Greetings, and Welcome to the Schneider National, Inc. Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Steve Bindas, Director of Investor Relations. Thank you, Steve. You may begin.
Thank you operator, and good morning, everyone. Joining me on the call today are Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Steve Bruffett, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, the company issued an earnings press release, which is available on the investor relations section of our website at schneider.com. Our call will include remarks about future expectations, forecasts, plans, and prospects for Schneider, which constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbor provisions under applicable federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations. The company urges investors to review the risks and uncertainties discussed in our SEC filings, including, but not limited to, our most recent Form 10-K and those risks identified in today's earnings release.
All forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this call, and Schneider disclaims any duty to update such statements except as required by law. In addition, pursuant to Regulation G, a reconciliation of any non-GAAP financial measures referenced during today's call can be found in our earnings release, which includes reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. Now I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, Steve Bruffett.
Thank you, Steve and thanks to each of you who've joined us on the call this morning. We appreciate your time in this busy earnings season. I'll open with commentary on our third quarter results, and first I want to compliment our entire team for their performance, especially our professional drivers, field operations, and customer service associates. Operating conditions have lifted the tide for many players in the transportation space, but you have to crisply execute commercially and operationally every day to deliver results above and beyond what the tide brings. Our team's done a nice job across the board of doing exactly that as we've successfully navigated the 2021 freight environment. In addition, our multimodal portfolio and platform operating at scale enables us to compete effectively and to fulfill a growing portion of our customers' needs and profitably grow our business.
Our Q3 EPS of $0.62 was the strongest in our history, exceeding the prior record of $0.60, which was established last quarter. Contained within our Q3 results was a pre-tax net loss of $3.1 million on our equity investments. We took advantage of the robust used equipment market in the Q3 as we onboarded new equipment and then utilized our efficient maintenance and retail channels to profitably dispose of older equipment. Enterprise revenues, excluding fuel surcharge, of $1.3 billion or 25% above last year. Each reportable segment of our portfolio delivered record quarterly earnings and contributed meaningfully to the doubling of our year-over-year adjusted operating income. Truckload earnings were up 87%, Intermodal was up 99%, and Logistics was up 143%.
Our asset-light offerings of Intermodal and Logistics comprised 44% of segment earnings, and that's up from 41% a year ago. I'll now provide some context for our updated EPS guidance. As noted in this morning's earnings release, we have raised our full-year 2021 adjusted EPS guidance to a range from $2.13-$2.17 a share. Given that our year-to-date number is $1.53, this range inherently guides to a fourth quarter EPS of $0.60-$0.64, which is in the vicinity of our third quarter EPS of $0.62. We do anticipate selling less equipment in the fourth quarter than we did in the third quarter and therefore expect lower equipment gains. At the same time, we expect all other elements of our operations to continue at or above the trajectory of the third quarter.
On a full year basis, we expect revenue excluding fuel surcharge to exceed $5 billion and for operating income to top $500 million. Our tax rate guidance remains unchanged at about 25% for the full year, and our CapEx guidance is lowered to about $300 million, and the adjustment is due to higher proceeds on equipment sales and some delayed equipment deliveries that are expected to spill over into early 2022. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mark.
Thank you, Steve, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining the Schneider call this morning. I'll offer a summary of our performance across our three primary reportable segments for the third quarter, how that aligns with our enterprise strategy, and offer our context on what to expect going forward. As Steve mentioned, each of our three reportable segments were significant contributors to our record revenue and earnings performance in the quarter, demonstrating the value of our scaled and balanced portfolio of services.
Our strategy to aggregate multimodal capacity options on behalf of our shipper community. I'm especially pleased with the performance of our strategic growth offerings of Dedicated truck, Intermodal, and Brokerage. First, in the quarter, Dedicated average truck count is up roughly 300 units year-over-year to 4,240. Furthermore, we finished the quarter with 252 more Dedicated trucks and 280 more Dedicated drivers than we started the quarter with. Our new business startups are maturing, as is our success in seeding the Dedicated business awards that we have won recently. Secondly, Intermodal battled the challenging macro environment to grow order count 1% while improving Revenue per Order 20% year-over-year.
