All right, good morning. Thanks for coming back for the second day of the Industrials Conference. We're kicking off the transportation track here with Union Pacific. I'm Brian Ossenbeck, I cover the rails and logistics for J.P. Morgan. Very excited to have Jim Vena, CEO, and Jennifer Hamann, CFO of Union Pacific. We also have Brad Thrasher here in the room. So I'm going to kick it over to Jim. He's going to make some introductory comments, and then we'll go into Q&A. So Jim, Jennifer, thanks a lot for coming.
Brian, thanks for hosting. Thank you very much. Okay, I think I'm close enough, people should be able to hear me. So, first of all, why don't we do the, cautionary information which says, and I'm not going to read all this, I'll be real fast. I'd like to remind everyone that we will be making some forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, so please refer to the UP website and SEC filings for additional information about our risk factors. I'm going to start by making a few brief comments for those not in the room. The presentation I'll be referencing can be found on our investor webpage. So starting on slide three, Union Pacific team is executing our multi-year strategy to lead the industry in safety, service, and operational excellence, which leads to growth.
That strategy starts with safety and the obligation we have to operate a network that is safe for our stakeholders. As indicated by the stats on the slide, Union Pacific, as well as the entire industry, has made significant progress over the years. We exited 2023 with good momentum as we had zero work-related fatalities and saw a 15% reduction in serious injuries. But we understand we still have work to do, especially to reach our goal of industry leadership. To reach our goal, we are investing in our people, changing our culture, continuing to improve our infrastructure and equipment, and using technology to propel these efforts. For example, on the personal injury front, our team researched thousands of serious safety incidents and used those findings to refresh our safety strategy.
Approximately one-third of all serious railroad injuries and incidents are related to six choices individuals make each day. We call these Go Home Safe choices, and we rolled out new policies and training to help employees prevent these potentially life-threatening behaviors. By focusing on these key behaviors, we believe we can drive reductions in safety incidents and improve the overall safety of our company. Having the right culture in place is key to a safer network. I can go on, but we'll save those for another day. The key message is that the right priority is being placed on the safety of our network. Moving to the next slide, improving service and driving operational excellence. The next piece of our strategy is delivering the service we sold to our customers and doing it as efficiently as possible.
If you paid attention to our earnings release or other speaking engagements, you know that we've made great progress in both areas in the short period that I've been back at Union Pacific. But again, there's work to be done. The slide provides an update on our service and efficiency metrics for the month of February, and the key takeaway here is that despite the challenges the weather presented in January, our network showed great resiliency and recovered quickly. While I still expect better performance, our February metrics demonstrated a significant improvement from where we sat a year ago. This level of performance is key to building trust with our customers as we look to increase their business with Union Pacific. But we must do it efficiently, not only to drive financial success, but to drive our cost structure to a place that allows us to compete in more markets.
The efficiency of our railroad is on the right track, but understand there are plenty of opportunities to improve asset utilization, lower fuel consumption, and increase train length to drive productivity. Turn to the next slide. Success in safety, service, and operational excellence does lead to growth, and that's ideally what it's all about. We want to grow. Let's be clear about that objective. Near term, it was good to see February volumes bounce back after the weather impacted January. Our volumes in February were up 6% versus last year, which includes an extra day. This helps for the leap year, but we're pleased to see quarter-to-date volumes back to essentially flat versus last year.
Longer term, the growth starts with leveraging our franchise, expanding our reach through new service products, and providing our customers with a consistent, reliable service product that represents what we sold them. We've talked quite a bit about our new intermodal products, whether that's our Falcon and Eagle Premium service, our Port Houston on-dock, or our new Phoenix Intermodal T erminal. These are key products to competing with the truck, with trucks to win share and driving growth to the railroad. But let's not lose sight of opportunities we see to bring additional cargo growth to our railroad. Our franchise provides numerous opportunities for us to benefit from industrial development in the United States, whether it's through our construction products network or petrochemical footprint.
We remain very bullish on the growth we've seen in renewable and biodiesel, and the team is delivering with business development wins in these markets. Let's be clear, Kenny and our sales team understand their directive to grow our business, while Eric and his team understand their responsibility to provide our customers with the service we sold them, and the rest of the team understands the responsibility to support our overall strategy to drive long-term returns for our shareholders. The entire UP team is energized behind the strategy and ready to win. With that, Brian, over to you. Any question you want to ask me? And if you don't have any, I'm good. Just take a copy of this and, we'll move on.
