All right. We're gonna go ahead and get started with our next presentation here, or Q&A rather. We have RXO here on stage, Jared Weisfeld, Chief Strategy Officer, Kevin Sterling in IR and Strategy as well. Thanks, guys, for making the trip here. You know, maybe let's just jump straight in and talk about demand. You know, it's been the thing we've all been waiting for to help turn the market. We can get to the supply side, you know, in a little bit later. What are you seeing in terms of the demand aspect? Any positives as we look into the second quarter, even wrap up the first quarter from some of your key end markets or customers?
Sure. Thanks for having us, Brian. When you think about the demand environment, we talked about on our earnings call how we were operating still in a prolonged soft freight environment from a demand standpoint. You saw January was down 7% year-over-year from a Cass Freight Index standpoint. I think it came out this morning or the day prior that February was also down 7% year-over-year. So that was, of course, contemplated in our Q1 outlook. When you think about what we're focused on, I'd say a couple things.
To your point, in terms of green shoots, the industrial sector of the economy has certainly had two positive PMI readings now to start the year at the highest levels in four years, especially that new orders component flashed 57 in January and was hot again in February. That tends to have, you know, about a two to three month lead time relative to actually seeing the orders, and that's important for RXO. It's about 20% of our business within brokerage is the industrial manufacturing sector of the economy. On the consumer side, you have seen a move higher to start the year on consumer confidence, and we obviously have to see how everything plays out with all of the geopolitical noise over the last couple weeks in terms of consumer confidence readings, et c.
I think the key for RXO is that our late-stage sales pipeline is up more than 50% year-over-year, and we talked a little bit about this on the earnings call. This is across the company with the integration of Coyote materially complete, having the ability to focus on this late-stage sales pipeline, which historically runs at a pretty healthy conversion rate. This is not just law of small numbers. This is hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars up more than 50% year-over-year, I think just speaks to a lot of the idiosyncratic levers that we have, heading into Q2 and the rest of the year.
Brian, just to piggyback on Jared's comments, particularly as you think about ISM strength, and I know you know this, but look what's going on with flatbed rates. While we don't have a lot of flatbed business, but if you kinda look at general industry flatbed rates, they are really, really strong.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's also a good leading indicator of kinda some of this industrial strength that Jared's talking about.
I do wanna ask about the late-stage brokered sales pipeline. Maybe you can define that a little bit more, like what goes in there? How it's quantified? Like, what type of projects, you know, you're seeing? You mentioned there's a pretty high conversion rate. Like, what does that roughly translate into over time?
Sure. It's the first time we've talked about it externally, and, you know, to give a little bit more color, the reason why we talked about it last quarter was we made a statement on the earnings call that we expect to resume truckload outperformance versus the broader market as early as the middle of the year. To make that kind of statement, we thought it was appropriate to give some backing of why we were so confident in that. To speak to that late-stage sales pipeline, what is that? It's composed of deals that are already in pricing, late-stage qualification with customers. That will hit as early as Q2 and stage throughout the rest of the year, and that runs, you know. This is also, this excludes the pre-pipe.
This is a later stage pipeline, We haven't, you know, given that percentage in terms of what it runs at from a conversion standpoint, but it is very healthy. Importantly, it is composed mostly of full truckload, and it is very diverse in terms of the composition of that. We feel very good about the health of the pipeline and what that means with respect to truckload volume. I think importantly for RXO, if you go back over the last, you know, 10, 15 years, RXO DNA is all about profitable growth, truckload outperformance. We took a step back last year with numerous headwinds that were facing the business, but we're very excited to getting back on the path for truckload outperformance versus the market as early as the middle of the year.
Most of that's full truckload. I would assume a lot of that is contract, as well. I mean, you wouldn't really necessarily put spot in there.
Yeah, but that's exactly right. This is contractual in nature, it's an important point when you think about the mix of the business, which last quarter on our truckload business was about 72% contract, 28% spot. Our fundamental belief is having that large contractual book of business will lead to materially accretive spot opportunities, special projects, mini bids when the market does become tight. We're seeing that right now, right?
