Okay, great. Gonna go ahead and get started, sticking on the transport track again this morning. We're very pleased to be joined by Schneider National. We have Mark Rourke, President and CEO, to my left here, and then Darrell Campbell, EVP and CFO. Thank you so much for joining us. Christine McGarvey, VP of Investor Relations, that many of you know as well, is in the audience. Thanks, gentlemen, for joining us. Really appreciate having you here.
Thank you.
Maybe the best way to get started is kicking off with a couple of comments about sort of the current state of the market, what you guys are seeing. Got a lot of questions we can dig in. We do want it to be interactive. Folks in the audience, if you have questions, just raise your hand. We'll get your questions asked to these gentlemen up here, and we can get started. I'll hand it over to you.
Yeah, maybe just a little bit of the contemporary.
Yeah, just how are things going here so far in 2Q? What are you seeing?
Yeah, I think there certainly was a lot of uncertainty at the macro level, and justifiably so. Folks are concerned about overall demand levels, air pockets, all the things that the terms that were being thrown about, Chris. I think as we sit here early June, it looks like, at least from our view, that the worst-case scenarios that were being bantied about have not played out. That very resilient consumer, that very resilient planning that our customers have gone through, I think has kept demand fairly steady and seeing signs of seasonality and the things that you would normally expect to see. I would not say it is completely normal. That would probably be a little bit of an overstatement.
Those forward-looking sentiments that were so negative, whether it was the consumer or how folks were talking about the recession and all the things that could or should have played out with all the tariff discussions, does not seem to, at least at this point, be the reality of the condition on the ground.
I guess it's a great way to start because I think there's been a lot of discussion of having an initial lull after the tariffs were put in place in April. Then maybe once China came from 145 down to 30, there'd be potentially this surge of activity. Maybe it feels like the lull wasn't as much of a lull as people were fearing. Maybe there's the view that the surge may not be as much of a surge as people maybe thought it would be. I don't know how you guys are thinking about what you're hearing from shippers in terms of their behavior. How much has been pulled forward, and maybe, or is it just going to be a little bit more steady eddy as long as the consumer kind of continues to remain resilient?
Yeah, if you look at at least at our network, we can certainly see a downturn in the West Coast volumes that we normally see at this juncture, obviously coming through the ports. There is also a lot of bonded warehouse activity, I think, is still starting to come inland. We have seen relative strength in other parts of the network, in and out of Mexico, some Midwestern and Southwestern locations as kind of taking up some of that slack that came through the West Coast. Chris, and if you talk to our customers, we have some that will describe what they expect to use words like tsunami coming. We have other customers that are saying it is going to be pretty much steady. Some activity we have taken, but it is not going to be a dramatic change than what you would typically expect in the third quarter.
It's a little bit all over the place, but I think it's probably less of the amplitudes, either low or high, that were bantied about earlier. I think it's going to be a bit more in the middle of the fairway.
When you think about the various lines of business, I guess intermodal would be one where maybe coming off of the West Coast, we could have potentially seen a lull. Maybe if we can kind of run through and think about what you just said in the context of the different businesses, you have the network business, you got dedicated, intermodal, maybe how those are reacting if they're different.
Of course, intermodal has a little more reliance on imports than our domestic business in the truckload segment. We have less impact there, and the domestic demand has been fairly steady, if unspectacular, but steady. We have lots of room for productivity enhancements. As we're getting through this allocation season of staying disciplined relative to making sure that we're being as smart as we can on some rate recovery actions, even if that means putting a little bit more in the spot market in the short term. The spot market's responded quite favorably to things like the produce season. It's responded quite favorably to things like road checks.
I think, Chris, that points to, while we're not probably in perfect equilibrium yet on the truck side, we're starting to get into those zones when you see the response to those little one-off activities like seasonality of produce and things like road check.
That is a great question. That was one of the things I wanted to kind of touch on, and maybe we can dig in a little bit deeper, which is sort of the supply-demand balance. I mean, we have gone through a multi-year kind of downturn. We have seen capacity come out of the market. I guess you said we are getting closer to that equilibrium. Do we still see capacity coming out of the market at this level? It has been remarkable how resilient capacity, particularly in the truckload space, has been. Are we finally getting to the point where there is capitulation? There are a lot of factors that go into that, but maybe that is the broad question to start with.