Thank you, Jim. I do have a few here, so we'll go ahead and jump right in. Thank you for the update. So it seems like the network's running pretty well at this point, but obviously, you mentioned a few things that you'd want to do better in over time. So, are there any structural changes you think need to be made, or is this more of the, you know, typical blocking and tackling and repeatability as you look forward?
Well, listen, I've been in this business, Brian, for a long time, and it's not a simple business. If it was, anybody could do it, and you could look at a network that tries to move 160,000 rail cars a week or 153,000, like we're—and change that we're running at this morning, and you think, well, listen, it should be real easy. Customers don't always work at the same level. They don't provide—they don't release cars, so you're always flexing and inflexing the system. So do I think there's more opportunity? Absolutely, there's more opportunity to take us to the level where we need to be, and there's pockets where we're gonna have to invest a little bit. But overall, I like the network we have. I like the originations we have.
I like the mix that we have at Union Pacific, so, I'm very comfortable, and they have clear sight of where we have to get it. We're not missing anything. We're not, we're not short of people. We've been able to hire the people that we need, so we're and, at this point, in the last few months, anytime we've looked and needed to bring in a conductor or an engineer or a heavy-duty mechanic, we've been able to find them wherever we look, so we don't have a structural issue there. I've talked about assets. It's more than locomotives, but locomotives is a great way to take a look at it.
You know, we, we have today, we have 500 locomotives parked, ready to go, meaning we could go outside and turn them on on a base fleet that we need to operate the railroad in the 3,000-4,000 range, depending on the day of week and what's happening. So we have lots of excess, and then on top of that, we have another 1,000 that, if we need to do a little bit of work. That's we have as many units parked as some of the other, the smaller Class I' s have operating the railroad, so we don't have an asset problem. And our infrastructure that we have in place for being able to move and increase business if we have to.
There's pockets where we'll have to invest capital, but overall, the railroad was built to handle more, more traffic than we have today, so very nice place to be in, that we bring it on, we bring it in at low incremental spend, both capital and operating.
So on the service side, specifically-
Let me add something. Listen, I'm not happy with where we are, okay? So that's just the way I am. I don't think I ever wake up in the morning, and I go, "Wow, Eric, the railroad's running real good. Thank you very much. Kenny, you know, the business you've been able to bring on, I'm real happy with." You know, they wanna come back and tell me that, you know, we've got a coal problem, and I tell them: I don't really care about the coal problem. It's your job to bring the business in and tell us if we have—what level of service we need to be able to bring that business in. So I'm a happy guy this morning, but I just thought I'd let you know how I feel.
I appreciate that. Imagine, happy can only go so far, and the coal problem, we will talk about, you know, in a little bit. But, just getting back to the service, though, you know, when you think about what the shippers have kind of endured with the supply chains, not just for railroads or Union Pacific, just broadly speaking, it's been quite volatile. So service, as you mentioned, is in a good spot, very good spot. Are they willing to bring back volume at this point? Is it there? Do they trust, you know, that it's going to be there, the service level is going to be there to bring it back, or is it just simply, you know, the demand isn't quite there enough to bring it?
You know, there's two different types of customers that you have. There's customers that I've spoken with that are today giving us more business. And if you take a look at the entire Gulf Coast area, going from New Orleans all the way down to Brownsville, that's very important to us, that origination. And they're giving us more traffic, and we're able to win because they see the service. And I've talked to them. I've been out to petrochemical plants. I've been out to polyvinyl plants, and they want to give us the business. It's the way to move it, and we see that.
When you're talking about the other piece of the business, service that's good for 3 months is just not long enough for people to say, I'm gonna change the way I wanna do my supply chain and how I'm gonna work. So, Brian, we have some work to do and some consistency to keep it. Most customers do not want us to, to be super fast, even though we have a network that allows us to be fast if we have to. You know, we, we can run, and the, the reason, if you looked at that map that we had up, we have 70 miles an hour in there. We actually do have, we built the railroad. Makes us safer because the tolerances are, tighter when you, have to inspect and with how you can operate the railroad.