When you think about just where the overall industry is versus last year, two years ago, three years ago, despite that muted demand environment that we just talked about, to Kevin's point, not only are you seeing elevated rates across other modalities, such as flatbed, but in the overall, dry van market, you're seeing 14%, 15% tender rejections coming out of the slowest freight month of the year. I think it does speak to how much supply has really come out of the market.
Brian, just to take it a step further, you know, talk about that contractual book of business, and it's very important to make sure you service that contractual book of business for your customers so that when there's spot load opportunities that Jared's talking about, you're that first call, because that shipper's gonna know, like, "Hey, Kevin does a good job. I'm gonna get that first call," versus, you know, randomly using someone, you know, may or may not be there. It's so important you service that customer's contractual freight so that when the spot opportunities are there, you can really capitalize.
How are obviously the spot rates jumped and it's remained elevated. You mentioned the rejection rate. How are conversations with shippers starting to change, or have they already changed? Because before it was like, "Well, it's just weather, and we're gonna debate about the impact." Now it does seem like at least our conversations, they're more willing to accept it or recognize it, obviously not jumping up and down to pay more, unless they have to. Like, how's that progressing from, like, your side of these conversations?
Yeah. It's been constructive. We put out our monthly curve, or our quarterly curve report a few weeks ago when we talked about how we have now moved to an inflationary rate environment. We talked about on our earnings call that we expect contract rates to be up low to mid-single digits for 2026. Combine that with the curve report where we talk about entering in that inflationary part of the cycle, which has obviously been a soft freight market for the last 3.5 to four years. I think it's safe to say with tender rejections sitting at 14% in the middle of bid season that is a favorable backdrop with respect to renegotiations and existing bids. I think 'cause it's a two-way conversation, right?
The shipper and for RXO, it's large tier one enterprise class shippers, they wanna put in rates with large strategic carriers that they know can get serviced throughout all types of cycles. They wanna have confidence that their routing guide is gonna hold up. I think, you know, we talked about the contract rate environment moving to an inflationary phase and you know, certainly that will provide relief on our gross margin when you think about just how our model works. You have to get through the repricing, which we're in the middle of right now, and then post-repricing, you'll see an improvement and relief on our contractual gross margin. You combine that with an elevated tender rejection environment and what that means for spot opportunities.
I think, you know, it's a pretty robust environment to think about, you know, the opportunity to capitalize on spots relative to two, three, four years ago.
Mm-hmm
When tender rejections were sitting at 2%, 4%, 6%. When I say robust environment, I'm not saying from a demand standpoint, I'm just talking about overall freight KPIs at much healthier levels than they were over the last few years.
When we think about the tender rejections, are these carriers, 'cause it's a little bit different with brokers, right? Like, carriers just make less money if they take a load that they can make more money later, but brokers can get squeezed, right? Because of the way the contract works. Are we seeing other brokers that are just walking away and redoing bids? Like, how far along are we in this process?
Yeah. I can't speak to other brokers, but what I can say is that industry-wide tender rejections are sitting at mid-teens. When you think about RXO, how do we service our freight? We want to go ahead and put in rates where we can service our customers, certainly to the extent and then to the extent you start to see pressure on waterfall routing guides, you'll see the ability for RXO to capitalize on those spot opportunities. We saw an increase, small, in December relative to November, an increase in January relative to December. You think about just how the market has developed with industry-wide tender rejections sitting in, you know, call it that, you know, 14, 15% level. I think that does provide, you know, a nice jumping off point heading into Q2 and the rest of the year.
Mm-hmm.
Brian, sometimes too, you know, there's certain regions of the country which are really tight.
Yeah.
Like for instance, take the Midwest, very, very tight right now. You can go lane by lane with a shipper as well. You know, you don't have to go with a blanket price increases, kinda go lane by lane, be like, "Look, it's really tight here," and they can see it. We have that ability to drill down lane by lane.
I wanna hit on that also 'cause it's a really important point that Kevin brought up, where you think about, and you mentioned this a little bit, the impact from weather in Q1, right? I mean, for two out of the three months in the quarter, most of the country was frozen and shut down. You know, it doesn't matter if you were in New York where we are, or the middle of the country, or even the southeast where Kevin is. It had an impact, right? But to your point, Brian, post-weather, the country's starting to reopen. I think there was an expectation by some that you would see a moderation in tender rejections, a moderation in rates, and they continued to move counter-seasonally and hold in.