We continue to experience an increased container dwell times at customer locations and at times congestion at key intermodal gateway locations that impact our ability to turn trailing equipment timely, impacting overall volumes. Our differentiators in container and chassis asset control, effective network and revenue management technologies, and the minimization of the impact of third-party dray costs through our company dray model overcame the volume challenges to deliver a solid 84.5% Operating Ratio in the quarter, representing 620 basis points of improvement year-over-year. Last quarter, we indicated that we expected to add between 1,500 and 3,000 containers in the second half of the year, which was dependent on overcoming supply chain delivery challenges.
We added 1,600 containers in the third quarter of 2021, and we expect to add at least that many in the fourth quarter, setting up additional growth opportunities as we head into 2022. We do not talk about our Asia operations very often, but their efforts in helping us secure dedicated vessel capacity for our Intermodal containers are making a real difference. Finally, our Logistics business set another top and bottom line record in the quarter as Logistics revenue was only $10 million less than our truck segment revenues at $475 million. Overall volumes and net Revenue per Order expanded in the quarter, and operating ratio improved 150 basis points year-over-year and 80 basis points sequentially.
An increasingly larger portion of our Truckload network volumes is being successfully executed in the Power-Only configuration of our Brokerage business, leveraging the value of our extensive orange trailer pool network. We expect a further catalyst for our Power-Only offering from the conversion onto the Mastery Logistics MasterMind platform. Power-Only will be the first service to make the conversion beginning here in the fourth quarter. Therefore, because of the growth and successful performance of our Power-Only offering and serving the Truckload network business, our priorities for growth and company drivers are firmly centered on Dedicated and Intermodal Dray driving positions. We expect to carry strong momentum in these services into and likely through 2022. In closing, I would also like to thank our team, especially our professional drivers, for their commitment and hard work in these disruptive supply chain conditions.
Your work is essential to the everyday lives of all Americans. Thank you. With that, I'd like to return the call back to the operator for your questions.
Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. In the interest of time, we ask that participants limit themselves to one question and one follow-up. One moment please while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Ravi Shanker with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.
Thank you. Morning, gentlemen. Mark and Steve, how do we think about 2022, kind of going into it in terms of pricing dynamics, fleet count, wage inflation, et cetera? I mean, you set a good benchmark for us for 2021. How do we think about that flowing into 2022?
Well, Ravi, and good morning. I think we have a lot of good momentum on the price line as demonstrated in the quarter that obviously we'll bring into calendar year 2022. I feel good about the Dedicated growth. We had a good deal of growth of assets and drivers in the third quarter that we didn't get the full benefit of. We had the cost more so than we had the revenue based upon timing. Again, I think we'll take that momentum into 2022 in addition to what we bring in in the fourth quarter.
I'm also pleased as it relates to our ability to get our boxes on ground here more so than I probably would have thought mid part of the year and we've successfully executed. It might be a little bit ahead of the plan. I think that gives us as the networks become more fluid in the rail portion of our business that we have good growth prospects coming at us in 2022. Obviously we've matured the use of our platform as it relates to third parties to include the recent addition of our Power-Only capability. I put all those things together.
I certainly think we have some momentum as it relates to the top line, and I would expect that we continue to extract and improve price performance to cover the inflationary aspects of the business. I feel we're well positioned as we head into the year.
That's great color. Any way at all you can put some numbers to that, especially around pricing and fleet count. Do you think you will have the truck availability and the driver availability to grow the fleet next year in the trucking business? Do you think you can get a double-digit price on the contract side?