But on top of that, it allows us... And we go from the West Coast to Dallas in for just over 48 hours, and it's close to 2,000 miles. That's truck-like when you can do that. But no one's gonna make a change over a three-month efficiency and service and driving that. So we need to make sure that we do it long enough, that people are comfortable that they want to change their supply chain. And we're winning. If there was more ground parcel, you know, we won an award in for over the Christmas season, the rush season, as they call it, being the best railroad service for UPS, which is a great thing to win.
It shows what we can do, and we delivered the highest level of any other railroad and the highest level of service. And there, they want speed and timeliness. They do not want to miss a sort. So we can do both. We can be efficient, we can be consistent, and we can be, have speed if we need it.
One thing, the company just announced recently was this Service Performance Index that goes down to the customer level. So I want to ask you about that. Can you maybe just give us some background, you know, what it is, what it measures, and why you decided to implement it?
This might be a little longer answer, and if you don't mind, let me take a couple of minutes on it. Now, let me just back up. Let's just talk about Union Pacific. When we measure things, we have to make sure that we measure what is success for a customer, not what is success for the railroad. What the old TPC measure that we had actually was success against our trip plan that we had built, and it was driven by what we needed to do in our touch points. We put in a standard of no more than eight hours to put a rail car into a hump yard, switch it, inspect it, put it on the outbound train and get out.
So we built that for ourselves, and we use that as a measure, and that's why the measure would never get to 100%, because it wasn't reflective of what the customer wanted. And you have to be careful because you can change the result of things pretty easily. I could have—I, first day on the job, if I wanted to get the trip plan compliance up to 98%, I would have just changed it to 12 hours. That doesn't do anything because I don't want the people out in the field to fix, to start thinking that they have 12 hours to get a rail car through our system in places where we have to touch it. So wrong measure, it's gone. What SPI is, is it measures what we've sold our customers.
And it's at a high level, that's what it gives us. Now, it's a consolidation of everything, but in actual fact, we have specific measures and specific SPIs, and we'll continue to do that with a lot of our customers. And some customers are comfortable that we just give them a consistency of how fast are we consistent? Do we do this in three days, or do we do it in two days? And others want something more specific. But the SPI measure, when you look at that, if we're in the 90%, that's a number that the customers and us have agreed to, and that's the number that shows how well we're doing.
And this morning, you know, we're running over 90% on our intermodal, which is a—that is a point where Kenny and his people can go in and see a customer, and they do not complain that service is the issue that should affect them on how they move, and that's why we made the change. It's much more reflective. Now, it would have been easier for a guy like me, you know, change it to 12 hours and, or do my train speed by changing train numbers and all of a sudden, my train speed goes up by 10%, and everybody thinks we're doing good. But the underlying... Listen, I've been around too long. I don't like it when people play games.
In fact, I would rather change that 8 hours down to 7 hours and force them harder to get cars out quicker, not longer.
That's very helpful, Jim. Thank you. Maybe just focus on labor for a minute. You know, you have these workforce agreements and maybe some challenges in implementing them, specifically the 11 and 4 for the engineers. Just wanted to see if you can give us an update on how that's progressing and, you know, if there's any sort of cost or additional headcount, because it does sound like this might be, it may be an event for this year and for next year. It's just hard to say, given this is a new program, like, how it's going to play out.
Right. But listen, when I showed up on August fourteenth, a couple of things that jumped out at me. One was the inflationary pressure from both wages and the input costs that we have to operate the railroad. So it will take us a couple of years to get to where I think we need to be and where we can show what's possible, completely possible at Union Pacific. But I think the fourth quarter showed it, and I think the first quarter. I won't get ahead of my skis too much because we still got a few weeks left in this quarter, but I think it'll show what's possible for us. And wages are wages we have to deal with. We pay very well.
There's a reason why we can attract people, and people stay, is we pay, and the benefit package that we have is top shelf. It's as good as anybody that's coming out of a high school that wants to be a conductor or engineer, heavy duty mechanic, and we're paying them $150,000-$200,000 a year. That's what we pay for a locomotive engineer to operate trains. Now, quality of life is real important, for people, and we want the quality of life to be as good as possible. But we do understand that we operate seven days a week, and we have this 11 and four that we agreed to before I came on. And I think it's workable, but we're being very cautious about how we implement it.