You think about an environment where demand is soft and we're still holding at 14%-15% tender rejections in the weakest freight month of the year. I do think that it just shows, and I think the language that we used on the call was that this market is the most susceptible it's been to changes in demand than it's been in the last 3.5 years. On one hand, that's not saying much given how weak it's been for the last 3.5 years. On the other hand, I think it just speaks to how much capacity has come out of the market.
Well, just to touch on that point, there's been, of course, a lot of regulatory enforcement and focus and probably more to come. How have you guys seen that play out other than what we just talked about with spot markets and maybe the elasticity, or at least is less elastic than it has been in the past? Do you think this is something that can accelerate the impact throughout the year? Like, how are you thinking about that?
It's fitting that we're here in D.C., and the final rule from the FMCSA went into effect last night with respect to non-domiciled CDLs and what must be true in order to go ahead and keep the roads safer and to have the requirements to get a non-domiciled CDL. The FMCSA has identified about 194,000-197,000 drivers that will be coming off the road between now and the next five years. The reality also is there's also some self-enforcement associated with this, so it could certainly be faster than those five years in terms of all of the checkpoints that are now across the roads across the country when you think about enforcement by state and local officials to abide by the new final rule.
There's also movement in Congress, right after the State of the Union, there was the proposal of Dalilah's Law, which would take it another step further and effectively have to recertify all of the CDLs across the country, and going through the same SAVE system at the federal level. I think there's a lot of developments at work to go ahead and remove some of this tangential supply, the shadow capacity that has been in the industry for the last, call it, 10+ years. Not only will it make our roads safer and reduce theft and fraud. This capacity removal is structural in nature, and it's not coming back. It does certainly set up for a higher, for longer freight rate environment on the other side.
Yeah. Just to piggyback on that, Brian, and you can probably remember this too. The cycles in the old days would last three and four years. I can remember 2004, 2005, 2006, fantastic freight cycle. Why was that? There will always be a supply response, but it's more gradual, more responsible. Think about when ELDs hit in, you know, 2017, 2018. Now looking back, we realize that freight cycle only lasted a year because all the supply came flooding in. You step back 20 years ago or so, you know, the cycles, supply would come back, but it'd be very rational. I think to Jared's point, the spot's coming out, it's more permanent nature, structural nature. It's not gonna come back. We could set up where we could see what we used to see, cycles that last three and four years.
Truckers used to tell me in the mid-1990s, cycles would last three and four years. It'd be nice to get back to those days.
That would be a nice change. Well, we had four years down, so maybe more likely to be up next time. I don't know.
There you go.
Well, in terms of the other big impacts coming out of D.C., potentially, you know, the Supreme Court hearing.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I guess most people refer to the Montgomery case, but like broker liability. I don't know if there's a specific view you guys have internally in terms of how that could shake out, but let's just say it goes forward and brokers have to have more liability, you know, basically overnight. How does that impact the industry? How does it impact RXO? I mean, there's a bunch of different things I can think of, but would love to get your thoughts on this.
Sure. I'd say firstly, I think we continue to remain optimistic that the Supreme Court will rule in favor of preemption. You'll certainly hear more from us after we know more and we see what that ruling looks like.
Mm-hmm.
To your point, to the extent that it does not, it's really interesting because I do think that it will become very difficult for small, subscale, and quite frankly, even medium-sized brokers.
Mm-hmm
To compete in the industry. I think in that scenario that you're outlining, and again, we remain optimistic that the court will rule in favor of preemption. There's a scenario where that actually could favor the top ten brokers in a pretty meaningful way to the extent that the court rules against, because ultimately it'll shake out the competitive landscape, I think, in a pretty interesting backdrop whereby, you know, if you're, you know, a small, medium-sized brokerage and the compliance costs, the operations in terms of processes and procedures that you need to operate in that kind of world, it just becomes prohibitive.
I think that would certainly, you know, we've always stated that we believe that this is a winners take most type market structure, where right now the top 10 players in brokerage represent almost half the industry. We think over time, the top five probably represent a higher percentage of that. To the extent what you're outlining plays out, that could certainly accelerate it.