Well, we'll probably refrain from giving all the exact detail that you may be asking in those questions, Ravi. I do believe we have some excellent carryover work, all the work that we've done this year, and very cognizant of what it's gonna take relative to the labor condition. I'm pleased that all of our Truckload network business does not have to completely come from our assets based upon what we did with the Power-Only growth. I think that combination together gives us growth opportunities within our network, so we're not backing away from that. Certainly our strategic growth drivers we continue to lean in most heavily on is Dedicated, Intermodal and our Logistics brokerage business.
Thank you. Our next question is from Todd Fowler with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, great. Thanks, and good morning, and congratulations on the quarter. Mark, I guess just starting with the operating ratio on the Truckload segment. You know, very, very strong here this quarter, better than kind of what your longer-term targets are. As you think about that, you know, moving into next year, what would be some of the reasons why you can't sustain the OR where the Truckload business is right now, you know, over the next several quarters or longer for that matter?
Yeah, this is Steve. Todd, good morning. I think-
Thanks.
The margin range for our Truckload segment in particular is one that we are evaluating. By that I mean, if anything, it would be elevated from its current levels, but we haven't exactly landed on what that new range might be, and we'll likely provide an update on that on our next call as we provide some perspective on our initial EPS guidance for 2022 and so on, if that helps provide some context. The other part of your question of what would prevent us from maintaining this type of level of performance as we go forward, I do think that we have made some step function progress as we've moved through 2021 in pertaining to our margin performance within the Truckload segment.
I think a substantial portion of that should remain intact as we 2022.
Yeah. No, that makes sense. I understand, you know, kind of the response there and then the directional comments. For my follow-up, I know it's still early, but would you care to share just kind of your thoughts on pricing expectations for trucking and for Intermodal going into next year? It seems like the environment's strong. It seems like there's a lot of contracts that probably need to reset that were priced earlier in the year that are probably still below market. How are you thinking about pricing expectations for truckload and Intermodal into 2022? Thanks.
Yeah, Todd, I think we're still building there. Certainly, as you look at contract renewals in the third quarter as compared to the second quarter in both our network Dedicated and Intermodal business, those are all continuing to go north and improving. We would expect similar results for the limited amount we have left here to do in the fourth quarter, which again gets back to my comments thinking that we have a very constructive setup as we head into 2022.
Thank you. Our next question is from Jonathan Chappell with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.
Thank you. Good morning.
Morning.
Steve or Mark, just high single digits, and then you get the, you know, huge move in the third quarter revenue per load. Do we think about it as kind of marking the market, the Intermodal book? Is that a very heavy first half timeframe? Is there a big step up then since the first half of this year was only kind of high single digits versus the momentum that you've seen in the third quarter and conceivably into the fourth?
Yeah. Each year generally has its own nuances there. Generally speaking, the first half of the year is a more robust renewal period than the second half of the year. As we still had some work to do because of some renewals and going back and addressing some market issues, particularly around the inflationary costs with drivers and recruiting, that we went back and had some additional discussions. What we really would suggest to you is the low double digit range of increases early in the year became upper teen double digit increases as we progressed through the year. That is still where we see what's remaining to be executed against here in the fourth quarter.
Okay. That's helpful. Then, Power-Only has obviously been a huge boon for you in the logistics space. You mentioned, Mark, at the very end there, you're transitioning now onto or converting into the Mastery logistics platform. When you think about the opportunity there in using that technology, is there any kind of line of sight on the long-term logistics 4%-6% margin moving higher as you scale that platform?
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, secondly, the second part of our business that we expect to go beyond Power-Only onto the platform will be our Brokerage business. We would expect obviously with more investment that we do in the CapEx and the Power-Only that those perform at superior margins to what is considered traditional brokerage when the carriers bring both their power and their trailer assets. We expect to see a return for the trailer portion that we get on an incremental basis. Because I think what we're really excited about here is how we blend our solution to the customer so that we could take a larger share of wallet as it relates to bringing solutions well beyond what's necessarily just our power and reach with our assets.