We're taking our time to make sure we understand it, because the last thing we want is to add more costs where we're not getting the same work in 11 days as we did out of 15 days with people. And so far, you know, we'll be able to figure out how to get over that. But in the short term, we're probably carrying some extra people to make sure that we don't affect the service level that we have to. So there isn't anything that I'm real worried about being able to deal. We signed also an 8-day sick leave benefit for people so that they can take time off. Let me just clear something up. People have always had the chance to take time off, and they always will. If you're sick, we don't expect you to come to work.
Brian's sick this morning, but he came to work. But I'm sort of a little, I, I don't get sick, so I don't really care. I'll sit closer to him. But at the end of the day, the employee has to decide whether they want to come to work or not. If they're sick, we don't expect them to come to work. Never have, never will. But we gave them eight days. Somehow, for some reason, so far, over 40% of those sick days have been taken in the first two months of the year.
I think it's actually 50% now.
Is it now? Is that jumped up? On top of that, for some reason, I don't know what it is about NFL football weekends in January and February, there's a lot of people that get sick on weekends. Okay? So it is what it is, Brian. You need to deal with that, and you move ahead. You can lose a lot of sleep over it and say: "Boy, people before me shouldn't have done it." There'll be people that come after me and say: "What the heck was Vena thinking?" I don't think there'll be too much, but if there is, right, so be it, and we'll move ahead from it. There isn't anything structurally that we have that we cannot get through and operate the railroad more efficiently than we are today.
Well, I do feel better sitting next to you already, so thank you for that.
Perfect.
So something's working. But in terms of the cost for this, you know, for the engineers and for potentially the conductors to shift to this more, I guess, maybe perhaps a new way of operating, is there? The reason I ask is, one of your Canadian peers came out a little while ago and said, well, their cost is about $100 million to do a bunch of these new work roles and sick pay. So I don't know if there's a way, Jim, for you can put a number on it. It seems like it's still kind of in flight, and maybe a little bit more if the conductors actually go forward with a similar sort of role or a similar sort of agreement, as I understand it.
... Yeah, so, so that is an important point that you raised there, Brian, is we right now, we only have the work rest agreement with our engineers. We're still negotiating with the conductors, and so that's still kind of TBD in terms of what that looks like and, and how we need to implement that. But to Jim's point, the main thing right now is you're seeing us carry a few extra employees as we're going through the implementation process and as we're working through, the rollout of that, and as we're also watching the volumes. Because the other thing that Jim's talked about is we want to maintain a buffer. We want to be ready to serve our customers and, and provide them the service they need.
We're going to do it as efficiently as possible, but we've got to have a little bit of slack in the system to deal with that. And so that's where you're seeing the primary impact come through. And that's our job as management, is to offset the impact of that inflation through productivity, through price, and through the activities that we're doing to grow the business.
Yeah. So on the volume comments, I know you had the slide up there with the quick recap, but maybe you can give us a little sense in terms of, you know, almost done with the quarter, how are things trending versus expectations? And I know maybe the bigger picture question, just to get your perspective on the full year, I think UP is the only one of the railroads not to give a revenue or a volume guide. And so just wanted to get your thoughts in terms of, you know, why that might be the case.
Let me start in general about the guidance that we gave after the fourth quarter, and then, Jennifer, jump in and take through a little bit deeper dive on it. Bottom line is, I'm just an honest person. I just tell it the way it is, and I cannot tell with where interest rates are, what's happening to the economy, what is going to happen in the second half of the year, okay? I really can't. And if anybody in this room that's here live wants to put their hand up and tell me what's going to happen in the third and fourth quarter, please do that. I'll come and visit with you, and I'll ask you some pointed questions.
So at the end of it, I think it would be, it would be not prudent for Union Pacific, because that's where I worked, to get out there and talk about it. I always wonder when growth is—when somebody announces, and growth is always going to be for my own personal investments, okay? And I'm a client to J.P. Morgan. I have one of those You Invest accounts and everything else here, and I got them on some other banks, so it's not all you, Brian. But at the end of it, I look at, I look at—I always wonder when somebody tells me the growth is coming in three or four quarters, okay? So I'm much more prudent, always will be, and we will deliver.