Yeah, I think we're certainly on that path. I'll probably stop trying to predict.
I think we all have that to a degree.
Just because it's difficult to do. When you're looking at the new truck orders, as depressed as they are, when we have customers talking to us now about some scenario planning as they're seeing more failures within their book, those are all good signs. More recently, as we've been talking internally, we've seen an uptick across our subsidiary companies and our flagship relative to driver recruiting and availability, which means, I think, that there's less availability across the network or a flight to quality, which both kind of play to our advantage. When you look at some non-traditional signals, I think all of that points to we're getting much closer to the equilibrium point. The fact that we're still, without a great demand inflection, we're still gaining modest price increases as we go through the allocation season, which we needed to start to see.
That's a great point. Before I get to the pricing piece, I'm kind of curious about.
I got you off balance or something here.
No, you jumped ahead. I do want to get to that. Pricing is extremely important. I do want to kind of round out some of the conversation around the capacity side because I think that's also very interesting. We're starting to hear with used truck pricing kind of moving up that maybe there's a little bit more activity with banks getting a bit more strict in terms of what they want to do. I think there was a period of time where people didn't want to get a return of used trucks, even if the loan was in default. I don't know how you're thinking about sort of the used truck market and how that kind of plays in.
Yeah, the used truck market, particularly on sleepers, maybe a little less so on the day cab configuration. Sleepers have been healthy for some time. Particularly as we came through COVID and out of COVID, what some of the small carriers were paying for a truck. At times, we were selling team trucks for almost what we paid for them after we've used them for a couple of years, right? You just got to imagine the stress at those levels of what people are paying based upon how the rate structure has been. I think certainly that's led, I think, to some of the small carrier difficulties. I think it's led to some of the owner-operator difficulties. Our channel checks would indicate that the defaults relative to those who specialize in the financing of trucks we see in our lease business for owner-operators.
Obviously, some of the bigger banks do a much larger scale. I think those forbearance and some of those tactics have kind of hit kind of the limits. I think you're starting to see, particularly with used truck pricing, you'll see folks more interested in repoing those versus looking for more creative ways to help people stay.
There's also the used truck dynamic in terms of the pricing. With the impact of tariffs on new trucks, we expect that there's some inflection in pricing for used trucks, which is actually a positive for us as it relates to gain on sale. There's some offset with the increased cost of new trucks as it relates to gain on sale for us because the used truck pricing should go up.
Yeah. When you think about where we are from a rate perspective for your average small carrier who maybe owns one to five trucks, are they essentially just using depreciation as a way to stay sort of in business? You guys do not have that luxury. We look at you on an operating profit basis. Obviously, your small carrier is operating for cash. Even at these rates, is even that positive for your average small carrier? Do you get a sense of, are they still survivable in that scenario?
It's really hard to make the math work, particularly if they're more reliant on the spot market, which they generally are. We see that through our brokerage business, obviously our power-only business, Chris. The sustainability is a bit perplexing. To your point earlier, it's been much longer than I think any of us would have typically expected based upon prior cycles. All bad things have to come to an end at some point. I just don't see it being sustainable where it is.
Okay. Now I'm ready to talk about pricing. Let's talk about pricing. You noted that we're getting kind of through the bid season. It doesn't seem like rates are down. Let's talk about what you're seeing in terms of contract rates in the bid season so far. We're getting towards the tail end.
Yeah, second quarter is a big quarter for getting through the allocation, June being the biggest. We are not completely solidified there, but we have maintained our discipline relative to getting contractual improvement. If we do not, then we are more and more comfortable, particularly in certain network lanes, to put more of our business in the spot in the short term if necessary. The other dynamic that is also important to understand, Chris, is you have your initial allocation decisions, but then you have how well does it stick and how well do carriers perform, how well do carriers accept, was there any paper savings versus real savings. We want to make sure that as we get a chance to work through that secondary element, we have a little bit more opportunity for our price points that we think are more competitive relative to what is truly in the market.
I always go we have two selling opportunities, the first one and the second one. Particularly with big trailer pull shippers, we're seeing more of that, which again gives us confidence that our strategy is the right one and that we take this for the long haul and do not sign up for things that we are not going to be happy with over the next 12 months.