This just gives us another avenue to do that. Certainly, this has been a terrific market to be able to demonstrate value to the customer to build that momentum.
Thank you. Our next question is from Bert Subin with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, good morning, and congratulations on the quarter.
Morning.
Following up to Ravi question on the 2022 momentum side of things, what gives you confidence on the demand side? Or is it purely that the supply situation is so challenged that rates just should continue to rise?
Yeah, it's, you know, it's difficult to have obviously a perfect view into that. You know, certainly I think it's on both sides of the equation, supply and demand, that gives us, you know, a degree of confidence that we have a constructive market, well into 2022. Equipment is gonna continue to be difficult to come by relative to new equipment based upon supply chain concerns. Inventory to sales ratio still has plenty of room to go. We still have, by all measures, a very healthy consumer. All of our channel checks, relative to our customer base for the most part, are still quite bullish as we head into next year.
We try to look at all of that and come to our assessment to think that we have some staying power here on both the supply constricted side as well as the demand equation.
Yeah, that's helpful. Just as a follow-up on the Logistics side. As that business continues to take off, how much of your growth do you attribute to market share capture versus just a growing addressable market? I assume it's probably a bit of both.
Yeah, I'm trying to think about how to frame that for you. Certainly we have the benefit of all the things that are going on in the marketplace, and I think that does give benefit to multimodal platform companies like ourselves. We can through our technologies at the front end of the funnel capture and provide more options to the customer on the front end, which allows us then at that original point of tender to find a way to say yes more often and look across intermodal, look across truck, look across our third party offerings to now include Power-Only. I think it's just leveraging those relationships and leveraging that initial point to capture as much volume as we can profitably.
Thank you. Our next question is from Brian Ossenbeck with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.
Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking the question. Mark, maybe just follow up on that last comment you made there. I think you referred to it as blending of the orange, this multimodal platform idea. What else do you feel like you need to add or maybe potentially get bigger in when it comes to the suite of services or capabilities that your customers are asking for now or you think they will look for more in the future? If you could add some comments on the FreightPower platform as well within Logistics, that would be helpful.
Yeah, Brian, I would really tie my answer to your question, all of those pieces together. You know, traditionally, we've done a very good job as a company in our asset-centric services to include Intermodal on the large shipper community across a wide swath of the economy. What we've done really well on the Brokerage and Logistics side is getting after the long tail, smaller shipper. And what I'm excited about with what we're seeing on FreightPower is how we can do that and find ways to grow with the smaller shipper across all of our services by making it easier for them via FreightPower to connect with us and easier for us to reach them because you can't do that all with just salespeople on the street.
You know, that's where we're starting to see value. Obviously, we started first with our Brokerage offering, and now we've expanded into all the rest of our offerings, both on the carrier support side and now on the shipper side. We're in the early innings of that, but early returns, and we're more mature on the carrier, third-party carrier side of FreightPower and ramping up on the shipper side. To us, it's just an extended reach into a market segment, particularly for our assets, that traditionally has been a bit more challenging for us to reach economically. That's what this whole blending in our view does. It just allows us to hit more of the addressable market more effectively.
All right. Thanks for that. Then just to follow up, can you give some comments on a potential vaccine mandate, which I guess depends on who you ask, is coming out before too long. The industry and the ATA have been pretty vocal about an exemption, and I think it would be pretty counterproductive if trucking didn't get an exemption. We're not quite sure that's gonna happen. Maybe you can just talk about your view on that and how you're preparing Schneider for, you know, a potential mandate with all the associated testing that they might have to go with that. Thank you.
Yeah. Great question, Brian. You know, certainly, you know, start with, we strongly encourage all of our associate base to get vaccinated, and taken a series of steps over the last 18 months to make that as easy as possible and educate to the best that we can how that makes sense and helps, you know, both on the personal side but also on the business side. That being said, we think, and I'm pleased with how well the industry has responded to educate the policymakers, and we really do caution the policymakers to be thoughtful here, 'cause we already have a very fragile supply chain and a volatile situation that we think would be very detrimental if we did not get an exemption.