From a risk perspective, though, I guess brokers would need to put more price into the market basically overnight. Would you expect smaller carriers who may not be able to comply with the new standards, the checks and all the rigor that's gonna go around to vetting them because now if you're responsible for them in a different way, like could that actually have a supply impact as well?
I don't wanna go too far down the road on hypothesizing of a potential verdict, but I would certainly say, going back to my prior comment on why this would benefit the top ten, you think about how we do business today. We are extremely strict in terms of what must be true in order to go ahead and do business with RXO, and I would assume it's pretty similar for the top ten as well.
I think we might actually have some of the strictest standards because it's a two-sided competitive marketplace, and those moats, we think are real, and there's a lot of effort to go in to make sure that we're servicing our customers' freight because we want them to, you know, obviously have a great experience and give us more freight going forward. That can't be true if you're not using a reliable carrier network. On RXO, we've got access to more than 120,000 carriers post Coyote across the combined network, spanning from owner-operators up to large-sized fleets. I think making sure that you've got the compliance guardrails, the right onboarding procedures to make sure that you've got a high-quality network is even more important in the world that you're outlining.
Brian, to take that a step further, you know, I had this question posed to me, you know, could shippers ultimately be liable too?
Yep.
I bring that up because if you're a shipper, you know, you're more likely to do business with an RXO or a large broker, someone you know has a strict compliance and vetting process. That's something to keep in mind as well.
Well, just that was the next question, and this.
I can read your mind.
... changed here. Well, I don't feel I do that too much. In terms of the shippers, like, okay, so they could potentially get impacted, but are they thinking about this right now? Maybe the bigger ones are. Does it come up in any of these conversations, or is just.
I think everyone in the industry is paying attention to it. I think depending on the size of the shipper is likely to dictate whether or how closely they're paying attention to it. I think to your point, you know, depending on the market environment that you're in, could this be inflationary from a rate standpoint? 'Cause ultimately just the cost to do business goes higher.
Excuse me. It wasn't too long ago when we were talking about AI favorably, and then overnight it became, like, unfavorable.
Yeah, I thought you were gonna have a karaoke machine up here.
Um-
I'm surprised.
Yeah, I think it's in the back somewhere, but we can see if we can roll that out 'cause evidently that's part of the disintermediation risk that we were not paying attention to. What are some of the, I guess, the moats as we think about AI as certainly a tool, but there's all sorts of ways to use it, and there's other things that are probably preconditions, I would suspect, to using it effectively as opposed to just, you know, ramping up the curve to get like, I don't know, 80% effective, and there's always that last piece, which is pretty significant. What are some of the moats that you believe to be true that will really not change for yourselves, for the industry, for the scale players, as we get more and more of this AI adoption with or without karaoke machines.
You know, we've had a, I guess the freight industry has had a sneak preview of this probably about 10 years ago with, the threat of digital brokerages and what that would do to the industry, with the notion being there would be increased price transparency, and the gross profit dollar pool available to the industry would decline, and therefore, there's a terminal value problem, right? Ultimately, that was 10 years ago, and what's happened? All those digital brokers, for the most part, no longer exist. I think the RXO philosophy has always been, we are not a technology company, we are a tech-enabled service provider, and we invest in technology aggressively. We spend more than $100 million a year in technology.
We spend it across all aspects of tech from, you know, not only artificial intelligence, but also Gen AI and Agentic AI, which I'm sure we'll get into in addition to our pricing algorithms from machine learning techniques and we've been doing that for a while. I think the fundamental premise is that I think you characterized it quite well. This is a two-sided network with moats on each side. Overnight, you cannot scale up a carrier network to a 120,000 type carriers. You also think about, like this is a business that is built on service, relationships, and trust. We continue to have such strong customer relationships. You think about our top 20 shippers, they've been with RXO for the last 16 years on average.
That is because of those deep personal relationships and the service levels that follow. No doubt, I mean, what's interesting right now is, you know, you think about sort of, you know, that perfect order in terms of, you know, what is totally touchless. We haven't talked about what percentage that is, but it's been growing over time. It's already part of the network. I think the harsh reality in the world of freight transportation is something's always going wrong with the load, right? Exception management is a huge part of our day when you think about our customer reps and our carrier reps. Is there a significant opportunity to automate that and help with respect to decreasing the amount of man-hours associated with rudimentary tasks? 100%.