So it's really the second opportunity is showing up the way that you had hoped it would?
Correct.
Okay. It's interesting, as someone who's observed this market for many years, the difference between the spot rates that we see quoted and the contract rates is still quite large. When we talk to brokers and carriers, we hear contract rates are flat to positive. That's not typical as we go back through history. Is it just that these spot quotes that we're seeing just have no volume behind them? There's just no depth in that market? It's a little bit confusing to see such a widespread, but still seeing a degree of rating increase at the contract level.
Yeah, and I think the contract level is, at least in our view, at least in our book, is much more of the trailer pull shipper versus the spot market gets, I think, compared on this live load, live unload, which is, in our view, just a different market, right? Can you play that around the fringes? Certainly, as a shipper, but to have the efficiency and what you need to do day to day to run your facility, your warehouse, your plant effectively, that does not correlate completely when you have a trailer pull requirement and you have to have the efficiency of a trailer pull carrier to make that work. While we think it is instructive, I think it does get overplayed a bit relative to at least the large carrier community as it relates to what is the actual correlation to contract pricing.
Okay. Let's talk about the segments to some degree. Maybe starting with truckload and maybe how you guys are thinking about some of the cost side and productivity opportunities. First quarter, I think, for the network business was challenging. We saw that kind of across the space. What have you been able to do so far here in Q2 to kind of help with either productivity or cost improvement, try to improve that profitability of the business as we move through the year?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess the good news is we didn't start in Q2, right? This has been an ongoing thing. As long as I've been around and even before, we've always been focused on cost. From a network perspective, you could see that in the first quarter, we saw year-over-year improvements in margin for the first time in three years. That's in a challenging market. Some of it obviously is price, but we've taken many productivity measures as we've moderated capacity for where the market is. There are some significant input costs that are inflationary, but we've been doing what we can to kind of arrest those inflationary costs, whether it's on equipment, whether it's on driver compensation, insurance, and other safety items. If you also look at our last four quarters of activity, our variable costs have been within a very tight range, right?
I think that's a testament to all the efforts that we've been making, not just in Q2, but for the past couple of years. Intermodal, same thing. We've been very focused on our equipment ratios. We doubled our earnings in Q1 year over year, despite, I would say, not the greatest pricing improvement. If you look at network, you look at dedicated, you look at intermodal, while we've got some price improvement, the margin is coming also from some of our cost measures.
Yeah. Can you build as you go through the year? It seems like you have some momentum there.
Yeah, we think so. We have $40 million that we publicly disclose as a target. We're on track to meet that. We also have synergistic opportunities with acquisitions that we've taken on board. We obviously did Cowan acquisition recently in December. We were very pointed in terms of some of the synergistic opportunities, a lot of which relate to cost. We think there's line of sight to $40 million, but every time we set a target, if we hit the target, which we usually do, we re-up.
Okay. So there's more beyond 40.
We think so.
Okay. I want to jump back to a point because I think this is sort of progression as we go through the second quarter, but really more of a thought in the back half of the year. It is the English language provision. There has been a lot of conversation about that recently. I am kind of curious, what is your take on this? Clearly, this has been a violation in the past, but not out of service. There are questions about enforcement. There are questions about geographic enforcement. What do you think it does to the market? What do you think it means?
Yeah, Chris, I think there's that issue, then there's an adjacent one that I think is equally interesting to talk about. First, the English language provision, which, as you said, has always been a DOT requirement. I think they've given guidance to start enforcing on June 25th and they've given guidance to how to enforce. The guidelines have come down. You're right. It is a matter of how consistent and broad-based is the enforcement. I think it's less of an issue for someone like us and perhaps other large carriers who go through that process in their screening and hiring. I don't think that's necessarily representative of the industry. It could be a bit more disruptive. It's been, perhaps in my view, a little bit dismissed too much, and particularly in certain geographies where that could have more concentration and more issue than others.