Again, I think the industry has responded well. The customers that we've gotten involved have responded well to make sure that at least those voices and understanding got into the process. We don't know obviously yet what the ultimate decision will be there. It'll be problematic, particularly as we would estimate between 40% and 55% of our drivers are vaccinated, and I think that's a number that we see pretty predominantly across the spectrum. We're putting a series of steps together to kind of put some scenarios on how we would deal with various elements of what a rule could look like. All of it is gonna be difficult to execute, it's gonna be costly to execute, and I think it's gonna be disruptive to execute.
We continue to lean into that and awaiting further guidance from the policymakers.
Thank you. Our next question is from Jason Seidl with Cowen. Please proceed with your question.
Hey. Thank you, operator. Steve, I wanted to talk about sort of use of proceeds going forward on the cash side. You know, the end of the quarter, you know, with over $500 million in cash based upon your outlook for 4Q, it looks like you're gonna generate some more. You know, talk about the potential usage as you guys see in between now and the end of the year.
Sure, Jason. Good morning. It's a pretty consistent messaging from us so as far as use of cash goes. I think we are continuing to be interested in the inorganic opportunities that we might see in a Dedicated or specialty configuration and continue to evaluate opportunities there. At the same time, primary focus is on organic growth in our strategic areas of Dedicated and Intermodal, as well as the technology investments to grow our digital platform and capabilities, as Mark has mentioned. I think it's really important for us to continue to look for those opportunities to create seamless customer experiences and remove and automate things as much as possible as we move forward. I think that's an important part of what we're trying to accomplish here, is standardization and automation capabilities.
We continue to invest in those things. That would be our primary use, is to, one, grow our strategic areas organically, two, continue to improve the age of fleet in our Truckload segment, and, three, look for inorganic growth opportunities that fit with our strategy and our portfolio.
Okay. I appreciate that. My follow-up, you guys talked a little bit about, you know, really trying to get at hiring on the Dedicated and drayage side in terms of drivers. You know, can you compare and contrast sort of the different challenges in both markets? I mean, I'm sure they're both challenged like everyone else is in the Truckload side. However, is one far more difficult than the other right now?
Well, certainly as you look across our portfolio, the network businesses are the most challenged because of a little less certainty as it relates to the work and the time at home component. That's why we've had and continue to have more success in sourcing and securing and retaining in our Dedicated Configurations and Intermodal.
One of the things that is probably not as evident in the public metrics is, in those two configurations in particular, we have started to get back to some more of the efficiency measures around tractor sharing, particularly in our Intermodal business, where we did successfully grow drivers in the third quarter, and we successfully took some units out because we got back to some of our more standard practices as it relates to how in certain parts of the network. Intermodal and Dedicated are the most attractive options for drivers, and that's what, fortunately, we have that as a key part of our strategy.
Cover now, and what's the sort of long-term goal?
Yeah, we have consistently been between 90% and 93% of our own dray. There'll be certain times of the year based upon demands that could go a little bit north of that or a little bit south of that. But that's
Thank you. Our next question comes from Bascome Majors with Susquehanna. Please proceed with your question.
Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. As you speak with your customers and work with them on their planning into next year, commitments with penalties for both sides are being thrown out there. If you're just seeing shorter term arrangements to get through some of this volatility or anything strange where multi-year capacity commitments, just really anything that may have changed from the normal kind of cadence would be interesting. Thank you.
Yeah, terrific question. What we've for which we believe is in the best interest of all parties, is to have less of this annual procurement event that puts everything out up to bid and changing carrier to carrier, and the disruption for both parties that causes. We're seeing more clearly around their core carrier thought process to do things just like that, to have those discussions in advance, to plan for the forward periods and perhaps not have everything be in that kind of traditional annual process to make sure that incumbents benefit to both sides of the equation. I think on trend, that is continuing, and I would expect that to be more of the trend as people see the benefit of that, particularly in these type of environments.
