, well, I think that whenever we acquired Coyote, we knew that the gross profit per load was below what it needed to be. And, so we had to make some adjustments there. But I also think it was customers getting to know who we were in there. And so I think that coming in there, stabilizing the business was extremely important. And that's what, when you look at our pipeline right now, on an apples-to-apples basis, our late-stage pipeline is up more than 50% on a year-over-year basis. And when we say late-stage pipeline, we're not talking about the first round of an RFP. We're talking about stages where we've had deep conversations with customers about what works for them, what works for us, where are we adding value into their transportation network.
So it's something that we have a higher degree of confidence than typically what you got. Well, we call it just spray and pray. You're taking an RFP, you're just putting out rates. That's not necessarily where we're talking about the pipeline. We're talking about the stages right before awards go out.
That's great. And then, I would be remiss if we didn't, you know, talk more about technology because obviously, that's been a huge focus in the market. You know, I've thought of you guys for a long time as tech leaders, you know, in some ways, maybe preempted, you know, C.H. Robinson, especially around the pricing and time to market. But, you know, they've seen a huge run in their valuation on that basis and getting, you know, rubber to meet road. So, you know, maybe talk about some of the AI and tech initiatives that you have going on, what you think, you know, timing looks like in terms of really being able to connect that to the operating profit.
Yeah, so we are very excited about the investments we're making in technology across the board, including transformational investments in AI, both agentic and generative AI. When we think about AI, we think about applying it to improve the long-term profitability of the business, and we really think about applying it across four key pillars: volume, margin, service, and productivity. And if we can execute against those four key pillars, I think it's gonna have a fundamental impact in terms of profitability of the company. And it's really across two key vectors. When you think about the ability to go ahead and improve our productivity and improve the cost structure of the company, over the last 12 months, we've seen an increase of about 19% on productivity, so loads per person per day on a two-year stack up about 38%. And that's the key.
If we're, we're investing, obviously, to generate a return, and we expect with those investments that our people are able to do more. And when you think about over the long term, decoupling volume growth from headcount growth and the incremental margins that affords to the company, right now, we're a low single-digit margin company in terms of last quarter, about 2% EBITDA margin. But the incremental margins in terms of gross profit down to EBITDA in our brokerage business can be as high as 80%. So if you have the ability to decouple headcount growth from volume growth leveraging AI aggressively across the organization, it can provide pretty strong incremental margins. And it's a really important point that our fundamental belief, and we've said this since the day we've spun, is it's about the combination of technology and people.
It's not universally or unilaterally applying technology and AI at the detriment of our people. How do we make our people more productive? How do we make sure that our people are closer to our customers, building out solutions and services, and driving that long-term value? And then the other aspect is how do we generate incremental margin opportunities? We talked a lot about last week how we rolled out in the last 90 days agentic AI spot opportunities, an agentic AI agent that's sitting inside our reps' inbox, leveraging our proprietary pricing algorithms, able to respond faster to customer inquiries. Talked about a generative AI chatbot that we've built in for exception management internally, just making our people more productive, and we're running pretty quickly to go ahead and deploy it across the organization.
Great. We've got about 10 minutes left, so I do wanna, you know, just offer up that, you know, we have time for Q&A. If anybody has a question, please, you know, raise your hand, and we'll get to it. But in the meantime, you know, when I think about some of the long-term implications of AI and technology, you know, there's long been this thought that technology in general improves price discovery with customers, you know, ultimately puts some pressure on gross margins. Is that something that you expect in the future, and how do you offset that?
Yeah, I don't know that if technology put pressure on gross margins, I actually think you would see EBITDA margins go up because you would see people get more productive in what they were doing, and you would be able to handle more volume. So I think I would look at it more of what it was doing on the EBITDA line versus the gross margin line at that point. And for us, like, we talk about the gross margin percentages, but it's really, in brokerage, about what's happening in the gross profit dollars per load and how it's operating at that standpoint.
