To the next part of Day Two of our B of A Industrials, Transportation, and Airlines Key Leaders Conference. Certainly, key leader is definitely a proposal for our next panel. For those new to the room, I'm Ken Hoexter, B of A's Airfreight Service Transportation and Marine Shipping analyst. Next up, we welcome Union Pacific CEO Jim Vena, his fourth time joining us here, CFO Jen Hamann for her third time presenting, and many more attending from her IR role a decade ago, but I didn't write those all down so we could talk afterward and you catch me up. They are joining the audience by Diana Browner from Investor Relations. UNP has been kind enough to participate in 20 of the 24 years we've been hosting the event. We thank you for the commitment to the conference. Jim, I'll start off.
Edmonton is up three to one against the Vegas Knights, so you've had some late nights, right? So you're roaring to go? Good start to the morning?
Yeah, I hope they win and one of these days they're playing somewhere else on the West Coast.
Yeah, that's so fair. That wouldn't bother me.
A lot of West Coast late nights. I am okay. I go to bed at midnight and get up at six, so really it is a little bit of a late night, not a big deal.
Let me turn it over to you. Sounds like you've got some slides to get started with an update. Off to a strong start with volumes up 6.5%. It's well ahead of our 4% full quarter target. RTMs are up over 10%, so well ahead of our flat target. In your run-through, Jen, as you wrap up, if you could also include three key takeaways that you want us to leave with here today.
Okay. So of course, this is the cautionary information. I'll give you guys a second to read it. Of course, we're going to be presenting the information, and if you want any more, go on our website. But anything that we say, I've got Diana in the room. If I say something that is a little more than what's public, don't worry about it. She'll have an AKO here in about 30 minutes. I think I've been doing this for a while. I'm pretty comfortable on what we say. We're talking about the things we've said publicly and talking about what we see at this point in time. Excuse me, it truly is a moving target at this point. Why don't we frame where we are? I think that's real important of who Union Pacific is and what we're trying to do.
In this slide, must be that strong coffee, Kenny. I love it. Okay.
As long as I leave you speechless, that's all I care about.
So basically, you want me to make sure I don't go too long?
No, no, I want you to keep going. I want you to keep going.
I thought maybe I'd fill the whole 30 minutes. You won't have a chance for questions, but here, I'll go through it pretty quick. Fundamentally, what are we trying to do at Union Pacific? What's a win? We talk about safety, service, and operational excellence. If we do those things well, then we drive growth because we know there's markets out there across the board, not just in intermodal and not just in trucks, that we're absolutely sure that we can conquer, win, and bring more of it onto the railroad with the customers we have and new customers. If you take a look at our service product, how we measure, when I wake up in the morning, I look at a lot of operating metrics. It's a standard I do seven days a week.
It doesn't matter where I am in the world, what I'm doing, I look at those operating metrics. We represent a lot of it by saying, how's our car velocity? Remember, for people that don't follow us closely, car velocity is the best metric because it gives you from the time a customer releases a car until you place it and where they released it to. That's a great measure to see how your fluidity is. I use that as a reference, and then you can break it up into the different. Just as important is service, the way we describe it is what we sold to the customer, what we agreed to. Some of them are handshake deals, and some of them are formal deals. At the end of the day, it's what did we agree to?
We measure against that. To have both manifest and intermodal 95% plus changes the entire paradigm about the relationship on whether you're doing the right thing for the customer. What's good is this is not a one week or one month or one quarter. We see this now for a number of quarters, probably since we put that measure together that we thought was the best example of how and would show how our service is. The discussions with customers have changed. They talk about what we do moving forward and not so much about how well you're performing the service and what they're paying. It's all about value.
If we can present the value that Union Pacific provides them in faster car turns for the people that own their own cars or lease cars, dedicated service that they understand is going to arrive when we said it was going to arrive, and for the high requirement customers that we deliver exactly where they want in time. We have a number of different things. I'm real proud of what the team's done, and I think it sets the foundation of what we do. You can see the efficiency, whether it's a few more cars on every train now. Therefore, we can handle the ups and downs of what the normal business and normal week is in our business.
The team's done a fantastic job of building our train length against a very dynamic plan that we can change quicker than we ever could before with some of the technology investments we have made. Workforce productivity, 9%. I remember when I came back to work after my sabbatical for a couple of years away from Union Pacific, I was asked, "Is there anything left?" One of the analysts, it was not you, Ken. You were very smart. You did not ask me that question. I would not have come back if there was nothing to do. If I could put my feet up on the desk, I would have been doing other things. You can see that we have line of sight to continue to improve productivity and continue to be able to make the railroad more efficient.