And if the business is there, we're going to capture it, and we're going to capture more than our, what people would think our share should be, because of having a great network, great railroad, efficient, and be able to give our customers a product that wins. So that's just the way I am, and don't expect us to change, Brian. We are not going to get out and tell you that we're going to do X, but guess what? It's all backloaded. Because then I'll have to come back in the second quarter and tell you, "Well, geez, you know, with the water on the beans has changed, it's not going to be that good in the third and fourth quarter." I just don't do that. Okay, Jennifer?
Yeah. So I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of the first quarter, Brian. We're, we're flattish right now. The quarter started off a little slower than we would have thought because of some of the weather. So our volumes were down 6%-7% coming out of January. Rebounded very nicely through February, got the help of a little bit of an extra day. But then, you know, moving into March, you've got a little timing there as well with the Lunar New Year, so it came a little later this year than last year. But I think the important point is, we are meeting our customers' demand needs today. We know we've got a little softness in markets such as, as coal, Jim referenced that earlier.
You know, you still have the interest rates that are impacting the housing market, and that has a ripple effect through our business. So while primarily it hits lumber, you also have cement, roofing granules, and then you have the consumer products side of things, everything that goes in the new house, the carpets, the lamps, the furniture. So that's an impact as well, and you're seeing that in some of the domestic intermodal truck supply. I think you write about that fairly often; it is still pretty robust out there, still pretty competitive market. So those are the things that we're watching. But Kenny and his team, I think, are doing a good job going out, talking to customers and winning some incremental business.
So that's why kind of over the long term, and Jim referenced this, we think we should outperform the markets, you know, that we serve. Because we have the great franchise, we're going to provide the great service product, and the teams out there winning the business.
You bet. Well, that's a good point, Jim. You're the only company who doesn't have a back half recovery built in, so I guess we won't have to ask you what happened in a couple of quarters. But in terms of, you know, the competitive dynamic, excuse me, we've seen some international intermodal contracts change hands, not just for UP, but probably for some other ones, I would guess, coming up. So just wanted to see what your perspective on was, just the rail competition, you know, in the region, and then more broadly, when you look at some of the investments that BNSF, J.B. Hunt, making for inland terminals, obviously quite some time away, but some pretty significant capital expenditure. Is that something you think might have to be, you know, on the table, or are you considering something like that for UP?
Well, I think we are, Brian. I think we're ahead, and we will continue to invest. We have the capability to invest. When we build our capital plan... Listen, we spend $15 billion a year to run the railroad, so people forget that. But that's maintenance, that's repairing cars, looking at locomotives, paying people, you name it. And then on top of that, we have a $3.4 billion budget set up this year, $9 million a day on the capital program. But the way we look at it is, where is it that we think the business is and where we can grow?
That's why we already have developed a terminal in the east end of the LA Basin, and the traffic has been moving there for a couple of years. We did that on purpose. We got ahead of the game to make sure that we were set up there. So if we need to spend more money, we will spend it, no problem at all. If we can reuse some of our facilities, we have capacity in the other terminals we have in the LA Basin. I'm just using that as an example of being able to bring more traffic in, more intermodal business, and be able to get it in and out of the LA Basin and out of those ports. So we always want to be a little bit ahead of the game.
We opened up, we opened up the terminal in Phoenix, and it's not full yet, but we think there's a market there for us. It's a city that's growing. There's 5 million people living in that area and just what's the big changes in, in Arizona. So Brian, other, other railroads can spend the money, and, and it's for, for the industry, I think it's great, and I love competition. I'll put our network up against anybody. And if we can have a operational efficiency that's better than our main competitor, and then that opens up markets and allows us to do things in places that other people can't. This is not. You don't build a capital plan.
I always find it a little frustrating when people say, "You know, boy, you're spending $3.4 billion." The big question is: Is it smart money that we're spending? Are we doing it at the right places? Are we—You know, why would we spend money on locomotives when we have 500 of them parked? We're rebuilding some, but I'm not gonna go out and buy new locomotives when we've got that many. Are we upgrading them to make sure that they're Tier 4 and have the best systems in place? Absolutely. But so that's the way to look at it, Brian. This is not... And does Union Pacific have the capability to be able to go spend another $1 billion? If we thought the market was there and we could grow it, we'd do it tomorrow, okay?
We've got the capacity, and watch us as we go through on free cash flow and what we're doing this year. We have the capacity to be able to do that. So this is not a dollar and cent. This is purely driven on what's possible and what we think the need to add to the network to grow our business. And I'm very comfortable with it. Very comfortable.