Are we deploying Agentic AI aggressively to go ahead and capitalize on that opportunity? Absolutely. Does that replace the human? No.
Mm-hmm.
Brian, just, you know, we talked about service, and that's a key theme here that we've touched on. Just think about this as, you know, the market probably, you know, seems like it could be turning, you know, and things may get a little chaotic. Once again, if you're that shipper, to Jared's point, we manage exceptions, we manage chaos, we manage volatility. Really, that's our guiding principle to help our customers. As the market kinda gets chaotic, gets volatile, you know, who are they gonna turn to? A reliable partner that they can trust. That's so important.
In the spectrum of everything's disrupted in a race to the bottom versus, well, this is just the next nothing burger, somewhere in between feels like is where AI and technology would probably be in the near term, maybe medium term for brokerage. Like what does that mean for you guys? Is that more agentic? Is it more productivity? Like how do you see the, I guess, the practical applications that have financial impacts and productivity impacts for the business?
Yeah, I mean, it’s all of it. I mean, at this point, especially for a top-scale broker, AI is table stakes. You need to be investing in agentic AI capabilities. You need to be investing in generative AI capabilities. You need to be investing in machine learning techniques to help from a pricing algorithm standpoint. You know, you think about how we're doing that. We talk about the four key pillars and the principles that we abide by internally at RXO across volume, margin, service, productivity. It's all because of those aggressive investments. I mean, at its highest level, how do we go ahead and increase volume through our network by 20%, 30%, 40%, 50% and decouple that from headcount growth?
Mm-hmm.
Because when you can decouple that, the incremental margins are significant and can be as high as 70%-80%. You think about what that means, and that's the beautiful part of our business model and having a platform that is so scalable with respect to, you know, we've been hit hard clearly over the last few years in terms of the deleveraging of the P&L, because if you look between the gross margin and EBIT, you know, two-thirds of those costs are either fixed or semi-fixed.
It obviously works the exact opposite way on the other side, and if you can, you know, releverage the model even further by having that scalable tech platform and dropping through that volume with minimal headcount additions, the contribution margins at that level on a business that right now is doing low single-digit EBITDA margins, obviously, you know, can be quite impactful. That's how we think about the business. Then the other angle is, productivity. We've talked about over the last 12 months, our productivity is up by 19%. On a two-year stack, it's almost 40%. Then layering on a lot of the capabilities that we've been investing in, specifically on, spot quote agents, et cetera, across the network that are being deployed, right now, I think there's a lot of opportunity for incremental margin unlock.
How are you guys measuring productivity? I know there's like no real KPI that everybody uses or reports on, you know, uniformly across the industry. Is this like loads per headcount or what's the KPI?
Loads per person per day. Who is involved associated with that, the life of that order, and if they are involved, we'll burden the productivity number with that headcount. We think we are still in the very early innings with respect to productivity. If we look at our most productive rep. I mean, going back to your point on the fears of AI disintermediation and karaoke day, if you actually look at the stats in that press release, I think they talked about, you know, someone that was doing, you know, eight loads a day, right? I mean, I think you know, that was probably accomplished about 20 years ago at RXO. Like, you think about our most productive rep, you're talking multiples of that.
Right. Okay.
Many multiples of that. How do we then bring up the average across the base where we've got our most productive rep? As you can expect, you know, the more tenured you are, the more productive you are. There are certain loads and certain verticals that are more accommodative for higher productivity. In general, there is so much room on that productivity scale in terms of loads per person per day.
You know, Brian, in the old days, if you're a good salesperson, we'd hire a sales assistant to help you book freight as a market turn. If you're really good, we hire two. We don't have to do that now. We can lean into technology. That, to Jared's point, you're just gonna see us leverage and lean into that loads per head per day should continue to move higher.