We do that with investing in technology, investing in our people, investing in our physical plant. We continue to invest for the right things. Locomotive productivity is one of those hundred numbers that I look at every morning to tell us how the operation is, and that's headed the right way. A win is you need freight revenue, and you need to be able to have an operating ratio that allows you to drive more of it to free cash flow, more net income, and go up that operating income. For me, I love that bottom number, that free cash flow number at the end of the day. As an industry, we've always looked at operating ratio. If you take a look at the revenue growth, excluding fuel, I think we've done a fantastic job. You see the numbers.
We've outpaced what we said. We have always wanted to outpace what the economy gives us. I think we've done a fantastic job of being able to drive that in 2024 and even in the first quarter of 2025. Listen, I don't want to be a braggart, but all I can say about the operating ratio is that's what you said we're going to do, and that's where we are. Okay? Operating ratio is not what drives it. I see some of you smile when you heard me say braggart, but let me go back again. Yeah, I'm being a little bit of a braggart. So what? Okay? At the end of the day, I think we have the team, we have the railroad, we have the physical plant, we're smart about how we move, and we take decisive action in the right way.
I'm very comfortable where we are. I expect other people to take a run at us and probably sometimes beat us in operating ratio. This is not a game of who is operating ratio. It's about the fundamentals of what you do. Jennifer, maybe I'll turn it over to you.
Sure. Thanks. Maybe I'll start off with our second quarter volume. We commented back in April at our earnings release that the quarter was off to a strong start. That has continued for us. When you see the chart of the volumes on the upper right-hand side there, it really highlights what we think is a great strength of UP, and that is the diversity of our franchise. We manage it across three business teams. Got total volumes, Ken, you mentioned this, up 6%, really being led on the bulk side. Think coal and grain, industrial, that is kind of our mixed manifest type of business. It is a bit of a mixed bag. You have some pressure on metals and minerals, forest products, but we are seeing strength in plastics and industrial chemicals. The premium side, that is where I am sure we will spend a little bit more time today.
That's where we have our automotive as well as our intermodal, and in particular, the international intermodal. Automotive is down, but our international intermodal is still up. Now, you saw our quarterly, or excuse me, our weekly volumes that we put out the other day. That did show that intermodal, and this is both domestic and international, was up only 3%. Still up, still growing YoY , but we are starting to see that tail down as we're approaching that air pocket that people are talking about. Obviously, we got some good news on Monday in terms of a change in the tariff policy. We will see how quickly that supply chain can reverse itself and see some of that come back. The good news, going back to where Jim was at, is the network is running really, really well today.
We're in a very good spot to be able to react as that changes. It's some of that uncertainty and that volatility, which is why, although we have been reiterating our long-term targets, we haven't given a lot of specific guidance in terms of 2025 and in terms of that, not giving a specific EPS target for 2025 other than to say we will be able to achieve EPS growth that's going to help support us on that three-year path. Still very grounded in that, very comfortable in those things that we can control that we're driving forward. The last thing I want to mention is that international trade and the look at what our total car loads look like in 2024, because again, that's very topical. Almost 60% of our business is domestically linked.
Think U.S., as production grows in the U.S., as manufacturing grows in the U.S., we are extremely well positioned to capitalize on that. 14% is Canada and Mexico. That is mostly some of our bulk commodities as well as industrial, finished vehicles. The 30% is Asia and other. That does include China. The large bulk of that Asia and other is international intermodal business. The thing that I think is important to point out there is 30% volume does not equate to 30% revenue. There is a very different revenue profile for international intermodal than the rest of our portfolio. In fact, we have said, and we have been talking about this since last fall, when international really surged, that it is 40%-45% below our system average. You really need to be thoughtful.
We've seen that on the way up in terms of the volume growth. You're also going to see that as volumes start to tail off a bit on the international intermodal side. Ken, I'll just wrap up on the three key takeaways for us. I'd say it's the first thing that Jim talked about. The railroad's hitting it out of the park right now in terms of how it's operating, the service that we're providing, and the productive way that we're doing that. To me, the second point is that we are shifting, changing, really, the rail paradigm in terms of being able to both grow volumes and at the same time improve our service product and improve our productivity. We're doing that QoQ . That's building confidence with our customers.