You know, from the outside looking in and trying to track and understand and model your business, I mean, is that meaningful enough to have any changes to the normal cadence of pricing hitting midyear? Just trying to think about if that's meaningful from a financial standpoint at this point.
Yeah, I think it's meaningful. It might be more as we think about networks and stability and planning that we can do. I think the events still occur, but there might be just less of the freight that finds itself in those type of events. Maybe the less dense lanes, maybe you know, different strategies that change because they had some changes in the network is what finds itself in those as opposed to the repetitive and the base business. I you know, from an operating standpoint, from an efficiency standpoint, from where you want to have your drivers and your equipment, there's great benefit, I think, for both sides to do that.
I don't think it'll ever get to 100% that way because of how much change does go on within individual sourcing and networks. I think we can get smarter collectively than traditionally has been the approach of the industry.
Thank you. Our next question is from Scott Group with Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys. Steve, can you share with us what's in the guidance for gains in the fourth quarter? If I look excluding gains, Truckload segment earnings were down a bit from the second quarter. It sounds like maybe there's a good amount of startup costs or inefficiencies in Dedicated. Is there any way to quantify that?
Sure. I'll tackle the first part of that. Maybe Mark can weigh in on the last part. Regarding these equipment gains that we're talking about here. In our fourth quarter guidance, I mentioned in the opening comments that we expected to sell less equipment, and that amount is probably less than half of the equipment that we sold in the third quarter. We'll have to see. It's a lot of what drives our dispositions is the receipt of new equipment coming in, and that's not always completely predictable.
It's certainly been lumpy.
Yeah. It's been lumpy 20-.
Yeah. Exactly.
-21. Yeah.
That's kind of what's driving some of the gain behavior that you see working through our income statement. Again, to repeat what I said earlier, we expect quite a bit less gains in the fourth quarter, but something else is working really well. Scott, maybe just. You hit on one of the major elements of kind of the cost drag in the third quarter on Truckload was certainly having the revenue that we got a chance to book much more of the cost in the earlier part. Probably the second area that we think we've gotten to some level of maturity now is that the five apprenticeship academies that we've opened from a new driver CDL standpoint, we started that in the second quarter.
We got those fully ramped up through the third quarter and are now starting to see some of the benefit to address some of the capacity gap that we're all chasing right now in the marketplace. I think those two from a cost standpoint were probably the biggest contributors that we didn't get the full benefit in the quarter, but we expect to see in some of the out periods, obviously.
Just some thoughts. What are you seeing in terms of the spread between Intermodal and trucking rates? Intermodal has got a lot of accessorial charges right now. Where is the spread and heading into 2022, what are shippers telling you in terms of are they looking to favor one versus the other?
Yes, Scott, I would tell you today, we're still seeing more conversion that things that should go on the train have currently in the fluidity issues and the congestion issues on the rail. I think the good news there is that we've seen much less of that here to start in October. Frustratingly, we have much more we could do relative to intermodal based upon what we have available and how we believe we can execute across the network than we've been able to seize. Certainly the increased container count will help with that, but so will just getting some of these heart attack events that we've been dealing with on a recurring basis. I don't know if a heart attack and recurring is the right way to frame that.