You know, the same argument that you just laid out, as long as I've been doing this, I've been hearing that the gross margins were gonna continue to come down within the brokerage industry, and they've operated in low-to-high teens. It's depending on what's going on in the cycle.
What about from a competitive standpoint? Because, you know, we've, I guess, all known and experienced that, you know, the bar to start a brokerage is not particularly high, at least for a, you know, a small, mom-and-pop. But, you know, it seems like when you think about AI and the tools and investment required that, you know, it is getting harder to compete effectively in the business. So, you know, despite what you're hearing about, you know, asset carriers getting involved in brokerage and Amazon getting involved in brokerage, do you see the market becoming more competitive, or are you seeing, you know, consolidation happen?
Well, I think you're definitely seeing consolidation happen. I mean, if you look over the last 15 months, you saw where we acquired Coyote. Over the last couple of weeks, you saw where Echo acquired ITS. So I think you are seeing consolidation at the top. But if you look at what's happening in the brokerage industry, I think people realize, like, running a brokerage is probably harder than what most people thought. It's not a high barrier to start a brokerage, but in 2023, you saw about 10% of brokers go out of business. 2024, you saw 10% of brokers go out of business. In 2025, I bet the number will be around 10% of brokers went out of business when that comes out. And so, like, you have seen the tail of the brokerage just start to fall off.
What's happened is larger, financially stable brokers who are able to service customers at scale have been able to take away that tail organically. I think you'll continue to see that happen from, from customers. Customers are going to look to people that they can trust. And whenever they have to look to say, "Can somebody do 10 loads a day, 50 loads a day, 100 loads a day, 500 loads a day," there's less than a handful of companies that can go out and service customers at scale like that.
Quick pause for any questions. When you all spun out, you know, several years ago, you, I believe, laid out a, a target for kind of long-term secular growth for the industry as a whole, something like maybe high single-digit %. Just wanna see if you have any, you know, updated thoughts on that. You know, obviously, there's been a lot of supply chain disruption in the past few years. Do you think that number still stands today?
Well, I always go back to whenever I started in the industry. And, you know, at that point, you know, brokers were somebody who cleaned up a lot of what was going on on the spots, and it was harder to get in the contractual book of business within large enterprise customers. You've seen that shift. Brokers, whenever I started, made up mid-single-digit % of the overall for-hire trucking industry. Today, it's in the low 20s. I think over the next four or five years, you'll see it start touching 30. Longer terms, I think you'll see it go into 40. And it's because whenever you look at the industry as a whole, it's over 90% of trucking companies have less than six trucks. So being able to aggregate that capacity for customers is really, really important.
The second thing is you've seen brokers get into things like drop trailer and be able to do that at scale. And being able to have a trailer pull for a customer is really important because at that point, you're able to look and feel like an asset-based carrier, but you're able to do it with more flexible capacity where you can flex up or down based off of what the customer's needs are at that point. So we've seen huge strides in that business that now represents more than 10% of our overall business.
Yeah, that's a great point. There has been a lot of expansion in drop trailer. And I guess when you, you know, think about the portfolio and, and not just, you know, with some of those ancillary services, but also, you know, your mix, like with LTL versus truckload, are there any spots where you see, you know, more opportunity for growth?
Yeah, I, I think LTL is a market that we definitely see that we wanna grow. Right now, it represents around 30% of our overall business. I think that it should be 50%-60% of the overall volume. When you look at what LTL does, it is a more stable gross profit per load of what you're seeing. And so for us, that stabilizes earnings out. So we definitely wanna be able to grow that out. Managed transportation is another piece. We talked about being awarded over $200 million of freight under management in the fourth quarter for our managed transportation business. Our pipeline's sitting north of $1.5 billion right now in managed transportation. So we see again, that's a fee-based business. It's long-term contracts. It's more stable than just riding the truckload market.