That really leads us to the third part is that's going to support our ability to sustainably grow long-term. That is really what it's all about. We've got three mechanisms to drive profitability in our business: price, productivity, volume. We've got a long track record on those first two, and now we're hitting the third one.
It's a great setup. Thank you. I know I've got you on stage, but I'm going to start off with some of the minutiae stuff, right, just because it's exciting to think about what's driving this near term. I mean, that bulk stands out, right, in terms of that growth level outstanding. Coal's up 36% in car loads, which was double our target, intermodal up 11. I can't believe we're still talking about coal all these years later, right? It's gone from a quarter of volumes down to was down to 7% at the low for the industry, back up to 9%. We've seen that volatility kick in, and we thought we were done, secular decline, and it's going to continue to fade away. 36% increase is significant, right? Especially given what it can mean profitable-wise. What's driving the uptick?
Is that just the Colorado contract, or is this weather? Is there something more? Is it driving that?
Yeah. Certainly the contract win that you're referencing, Ken, is a big deal for us. We won that, started really in the second quarter. That's one train a day, incremental for us. That's a big deal. Natural gas prices have stayed relatively high. That's what most of our coal producers are competing against in the grid. As those natural gas prices have stayed high, that makes the coal more competitive. We're seeing greater demand. The railroad's running well. We're cycling those cars and getting really good utilization.
Intermodal. You talked about the air pocket. I want to understand kind of from your viewpoint, do you think this is pre-shipping? We've got the inventory here so we can get through this air pocket. Now, we know for surety at least that it's a couple of weeks long. Who knows what happens for 90 days? Do we get a pre-shipping rush and a boom? What are your thoughts? Jim, how do you prepare the rail for that kind of swing? Do you think this air pocket that Jen talked about, are we going to see a big pullback in intermodal for three weeks? Instead of the mother of all returns of volume, if we pre-ship, does it just kind of get back to a normal level?
I think you just about answered the question yourself. No ifs, ands, or buts that receivers across the entire U.S. pulled what they could forward. Some of that moved in the first quarter as soon as there was a discussion about tariffs. They were prepared. As we learned after the pandemic, there is only so much capacity to pull forward. Once you fill the places, then what do you do? I think that is there. That happened, and we would expect that to change how fast some of the buildup after the slowdown for the last couple of weeks once we have a different picture of where tariffs are.
For myself and for Union Pacific, the way we look at it is we think that yes, we had a little bit more business on the international front and a little bit because it translates to domestic. We already are seeing the effect of what people were loading two weeks ago or three weeks ago or shipping or buying versus what they had in stockpile. Now the next few weeks will be, if everything else stays normal, if the consumer does not change, if the U.S. economy stays and still has some strength in it, which everything that we see from what has happened to CPI and what consumer spend is, that we should come out of this in the next few weeks, we should see an increase back in the amount of imports coming to the U.S.
Okay. I would never have brought up the operating ratio, but since you put it on the slide, I guess I'll jump there with my next question. Jen, thinking near term, right, because that's how we fly. Near term, 1 Q to 2 Q normal operating ratio improvement is about a 270 basis point, which would indicate getting into the 58% range. You had unfavorable fuel and weather in the first quarter and given this unseasonable strength in volumes in 2 Q. I think, Jim, you might have mentioned you could see a better than expected normal performance. If things have improved further, what's the setup?
I mean, I think you're right. It's a very favorable setup. Obviously, we're not going to give a guide for that other than we feel very good about how the operation is running. We're halfway through the quarter. I think the key is going to be what happens in the back half and how steep is the downfall in terms of the intermodal. Then do we see a snapback? Is that soon enough to influence the back half of the quarter?
Yeah.
We'll just watch and see how that plays. I think the fact that we're running as well as we are is extremely important. We'll see how volumes play out. I mean, when you look at things historically, I think you get skewed sometimes because there are normal seasonal patterns, which are true. This could be unusual. We had a very strong first quarter, 165,007 day car loads. We'll see where the second quarter ends out. Regardless, I feel great about how the team is operating, the fact that we're continuing to get strong core price, which was important in the first quarter. I'm sure we'll talk about that some more. I feel good about our ability to perform.
Jen, I think you ended with one of the kind of return to your long-term target, high- single digit, low- double digit. After a flat quarter in the first quarter shaping up for could be double digit growth in the second quarter, I presume, do you think that's how the second half of the year flows out? I guess I'm just trying to understand the contracts, the ebb and flows of traffic, and kind of what we think in terms of earnings.