If we can get that behind us, we can get some more confidence in the customer and convert more what should be moving on the train. As far as price and movement, there has been some compression. I think we've moved a little bit faster in the third quarter on some catch up in Intermodal on the contract pricing range. There's still a good economic value for the customer between over the road and Intermodal, particularly depending on where they place environmental concerns as part of that equation.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Chris Wetherbee with Citi. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys. Maybe if you could talk about both combined for hire and dedicated in the fourth quarter, and then, you know, maybe taking a step back and thinking more conceptually, obviously, it's been a very, very challenging driver environment, and certainly that's led, I'm sure, at least in part to the contraction in the fleet over the course of the last several years. You know, I guess if you were to look out a few years down the road, do you think there is a point where you'd like to pick within the broader over the road truck fleet? Maybe that's more of a dedicated comment than as a for hire comment, but wanted to get your perspective on that bigger picture dynamic of where.
Yeah, Chris, it's a lot there to unwind in many ways. We strongly believe that a healthy and vibrant network business in truck is very good for our enterprise. It gives us great optionality as we go to market to bring multiple services together, and that's always a key attraction element for our customer base. You know, we've said all of these difficulties that we've had, but we're still putting 5,000 trucks a day out there in this industry. We still have great offering. Would we like to have more? Certainly. But we also have to be cognizant of the labor condition and the driver desires and the driver experience, and some of the other configurations right now are more attractive.
Fortunately, they match up well with what the customer value proposition is getting out of it as well. We're not strategically stepping back. We're from the network side of the business, but we also don't want to just blindly chase it from an overall cost standpoint to achieve kind of that outcome. We're trying to use the leverage of our portfolio, which is great. One of our advantages is all the optionality that we have. Certainly from a customer standpoint, the Power-Only capability that we developed has stepped into that vacuum in the short term here to help us serve customers and grow our third-party business by using that orange trailer.
As your question gets to the fourth quarter, I think that is probably more what we'll see continue into the fourth quarter. I think you'll see growth in those key strategic areas of Dedicated and Intermodal dray, and we're going to work like heck to get stability into that network portion of the fleet. Over time, absolutely, I could see us looking to grow both of those, network and Dedicated side. We just want to do it when it makes more sense for us to do it.
Okay. That's really helpful color, I appreciate that perspective. Maybe just a quick follow-up on the Intermodal side. Can you just talk a little bit about container addition the next couple of quarters, and then maybe a little bit about, how we should think about utilization from a rail service perspective in 4Q?
Yeah. I mentioned that I believe we'll get at least another 1,500-1,600 containers delivered here in the fourth quarter. We may not get a chance to use them a great deal because of when they hit, but I think that puts us in a solid position next year. We're solidifying, and we'll give you more guidance as we get to the next call. We will anticipate another year of growth of our container and chassis fleet based upon the opportunities that we see in front of us in 2022 as well.
You know, right now, as you try to think about the volumes in this business, we're about evenly split between just the dwell time that's impacting our volumes at the customer location and some of the gateway congestion and fluidity issues that we've had with the rail network. Don't want to obviously declare victory here, but we're seeing a little bit of better improvement in the fluidity of the rail network. We have not yet seen any material movement or improvement as it relates to the customer side as they're dealing with not only increased volumes, but also their own labor challenges to get those things turned rapidly. I think that one's still going to be with us for a while, and we would expect we're going to care-
Thank you. Our next question comes from Tom Wadewitz with UBS. Please proceed with your question.
Yeah, good morning. Maybe, continuing on that topic just a little bit more. Mark, do you feel like you have visibility, or are you optimistic that some of those constraints you just mentioned are likely to improve? It seems like, you know, there's a lot of appetite for Intermodal volume growth in 2022, but, you know, capacity is a constraint. You know, I mean, do you think that you have visibility to the labor side with customers and warehouses or with rails or, you know, I guess drayage in general, but that would really allow you to have substantial Intermodal volume growth as you look to 2022?
Yeah, Tom. Where I feel confident is in our dray performance, our dray opportunities to continue to put more productive driver jobs in the market to support our dray business. I feel good about our container build. I feel really good about our execution. Certain parts of our network, particularly east, where dray matters more and our execution is where we're seeing the growth, and we've had good solid fluidity there from the rail side. We really haven't taken a back seat at all, and the eastern part of the network has been more of those intermediate routes and the western side through the port state that is so well documented. I think that portion is going to be here a while, and the customer issues have not subsided.