So one more question on the end markets with coal. Obviously, natural gas is quite low. I don't think we expected it to be this low to start the year, and stockpiles seemingly pretty high. Is this, and natural gas prices are still volatile, actually been up a little bit and then back down. So is this something the network can manage, you know, pretty easily? Not that that's an easy situation to manage with that much volume down, but how do you sort of adjust for that? And are we, you know, kind of the run rate we should expect for the rest of the year when we look at coal?
Well, listen, coal is always gonna be a drag on our... Over time, we don't see coal, our coal business in thermal coal growing. We see it dropping. It is what it is. Like, I've told the marketing people and Kenny and the entire team, "I don't really care." That's part of being Union Pacific, is we have a problem, area one. But tell me about the petrochemical industry. We have the plastics industry, we have all the facilities we have for intermodal, the grain business that we have, our access into Mexico, our 26% ownership of the FXE. How can we partner? Can we nearshore more? Can we do that? And I'm absolutely sure we're gonna offset that.
So we can look at it as, now, would it be nice if natural gas prices went to $10? I guess maybe I should build it into next year's first and second quarter, and then tell you that our coal business won't drop that much, but I just don't do that, okay? So coal is what it is. I'm not worried about it, and we will react to make sure that we don't have too much capital and get ahead of ourselves, and on the people front and on the expense side, that we're set up properly to manage that change in business.
Because what happens is, there's a piece of our network where the coal makes up a bigger segment of the pie, and we know we're gonna have to adjust some of the assets and adjust the people up there and put them in other places, in Texas and in the southern part of our network. So it is what it is. I'm not worried about that. It was a good question, Brian. I know I was sort of jumpy on it a little bit, and I apologize, but, you know, it is what it is. You're always gonna have businesses that are helping you and businesses that are not. The soda ash business, they're expanding with everything that's happening and where that's used in the manufacturing of glass, and so people are expanding, and we love it.
They're on our railroad, and we'll work with them to expand it and give them more export and more domestic use.
Okay. No, I appreciate the comments there. In terms of, you know, looking at the first quarter, you know, most of the quarter's in the bag, at least, you know, last couple of weeks here. I think the commentary on the last call was it would be a little bit hard to improve OR sequentially from the fourth quarter to the first quarter, which seems to usually be the case. But then the broader commentary was like a more general improvement throughout the full year and maybe into next year. So I just wanted to see if you could put a little context on that, assuming that still stands. But any thoughts on the first quarter and where we stand?
Yeah, I mean, your comparison of fourth quarter to first quarter is, is right on. You know, when you go into the first quarter, that's usually your lightest volume quarter of the year. That's also when you have some costs at the beginning of the year, that are a little higher. You've got some of the weather that you're dealing with. You've got payroll taxes restarting again. And so first quarter, generally for us, and the seasonality in our business is usually, you know, not a better quarter from a, from an OR perspective, from a profitability perspective than, than fourth quarter. Our volumes then build through the year and then start to taper. Last year was a little unusual because we actually had sequential volume growth into the fourth quarter. Fourth quarter, as Jim referenced, was very strong for us.
We had strong sequential improvement in our OR, 250 basis points and 10 basis points year-over-year. So I think the key way for you all to judge us as we move through 2024 is: How are we performing month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter? Are you seeing us continue to be as efficient as we can be, both from an OR and a capital standpoint? Are you seeing us improve the service metrics to our customer and getting every piece of business that's out there and available to us?... You know, taking into context some of the headwinds we have, and we still feel very, very comfortable with that dynamic.
Okay, one thing I will forecast is we will have the best operating ratio and the best margin business, railroad in North America. So I'm not real worried about that. And I'm saying that because of, and people can go back and look at my history and, what I've done before, and I have a clear view of how we get there, understand how we're gonna get there. It's gonna take us a little longer because of the, expense side was way higher when I showed up, and the inflation, but I'm not real worried about us looking at, as we go through 2024 and 2025, where we're gonna end up. I'm very comfortable with it.
Mm.
I know you got me to forecast something. I can't believe it.
But without a timeframe.
I said no timeframe.
Nicely done. So in terms of the cost side, you mentioned, in terms of price cost for the industry has been, you know, challenging for a while now. But I think the commentary that you guys have made is that price was not accretive to margin. I think that's more so on percentage terms, but on a dollar-for-dollar basis, it is accretive, you know, to EBIT.