I think the more that we're able to do there, we'll continue to invest in those areas organically and look at them inorganically as well.
Maybe a bigger picture question. You know, there's long been, call it co-opetition with some of the asset fleets. You know, at various points, they've moved into, you know, your business line. At this point, what we're seeing is a lot of those mega fleets move into, you know, dedicated, move kind of away from the one-way trucking market. Any kind of broad thoughts on, you know, how you're thinking about that? Is that a better setup for you all?
I think it creates more volatility, which is a good thing. Good brokers thrive off of volatility with the market going up or down. Where it doesn't do well is when it, from an earnings perspective, is whenever things stay flat in a market, whether it's up or down. So the more it drives volatility, and that will drive volatility, that's a good thing for the business.
So a couple minutes left. I guess, you know, if we think about the outlook for this year, I know you talked about it a bit on the call, but it sounds like, you know, we've got some good potential or early green shoots for demand recovery. It sounds like, you know, supply is gonna be a major driver of a, you know, market tightening or market inflection this year. And you've got, you know, I believe, a back half, acceleration in some of your AI profitability initiatives. So, you know, do you agree with that, that setup?
If you look at the first quarter, right, we're being impacted by the supply dynamics that you talked about. But then building from Q1, we've got the momentum of our late-stage pipeline within brokerage, which is up more than 50% year-over-year. And we'll see the momentum of that as we execute against that pipe convert into wins, which historically has been at a strong win rate, beginning in Q2 with the implementation of those new bids. So I think that's really important. As you think about the bridge from Q1 to Q2, seasonally, it's positive for all of our lines of business. It's actually the strongest quarter for Last Mile in particular, which has been hit pretty hard over the last six months, as you think about just broad-based weakness across Big and Bulky.
But we do have a nice seasonal ramp from Q1 to Q2. Automotive as well is seasonally stronger from the first quarter to the second quarter. I think the biggest unknown is the pace of the demand recovery. I think we feel confident on the amount of supply that's come out and is going to continue to come out based on the fact that tender rejections have moved industry-wide from mid-single digit to, as last week was even early this week was 13%-14% despite soft demand, so I think that'll be the biggest determining factor in terms of whether or not you start to see those spot loads offset the pressure on the contractual book of business.
But, you know, and the one other thing I'd re-emphasize is that over the last 3 years, RXO has taken out a significant amount of costs to really prime the model for operating leverage when the market does recover. We've taken out over $155 million of costs, so we'll have the full run-rate impact of that in 2026, so a more streamlined cost structure. And then as you think about just the variability of profitability, you know, we've had years where one quarter has represented mid-single-digit percentage of our total EBITDA just to show how the cycle can ramp. And so I go back to earlier when I was talking about the contribution margin of gross profit to the EBITDA within our brokerage business, right? For every dollar that gross profit per load moves, it's seven-figure-plus impact on an annualized basis to adjusted EBITDA.
In the month of December alone, gross profit per load was 30% below our five-year average, excluding the COVID highs, just to give a sense of how tight the market really got. That's sort of how we're thinking about from Q1 to the rest of the year.
When do we see that quarter this year, Jared? You tell me.
I think a lot of people have gotten it wrong predicting the market. I think for us, it's about making sure that we're there and we're prepared to service our customers whenever the market does turn. The higher tender rejections go, are we the ones who are there providing them solutions? Are we there the ones that they're coming to on many bids? Are we the ones that they're coming to when they have projects? Are we providing them relief on spot loads? So it's about being prepared for the upturn, but it's also about building the business for the next downturn so that we're creating higher lows for the next downturn. So it's not just sitting hoping for the upturn. It's building the business for the long term to be able to perform through all market cycles.
All right. Great. Well, we're coming up on time here. So, wanna thank RXO. It'll be a very exciting story to watch for this year. So thank you to you, Jared, and thank you to you, Drew.
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Thanks, Bruce.
Thanks, Jared.