I got a couple more questions, but we can see if there's any audience after this one. You know, clearly there's a bunch of headwinds as we look at the first quarter, the margin squeeze, you know, eventually will be a good thing. Spot market seems like it's, I mean, from what we heard this week at the conference, seems like there's maybe a little bit of an offset from volume opportunities that maybe weren't there in the fourth quarter to kind of make up for that margin compression. You know, where are you in terms of expectations for this quarter and where we go from here? You're sort of tracking relatively in line with what you initially thought based on what the market's doing right now.
Sure. We're not gonna give a mid-quarter update, but you know, we gave an outlook for Q1 of $5-12 million of adjusted EBITDA for the company. Within that outlook included a variety of market assumptions with respect to you know, the tighter market conditions persisting throughout the quarter. Obviously, weather's been a headwind as well. As you think about tender rejections operating, to your point, in that mid-teens, that obviously has the impact of squeezing our brokerage gross margin, which is why we gave that $5-12 million outlook. I think importantly for RXO, you know, you think about the base that we're building off of the Q1, I'll go back to what I started with.
Our pipeline is up more than 50% year-over-year, so that'll clearly be a tailwind from Q1 into Q2. We talked about on the earnings call how Q1 is historically the weakest quarter of the year, and also the weakest percent contribution from a full year perspective. You think of off of that Q1 base, you know, historically that's been, you know, can be up as, you know, much as I think the last couple years it's been up 100% sequentially, and obviously it's now law of small numbers, so, you know, the percentages get a little bit wacky. You think about the building blocks, higher pipeline, we talked about.
We talk about the opportunity for rate relief in terms of the negotiations that were ongoing as part of bid season and the opportunity to reprice given the current environment that we're in. Building on that, managed transportation is seasonally a better quarter into Q2 from an automotive standpoint. We also talked about new wins that were awarded in Q4 of last year. We awarded more than $200 million of freight under management, and managed trans has significant momentum. Last mile, Q2 was the seasonally strongest quarter for the company. I think a lot of opportunity for us as we exit Q1 into the rest of the year and into 2027.
Brian, I remember a few years ago I had a transportation executive tell me once, "February is our twelve best freight month of the year.
Yep. It all comes down to March, so.
It comes down to March, but I think importantly, you know, it's the momentum building from-
Mm-hmm
from March into Q2 and into the rest of the year. I think importantly for RXO, we do have some company-specific tailwinds irrespective of the broader freight market. With the integration behind us, the focus is entirely on profitable growth, driving that pipeline higher, and then converting that pipeline, yielding tangible results across the business, all with a much more efficient cost structure because we've taken out more than $155 million of costs since we've spun. We took out, you know, $65 million in the first two years post-spinning from XPO. We took out $60 million of operating expenses from a synergy standpoint with Coyote, and we announced a new $30 million cost out in Q4.
Putting it all together, you know, you think about just those contribution margins that we were talking about earlier and how this model is primed for incremental operating leverage. It's also primed from a standpoint of a very efficient cost structure.
Okay. Any questions? We got one here in the middle here, if you can get them the mic, please.
Sure.
Well, you hit on two topics that I'd like to touch on. One has to do, you said your late-stage pipeline's up 50%. Then actually at the end, you just now said you're dramatically focused on conversion. What is the conversion rate at the late-stage pipeline, if you're allowed to share that? And then the second question you also talked a little about, too, you're under repricing. Can you give some color around what you're seeing as the sensitivities and upsides for getting repricing in this environment?
Sure. On the first question, with respect to the late-stage pipeline, we haven't quantified what that conversion rate was historically, but what we have said is that if you look at the overall pipeline, including pre-pipe, etc. , you know, that generally has been low single digit type conversion, and this would be multiples of that. You think about just the fact that these are qualified opportunities that are already in the pricing stage. I think there's good line of sight across the board, and the fact that the pipeline is composed of opportunities that are very diverse, there's not one opportunity that is dominating that overall pipeline, I think gives us confidence in terms of executing against that pipe and yielding results as early as Q2.
On the second question, in terms of contract price increases, you know, I'll go back to what I said earlier. It's a two-way conversation. This is a partnership. There's a reason why our top 20 customers have been with us for the last 16 years. We need to be able to put in rates that we can service throughout all freight markets. When we're in the tighter environment right now, to your point, Brian, I mean, shippers don't like paying higher rates, but it's ultimately the environment that we're in right now, and you've had so much capacity come out that is structural in nature, and despite softer demand, we're sitting at 15% tender rejections.