That's one. The second one is the B1 Mexican program, which was meant to allow Mexican nationals to run under U.S. hours of service, come into the States, pick up a load, and go back to Mexico. We believe that there's been a significant abuse of that. Just the mere threatening of enforcement drives changes. We're seeing certainly that with some of our customers and the B1 drivers, just the fact that the border started to do some more questioning and more enforcement stopped the proliferation of carriers coming into the U.S., which then means a little tightening of capacity, particularly around the border. Just the threat of enforcement can have some material impact, and then it comes down to a degree how broad-based is the actual enforcement once it's in effect.
Do we think that this is really more of a border state's opportunity from both of these provisions, or do you think it has the potential to spread beyond that?
It is being prescribed to be across the border, not just in certain geographies. Again, we'll have to come down to see how that's done. There are certain areas I think are more prone for that to happen, and the Southwest and the Southeast are certainly probably more opportunity.
Let's talk a little bit about intermodal and dig in a little bit more deeply there. We had CPKC in the last session. That's obviously a provider for you. Maybe we talked a little bit about this at the top, but how sort of intermodal activity has been progressing here as we go through the second quarter, maybe a little less volatile, but that is somewhat tied to imports. Just maybe start with kind of the lay of the land on intermodal and we'll dig a little bit deeper.
Yeah, we're very bullish on intermodal, and particularly in and out of Mexico and the CPKC and the relationship we've developed there in the market over the last couple of years has really got a foothold. We've been through now our second allocation season. We've got proven track record. We have by far the best solution from transit time and execution, single rail line, second bridge, all the things that make just for a very truck-like experience with intermodal, which that market has lacked forever in our view. Feel very, very good how we're positioned there. The service across the board, obviously there's times where we could have a derailment or the implementation of the software that they were talking about earlier have some hiccups.
Overall, the service performance across the board is very solid, and we do not really have noise with the customer community concerned about converting over the road to intermodal because of concerns around service. That is always a great place to be in the sales process. We were optimistic that our new business allocation wins, particularly coming out of the first quarter, would allow us to mitigate whatever air pocket that could occur. We still feel very, very solid about that. We are seeing that come through in the results. We believe we are going to be growing faster than the market. We have been more focused on discipline the last couple of years of making sure that we were margins first, and then let us look at growth. I think we are more balanced now based upon kind of where we are across the network.
We've done a really nice job through the allocation season of being more efficient in how we're connecting. That, again, allows us to drive more incremental margins on the business that we do have. I don't want to say we're not going to have an air pocket. Maybe something will come at us here with all the things going on in the world. As we sit here, the first half of the year almost complete.
I think one of the beauties of the growth opportunity ahead of us is that we can grow without adding any trailing equipment, right? So from a capital investment standpoint, there's definitely operating leverage upside there.
We're seeing domestic intermodal grow kind of across the board, not Schneider specific, but across the board in a market where you feel like the competitive truck offering maybe would hinder that potential market share. Is it rail service improvements that are a big driver of it? Is it consistency across the bottom of the cycle that's gotten shippers to kind of embrace domestic intermodal a little bit more in a bigger way? How do you think, how do you sort of explain the growth that we're seeing on the domestic intermodal side kind of industry-wide?
Yeah, I think you hit two of the big contributors there. Certainly, conversion is the truck alternative is always how customers think about that from a price, a transit, and a service standpoint. I think going into this year, expecting we're a little bit long in the tooth in this recovery, that most of our customers, particularly our big customers, had a more aggressive conversion plan to help mitigate against a more balanced truck market. Going through the allocation season, I think we saw that. Certainly what we really try to lean into is where are our strengths? Our strengths aren't everywhere across the intermodal landscape, but where our strengths are, we offer real value, and we've gotten more disciplined and more capable as a sales group of really pointing out those differentiators.
It certainly helps having the CPKC different now with our UP relationship now going through our third allocation season. I just feel that we're all just connected and performing better in our ability to talk about our differentiators with their customer community. It helps having that be part of their growth plan coming into the year. Those are a more receptive conversation. That gets the momentum ball rolling down the hill in the right direction.
Pricing within intermodal relative to what you're seeing through bid season on the truckload side?
Yeah, really not much change there. We've seen low to mid-single digit increases on the truck side, and we've been relatively flat to slightly up in intermodal. That's going to play out for the first half of the year too, Chris. Probably not a lot of change for what we talked about in the first quarter.