Yeah. To be clear, I mean, we said we have not given us a precise target for 2025. We said it will be consistent with us hitting our long-term targets. With that, we will see what happens in the back half. We knew we were going to have a difficult back half because of international intermodal and the strength that we had last year. How did the tariffs impact that? Do you maybe get more of a surge that could be a benefit? What does the grain harvest look like? As Jim was talking about, how does the consumer stay engaged and what does that do from the industrial side of the business? We like where we are at. I think we are in a great position, and we are going to move every piece of freight that is available to us and go out and win new business.
That's an important part of what the team's doing as well.
I like that Jim keeps laughing when I keep asking these pinpointed questions. Like you're going to change your mind and some number versus giving me exact quarterly guidance.
I'm waiting for Jennifer to break down one day, okay? I was going to say, okay, let's see what happens.
Jim, the power of the rail just keeps improving on the operating performance. That is what everybody was looking for when you returned to UP, was what can you do? Generating, Jen, you mentioned 165,000 cars earlier this year. I think you showed the network can handle 170,000. It was not what you wanted in terms of international intermodal, in terms of boosting things, but it showed the power of the network can handle that growth. I think it jumped, Jim, from when you joined maybe back down to 150,000-155,000, if I remember back a couple quarters ago. Increased confidence in that scaling? Are we going to get, do we break through the 170,000? Obviously economic driven and a lot of things in there, but the capability of the network as you have set it up.
We've had some weeks where we were 169,000, 170,000, and we handled it. The business mix makes a difference on what you're handling and what the impact is to the railroad. What I really like is what the entire team is doing, the operating team. It takes more than the operating team. It's truly how the marketing and operations work to make sure that they understand what the impact is to the railroad and the type of business and what the price should be for the business and how it impacts the railroad. That's really like a three-stool, okay, that you're sitting on and you make sure that you do the right things. The reason that's important is you can do something that's irresponsible from one piece of it and then drive the railroad not to be able to be efficient or you cause it.
Little things like, we'll store containers for you for $2 a day forever, right? Or we do something like that that just doesn't make sense for the railroad. We are clear-eyed on what a win is. What clear-eyed is this is we have excess capacity. We have excess assets, and we have excess on the people and the capability to ramp it up so that we can handle those things. Some of those items we can react fairly quickly to, Ken. We can react to locomotives very fast. We have 500 of them parked, ready to go. Every so often, we'll put a few of them in. We are ready to handle more. The railroad itself is built to be able to handle substantially more than 170,000 rail cars because customers, as much as we love them because they pay the bills, they do not, okay?
They did not tell us. This is not a negative. Some people, when I say this, have said, "Oh, Vena was surprised." No, we built the railroad for it. We had a 30% increase in international intermodal last year, and we handled it. You build the railroad that has some capacity to be able to flex, and that's what we've done. On the people side, we've been able to hire. Some of the issues that we had coming out of 2020 and 2021 where people had a problem hiring, we have not encountered that. We are able to hire people in. We are in a good place. That is how we run the railroad. Those fundamentals make a difference. Productivity is like religion for us. We look at ways to be able to make the railroad more efficient.
This year, we're able to switch more boxcars per person-hour than we did last year because of the way we've invested in our yards and technology. We're able to handle more cars on the same number of trains, our train length, because of the way we are able to flex our system differently than we did before. Those things add up to, listen, I think 170, I wouldn't even blink. 175, I think I'd still have a real good nap. I don't know if I needed one. 180, 190, I'd start to think about maybe I got to get really involved.
On that, you mentioned the 500 park locomotives, right? I'll throw on the CapEx, right? You've got your CapEx target of $3.4 billion. Does that, if you start getting to 180, are you using the 500 in storage or are you going out and buying new in advance of that? What's your tipping point for startup? What are you doing now? Are you just doing mods now? Are you doing news?
Yeah. Listen, when it comes to assets, any asset, you have to decide whether something new is better than what you operate, more fuel efficient, better reliability. If you have to cross the bridge on that, then that's what you do. You go over and decide what you need. When we are modernizing our locomotives, they come out like they're brand new locomotives. It's not quite as expensive as buying new. We found that we've been able to rebuild a number of locomotives, and we will continue to redo that so they just come out as if they're brand new locomotives with the fuel side, with the reliability side. That's the way we're looking at it.