We talked about in our curve proprietary report, which is available at rxo.com if anyone wants to take a look, a little plug there, that it is we are now entering that phase where we are inflationary in nature in terms of what those contract rates look like. It's, you know, I think Kevin brought up this point earlier. I think it's important to note this is not just holistic price increase across the board, and therefore we're gonna put that through. It's customer by customer, geography by geography, lane by lane, and we're gonna look at the customer holistically, where ultimately, you know, you think about being able to service certain contractual freight, and if that leads to the opportunity to yield to incremental spot volumes, that could make a lot of sense.
I think in terms of the contract repricing, you know, we talked about that low to mid-single-digit increase. I think the confidence level there is very high.
Maybe just on that point, if there's no other questions, I guess two quick follow-ups to sort of wrap us up here. The timing, you know, of the contract renewals or the repricing opportunities, are these some things that can show up, you know, this quarter 'cause you're moving some lanes around? I mean, typically we don't see these things progress until, you know, several quarters, and it takes some time to really get through the whole system. Maybe some comments on that. Also, is there managed trans in this late-stage pipeline that's moving some of the numbers as well? I just wanted to clarify.
Yep.
Clarify that.
On the first point, you're exactly right. It is staggered in nature, right? What I'm talking about in terms of contract rate increases, et c., this is not a Q1 type comment, right?
Okay.
This is gonna be staggered in nature as early as Q2 in terms of the benefits associated with relief on the contractual side of business with getting the repricing into the book. That's meant to be more Q2 and onwards. In terms of managed trans, no, the brokerage sales pipeline is up more than 50% year-over-year. Managed trans, we isolated, and that pipeline is very strong at almost $1.5 billion. The momentum across the business between the late-stage sales pipeline and brokerage, a managed trans pipeline, also late stage of, you know, call it $1.5 billion of which we had $200 million awarded in Q4.
You know, certainly from a seasonality standpoint, last mile will start to improve, not only with the weather thawing out, but Q2 is the seasonally strongest quarter.
Okay. That's helpful to clarify those. In terms of just maybe last mile and managed trans don't get as much attention, so maybe two minutes worth we can do here to wrap up. You mentioned the seasonality, you mentioned some of the things that are just kind of more normal course of business, but, like, what are some of the other initiatives or growth opportunities like the $200 million you mentioned earlier about new wins? Like, how's all that shaping up and, like, what are sort of the initiatives that are flowing through these two, I don't want to call them sectors but or segments, but, like, business lines?
Yeah. One segment company, but we do have complementary services, which is composed of our managed transportation, where we act as the control tower and the transportation department on behalf of our shippers, where we manage about $3.5 billion of freight under management. Momentum in that business exiting the year was quite strong, with more than $200 million awarded in Q4 and a late-stage sales pipeline that is almost $1.5 billion. The reason why that is particularly important is we talk about synergy loads within the company, whereby managed transportation can be a customer to our brokerage business, and ultimately the brokerage customer or the managed transportation customer then has access to dedicated capacity within our brokerage business. It's a pretty symbiotic relationship and very synergistic.
On the last mile side, you know, demand for big and bulky has been and is soft, which, you know, should not be surprising to anyone if you think about, you know, you've had a little bit move lower on the 30-year with respect to mortgage rates, but overall that's gonna be tied to housing market, and big and bulky is clearly soft. In 2025, we significantly outperformed from a stop standpoint, onboarding existing new customers and new business with existing customers. We did feel an acute slowdown last year on the last mile side, really after Labor Day in terms of just overall big and bulky demand.
I think the initiative there is, you know, as we think about across RXO, and we put out a press release a few weeks ago talking about RXO Middle Mile Solutions and how we can leverage our RXO Hub Network across the country in ways that can deliver incremental solutions to customers. How we can effectively leverage that real estate footprint, I think, is a very strategic priority because the contribution margins, given obviously the fixed asset nature of the business, can be quite high.
Okay. Well, guys, we're out of time, but thanks very much for joining us, Jared and Kevin. Appreciate making the time for us.
Super. Thanks, Brian.
Thank you.