There's a lot of, obviously, they've leaned into that quite heavily. They've tried to do a number of things differently, but we just haven't seen collectively enough of a move there. What we have is just more delay on the customer side than certainly I would have anticipated as we're this far into this cycle. It's going to be with us, I believe.
Does that imply we ought to look for growth maybe in, you know, kind of gradually ramping up? Obviously, there's seasonality in the business. You know, I don't know if comps are a lot different, but is that the right way to look at it, that your Intermodal volume growth would kind of gradually ramp up through 2022? Or are you more optimistic in kind of a step up?
Yeah, I'd like to be more optimistic. I you know I think because we know how much more could convert than has converted. It's great to be in a position that the market has more desire than you know the providers can provide right now. I think ultimately things will start to get more fluid, things will start to work its way through. That should bode well, and it's just a matter when. I just don't think that's going to be a real short-term issue here in the fourth quarter, Tom. I think certainly as 2022 progresses, I think that's a very reasonable expectation and we're confident that that will continue to improve.
Okay. Just a quick second one, if I can. I wanted to see if you could provide a little more color in Brokerage. I mean, you had great results in Brokerage, continue to have just tons of momentum there. How much of the mix was Power-Only and how maybe if you give a little more perspective on how important that capability is to.
Yeah, it's, you know, I look at what I can try to ascertain as industry statistics on this. I don't think anybody is moving more Power-Only than we are. I think we're kind of leading the charge on that from an overall volume standpoint. But we're also growing our volumes across the more traditional lanes, the traditional channels of live, the dominant portion of what we do there and the dominant portion of even the growth of what we do there, Tom. Increasingly Power-Only is gaining share, but it's still the smallest portion of it.
Thank you. Our next question is from Ken Hoexter with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.
Hey, good morning.
Hey, Ken.
Mark and Steve. Hey. So just, you've hit on a lot of stuff in terms of kind of what's going on with the market. I guess just to clarify, Steve or Mark on your thoughts on fourth quarter, just given your large outlook. If you've got less gains, we've got similar momentum on pricing. Does that mean we're not seeing additional wage ramp up needed to sustain kind of the labor in this market, given the battle that's going on? I just want to understand. I know you were talking about labor wage rates before, but maybe just talk about kind of what you're seeing in terms of on the cost side as we move into the fourth quarter.
Sure. I think we would anticipate you know full quarter effects of actions that have been taken across recent past in the fourth quarter. Some a bit of continued cost inflation in there. It's not just in rate per mile, it's in work configurations and driver-friendly steps that we're taking outside of the rate per mile itself. There is some of that inherent in what we see happening in the fourth quarter. At the same time, the price momentum we believe should more than adequately cover that dynamic as we move through the fourth quarter, thus our statement about-
Yeah. Thanks, Steve. I guess what I was asking is, you don't see another wave of rate increases given the tug and pull of labor in this environment where you know, just the demand on the drivers. That's what it sounds like you're saying you've got that built in and the full-
Nothing new, particularly in the fourth quarter, is planned, if that's your specific question.
Yeah. Yeah.
If we get into 2022, that's a different dynamic and thought process probably. For the fourth quarter, I think it's just more about full quarter effects of things that have already been done.
And Mark, just to follow up on the brokerage side you were just referring to in terms of the ramp up. You know, is the scaling of the relationship with Mastery, is that something that's going to kind of accelerate that deployment?
Yeah, we have a very specific onboarding plan, which we will do that Power-Only being the first thing that starts, and that starts to ramp, as I mentioned, in the fourth quarter. We would expect, as we come out of next year, the timing would, at this juncture suggest that we'll be in the conversion of our larger segment of our entire logistics offering, namely the brokerage business in calendar 2022.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation. Have a wonderful day.