The 500, we have another 1,000 parked that would take us a little more than just one day to go out there and turn the key over to make them go from storage to run. The 500 are ready to go. We fuel them up. We take them to the shop, fill them up with oil, fuel them up, and they're gone while we get another 1,000 that are parked somewhere in our system.
That's what I thought. I thought you had the 1,000 parked.
Yeah.
Yeah. Let's talk about employees. You threw out employees. You've got about 30,000 employees. I think you mentioned it might be down YoY . I don't know if that changes with your thoughts now on volume growth. In answering this, let me make it an even longer question because that's what I do. This round of union negotiations has to be one of the strangest I think we've seen in a while just because the industry broke up, right? In terms of you had CSX jump out, go early. They just signed with the engineers on Friday. You decided to be able to, and then Norfolk and Burlington jumped on board.
You said, "I want to try and get some work rule changes before I just sign upfront." Maybe just talk to us about what is going on in terms of the progress from your point of view with the unions while you answer the employee question.
Yeah. Listen, talk about the unions. I'm not sure why anybody would give somebody else the responsibility to negotiate union contracts for our employees and work that as a group. I can never figure that out. Because what you need to do is, first of all, have a relationship with your employees. You have to have a relationship with the union leaders. Every railroad's collective agreement is a little bit different in what their requirements are. We understand that a pattern is being set by some of the other railroads. That pattern is sort of a line that says what a deal, how you can find a deal. There are things on Union Pacific that we see that we would like to tweak, and they're not huge, that would allow us to become more efficient and provide better service for our customers, especially on the service piece.
I've never been able to figure it out. I grew up working for Canadian National Railway for 40 years, and we always negotiated our own contract. We never said, "Okay, why don't we get together?" Because when you're together, you give up some of your rights about what is right and wrong. I wish some of the pattern deals would have waited a little bit because inflation's come down, prices have stabilized, but it is what it is. You need to work on it. We've already signed up one of the unions, and it's been ratified. That's a great step. Now, do we have a lot of negotiations? Yes. We have meetings weekly with, I think, 17 different units with subunits in it.
Just for the conductors and locomotive engineers, they're broken up into four or five or six different general chairmen that we have to negotiate with to get it. It is complicated. It is what it is. We're being very reasonable. We want a reasonable deal. We actually pay our employees more than any other railroad in North America on average. There might be a little tweak here and there that somebody gets a little bit more on one of the other railroads. Overall, we do not mind compensating our employees.
We want them to be productive, but we also need the rules that allow us so that we do not get on a Saturday night where we cannot go service a customer that pays us $150 million a year to go service them because we cannot call a person that lives in the same community, but their contract rights tell them that they can only operate one way versus the other. How silly is that? Those are the tweaks that we want to fix. The way we—and you got me going on this one here, Kenny—the way we got to this place is, as Union Pacific, I am not going to talk about the industry, we decided it was easier for us to negotiate as a group instead of negotiating ourselves. I do not know about all of you.
If I'm going to buy a house and get in a mortgage, I might like all of you in the room, but I'm not going together with you, okay? Because I think my—I'm over 800, so I think I should get a better number than the rest of you in this fricking room, okay? So I'm not going to negotiate as a group. I negotiate for myself. Same thing on the railroad. Do you agree with me?
800.
Does that make sense?
I like it. 800+ .
You want me to answer the headcount question?
Yeah.
I didn't think you wanted to tell him the 2,000 that were down since I joined, but go ahead.
I was going to give you some prompts there. Since Jim joined, our headcount is down 7%, about 2,000 employees. We are very much committed to being more than volume variable. You saw the workforce productivity number on the slide. We think there is more opportunity there. Work safer, work more productive, and we feel very comfortable with where we are at.
The FRA seems to be issuing some waivers right now. They've had a lot of things on their docket for a long time, and now it seems like you can make some headway. What are the exciting things that can be really additive? Obviously, I think you've got some automatic car inspection, track inspection. I mean, there's things that Wabtec showed us on remote control locomotive operations. What are the things that you become excited about reality near term, not five years out, but something you can start testing now and using?
I think the FRA today is looking at things in a very logical manner, and they have the same goal as we do, and we have the same goal as them. We want to operate the safest railroad system in the world, and we are, okay? As an industry, we are the safest ground transportation system in North America. Nobody can move products as safe as we do on the ground. At the end of it, I think for the longest time, it was just—it took a long time for the review, the regulators, to give us the authority to actually put technology that has been developed that helps us improve safety. Humans are very good at a lot of things, and you need humans to do things, but there is some of the autonomous track inspection systems that we have or signal inspection systems are way better.