Got it. Okay. I wanted to ask a little bit about how you're thinking about capital allocations. You did the Cowan deal. You got that done. You're working your way through. I guess, where does capital get called first? Are there other M&A opportunities? How do you think about that?
Yeah. I guess the beauty of where we are again is given our leverage profile, we do not have to choose between organic and inorganic growth. In terms of the hierarchy, clearly organic growth is number one, right? And organic growth in strategic areas of opportunity. Whether that is dedicated in truckload, intermodal, logistics, those will always get first dollars. If you look at our capital plan, dedicated trucks, intermodal trucks is where most of our capital is allocated, along with replacement to keep our agent fleet tight. At 0.7 times leverage, right? We do not have to choose between organic growth and inorganic, which is why we can supplement that strategy with deals such as Cowan. Cowan is the biggest acquisition we have done, but it is not the biggest that we could do, right?
We'd always see a path where for the right deal, we'd lever up, especially if it's accretive. There would be a line of sight to get leverage back in check. Overall, we expect to be investment grade, right, regardless of our capital allocation. There's a long way between 0.7 times and the top end of investment grade. We're always looking at the pipeline, right? At any given point, there are at least a handful of potential targets that fit that profile, right? The profile that has worked with M&M, MLS, Cowan. We have the luxury of not having to choose between organic versus inorganic.
Maybe two questions that kind of come out of there. Can you be a little bit more specific about what you think maybe the upper bounds of investment grade might look like from a leverage perspective? Anything more in terms of what the opportunities could be from an M&A perspective? Does it need to be something asset-based that has a meaningful dedicated component to it? Does it ever make sense to roll up some of these sort of underperforming intermodal fleets? I don't know. How do you think about all of it?
Yeah. To just answer your first question first, say two times leverage, maybe up to two and a half times, we'd feel comfortable, especially for the right asset. We're not generally acquiring fixer uppers, right? If it's accretive, you'd expect that even if you bump up to two and a half times, within a few months or a year, you'd get back below to something reasonable. I guess that's the leverage point. We're always aligned with our strategic areas of growth. Dedicated and truckload is where we're allocating dollars today, which is why the last three acquisitions have followed that. It's not to say that we wouldn't look at an intermodal carrier. The universe of potential targets in intermodal is not very big, right? For obvious reasons, there's concentration there. We would look at something if it became available.
It's just not many things. Logistics, similar thing. There are a number of logistics carriers that are out there that we have taken a look at or could take a look at. It has to be compelling in terms of accretion, in terms of return, in terms of multiple. We haven't seen a whole lot of that in the current market either.
You mentioned logistics. I think in the past, you've talked about what you're seeing on the brokerage side in terms of capacity reduction. We've heard various things in the market. Does it feel like brokerage is declining at a double-digit pace on a year-over-year basis? Meaning, are we seeing brokers exit the market at that type of level?
Yeah, certainly. We've been on a multi-year trend now on kind of active brokerage license available that kind of peaked during COVID and has come down dramatically. There's also kind of another counterbalancing strategy. Customers are more asset-based focused as well today and wanting to either rationalize the number of brokers they deal with or prefer assets, which as an asset-based broker, that kind of can lead to some advantages, particularly with our ability to bring power only to play for trailer-pulled shippers. Yeah, it's been very difficult, particularly in the truckload space, maybe less so in LTL, less so in some of the other modes, Chris, but the truckload space, and that's really a customer strategy more in my mind. The fact that really the last two years now is less and less brokers into the bid process that we're seeing from our customer base.
We're trying to differentiate that we have an asset following that goes with that. Look at us perhaps a little bit differently there. It's not been as easy as it was a few years back, for sure.
That's for sure. Certainly want to get any questions from the audience if you do have one. Yeah, fire away.
Just a quick question. You mentioned in the beginning there was a bonded warehouse analysis of TCO. Do you see it kind of like already played out and played out already or still there? Second question is that in terms of the surge coming by the end of this 90-day period, that actually been mostly over goods and staying on the force or do you see actually been already right away?