That's correct.
So, can you give us a sense in terms of like when that actually... I mean, we care about the EBIT dollars, but I think people tend to focus on percentage maybe a little bit more. Is this still going to be an event through 2024 and into 2025? Like, how are these contracts gonna roll off? And if this is a big focus for Kenny and the team to get that, you know, sort of back into alignment.
Yeah. So you're right on the commentary in terms of 2024; margins aren't going to be accretive. And the, and the way that we talk about that is yielding price dollars that exceed our inflation dollars. And so it's, it's really just a math exercise. If you're putting the same dollar in the numerator and the denominator, you're coming out with a little bit worse number. And so that's where we're saying it's not accretive to our margins, but it is accretive to EBITDA. I'm not gonna make a forecast of when that's gonna turn, other than, you know, you look at our portfolio, so call it 50% of our business is under multiyear contracts.
There are escalators in there, but they're in many cases they haven't quite kept up with some of the inflation because they weren't designed to keep up with inflation as high as it has been over the last couple of years. Then you have the other 50% of the business that we're actively out there touching. And that's where Kenny and team are being aggressive, and they've got that dual goal. They need to win new business at very good margins and at higher prices. And I think so far, I think they're doing a really good job with that and delivering some strong price for us this year. We do have a couple headwinds in our price because we give you a—when we talk about that not being accretive, that's a net number, too.
So there's pluses and minuses. The minus, you've referred to one already in terms of coal. We do have some of our coal business that is have some linkage to natural gas, and with natural gas prices being low, that's a headwind, and we do have some headwinds from intermodal pricing as well. So, as those markets turn, that helps us. But really, the key part is when we're out there actively negotiating business, that we are selling the service product that we're providing to our customers, and being pretty aggressive there to cover that cost inflation.
Perfect. Jim, I want to ask you about the truckload conversion opportunity. You mentioned the carload growth story, which is obviously quite big as well. But from a truckload perspective, you know, given the longer length of haul for Union Pacific, is that something you still feel like there's a lot of opportunity there? Maybe it is on shorter length of haul as well, that we don't quite have as much visibility to, but do you have any examples of what you've secured already, what you're interested in, how that might progress throughout the next couple of years?
I think the steps we've taken in service and consistency and recoverability, and you can see that in January, are real important for us to start getting in. And it's gonna be a tough, absolutely a tough market to win in. But if we can be very efficient in how we operate the railroad, and we have the capacity to be able to deal with that business at the level it has to and provide the service. Listen, we are 70% friendlier greenhouse gas emissions than trucks. Does that—I'll be honest, does it make a difference when we ever bring that up with a company? Not very often.
Most of them go: "Tell me what the price is, and can you be consistent?" That's what the, that's what they give us feedback, and that's how we win the business. So we are much more, but at the end of the day, if we continue to operate service, and that's why we're selling it hard. We're selling the type of railroad that we have and the and where we can bring people together. And we're working with other railroads. The railroad I used to work at, at CN, to see how we can extend the reach so that we make it easier for people who want to have the truckload business on our, on our, and intermodal on our, railroad.
The new service we have coming out of Mexico, we are the fastest service, moving containers and trailers up to Chicago from Mexico. Nobody can get anywhere near our speed, and that's important for us to see how we grow the business. So we're targeted, and I'm not gonna tell you any more than that. The competitors might be listening in, and for me, it's. I wanna win that. But if you have good service and you have operational capability because you're a very efficient railroad, operating wise and margin wise, gives you an opportunity to be able to grow that business. And I'll take, like, 3 or 4% a year, I'll be a happy person.
It's, I don't expect us to change everything and affect the way we price, because overall, the value of who we are also is important to me, and we are not gonna start cutting prices to be able to just go after business to add a whole bunch of revenue without understanding how it drives to the bottom line.
Okay. Well, unfortunately, we're out of time, but thank you both very much for the update today. Really appreciate you spending time with us.
Well, listen, thank you very much. Thanks for everybody listening in. I'm very excited. Should be a lot of fun. Stay tuned and hopefully I'll come back there next year, and we'll be able to update you some more on where the heck we are in this journey. Railroad's a lot of fun, great business.