Yeah, it's really hard to have perfect visibility to all of that. Certainly, I think there's been a few large leading retailers that took advantage of the uncertainty of tariffs and use of the bonded warehouse as an approach to at least get the product in here. The good news is ultimately that's got to be distributed to the interior of the country. We think some of the mitigation to the air pocket is that that is starting to move. Whether it's fully exhausted yet, I don't think that's a multi-month backlog, but it's probably a multi-week that can benefit there. Again, that's our best estimate. It's mixed. We do think we're going to see a surge in imports to beat the 90-day period. We have some customers I mentioned earlier could describe that in their world as a tsunami.
Others describe that more as a blip. I think that'll be good for intermodal. I think that could potentially be a catalyst for some increased tailwind in the third quarter. We have to obviously see it all play out. We think that is going to be more good news than bad news.
We have about five minutes left. I did want to dig into the guidance a little bit. I do not want to put words in your mouth, but you said that maybe the worst is sort of off the table. I think EPS is $0.75- $1. I do not know if that means that $0.75 is maybe not as much in the crosshairs anymore, but maybe you could give a little bit of context of what you are seeing and how you are thinking about that. I think in the progression to Q and beyond, you mentioned a modest amount of seasonality, I think, when we talked on the conference call. Maybe we could talk about that too.
Yep, yep. I guess I'll start, Mark. You can jump in.
Sure.
A lot of what Mark was talking about in terms of the backdrop is embedded within our guidance. We had to look at a lot of scenarios. We look at a lot of scenarios every week, right? From an economic standpoint, there's the hard data, right, which we've seen, which has been resilient. If you look at wage growth, you look at GDP growth, you look at inflation, definitely moderation there. A lot of the uncertainty was forward-looking and more sentiment-based. Our guidance considers a range of outcomes which have a direct impact on price and volume. There's also the dynamic that Mark was talking about in terms of customer behavior, right? It's not universal. Even in the context of pull forward, some customers would say, "What pull forward, right?" Business as usual. Some would say they're taking advantage of the tsunami and all that.
Our guidance range, the width of the range would indicate that there is uncertainty. However, what we did say is that we're not hiding behind uncertainty, and we're focusing on what we can control. Whether that's freight allocation and the contract renewals or cost containment or productivity, those are staples within our guidance for all of our segments. From a truckload standpoint, network specifically, we expect to see year-over-year improvement in price. There are three consecutive quarters where we saw improvements in price, even in a tough market, even with uncertainty. We expect to see pricing improvement, even though moderated versus what we thought maybe four or five months ago. From a dedicated standpoint, it's continuing to execute with our customers with a contract allocation. A lot of that is volume and productivity based.
From an intermodal standpoint, Mark talked about the relationships with our rail providers, what we've seen for several quarters in terms of year-over-year volume improvement. We expect that to play out for the remainder of the year. Pricing is flat. We still expect that to be flat. In logistics, recently we had revised our long-term margin targets to 3%-5%. We continue to be profitable in logistics. I think a lot of that has to do with the technology that we have, our Freight Power technology, matching capacity with demand. A lot of what we've been doing on the productivity side to reduce the cost of serve, right? From a truckload standpoint, again, network, it's really pricing, continued pricing improvement, albeit moderated, focusing on variable capacity through the owner-operator model and supplementing that, obviously, with our company drivers.
Intermodal dedicated logistics is continuing to do what we can do from an execution standpoint. If you think about the three variables of price, volume, productivity, they're all important, right, in each of our segments to varying degrees. Our guidance kind of considers that there are different proportions that are necessary to meet objectives. I'm not sure if there's anything you want to add.
Yeah. I guess I did open with we did not get to the DEFCON four scenario that maybe some other crazy thing will happen in the world that kind of gets us back in there. Maybe feeling a bit more optimistic, Chris, than maybe we were even on the call. As we come through the third quarter, we might be in a position to narrow some guidance here. That was probably uncharacteristically large for us to do that. Not a lot of people guide today.
To your credit, you did. We appreciate that.
Thank you.
I was baiting you for that comment. Overall, though, what we were really talking about when we were last in public conversation was all this negative forward sentiment. It was not really showing up in the numbers, but the sentiment was incredibly negative. That seems to moderate too, right? I think all of that puts us in a better position industry-wise and certainly as a company. We still got to see it play out.
Sounds good. I think that is a great way to finish. Thanks very much for joining us. Really appreciate your time.
Appreciate you.
Thanks, everybody.