We've invested in them, and we're ready to go. What I'm really happy about is the way the FRA is looking at it and saying, "Listen, we'll give you a waiver. Go out there." If their speed continues this way, Ken, it changes the paradigm and the way we look at the railroad and the capability that we have on the railroad instead of doing it the old way from 40 years ago. I am very happy with the way they're looking at it right now. I give them a lot of credit.
Is there anything you've jumped in and started putting into practice because of that? I don't know if there was—I think you were already testing kind of autonomous track inspection or car inspection. Is there anything else like the remote control or?
Yeah. Listen, we're looking at a number of things, the way locomotives are handled, remote operations, and everything else. The day we receive the authority, I think within 24 hours, we're starting.
Got it.
Okay? We're ready to go, because some of these have been going on for a while.
The testing for a while.
The testing. It is not like we would have to wait forever.
Okay. Jen, you target $4 billion-$4.5 billion in share repurchases. You accelerated the first quarter with $1.7 billion all in, including the ASR accelerated share repurchase. How are you thinking about speeding up the buyback given where the stock is, given the volatility in the market?
Yeah. Obviously, we think the stock is pretty attractively priced. In fact, and this was in our 10Q that we issued, we bought about $430 million worth of shares in the month of April. Continuing to invest, continuing to return cash. As you said, our target for the year is $4 billion-$4.5 billion. We're well on pace for that and feel very comfortable with that, generating strong cash and look to deploy that.
Thoughts on leverage at 2.8? Is that where you're comfortable? Debt to EBITDA?
Yeah. I mean, I'm less concerned about hitting a specific number at the end of every quarter, at the end of every year. It's really about maintaining a strong investment-grade credit rating overall, which we have. We're in good dialogue with our rating agencies. We want to have good access to the capital markets, and we're very comfortable with where we're at.
Okay. Let's see. Long term, how should we think about rail volumes, right? We started off the conversation talking about getting to 170,000 a week. Seems to be, I don't know, maybe the last couple of quarters, the rails have finally gotten the mojo back, right? It started growing again. I think we're at six quarters now of rail growth. Certainly, a lot of lost share coming out of the COVID opportunity there. When you think about where the industry has been over, call it a decade or so, and I get that coal declined and we lost all that coal, what do you think about the rail industry ability to regain some share?
Okay. Let's see. I got 53 seconds. Let's see if we can do this justice. First of all, it's a network business that we have, the railroads. We hand off a lot of business to each other. We need to make sure that we're all operating at a real high level. I think we, as an industry, we are better today than we have been in a long time. That helps so that you can originate business. Second is, at Union Pacific, we're able to provide our customers with a high enough service level that they are looking at investing. When we talk about 200 different options open that customers are looking at what we're doing, those are people that want to come on the railroad.
We continue to do that for the future, and we continue to win with the business that we handle today. I think we grow. If coal drops 35%-40%, it's pretty hard to make up that whole number, but I love the trend line, and I love where we are as an industry.
We still have another 15 seconds.
Okay.
Jen, I just want to revisit one thing. You kind of mentioned—I forgot to kind of hit on this. You mentioned pricing was the strongest in 10 years in the first quarter. We heard a lot for years about pricing dollars. Now it looks like you're talking about pricing percentage gains above cost. Set me up the stage. No.
No, we're talking price dollars above inflation.
Price dollars above inflation.
No. Absolutely.
Not percentage gain of pricing above percentage. Okay.
No. Price dollars.
I'll open it up then. Just tell me about what is the pricing market, how are you viewing core pricing? We used to get from the rails for maybe a decade the level of core pricing each quarter. Your thoughts—since we do not get that anymore, and there is fuel, there is mix, everything—talk to us about what is the environment underlying all that?
Yeah. The environment that's underpinning everything is the service product that we're providing to our customers and the value that they're seeing from us. With that, Ken and his team are out there able to have discussions with our customers about that value instead of talking about a service issue. That frees up the conversation considerably, as well as the capital investments that we're making. That's where we feel very confident. Our pricing is going to be accretive to our operating ratio. We're very confident about that. You saw us start that in the fourth quarter of last year, did it again here in the first quarter. We had some catch-up because of the way inflation really picked up in, call it 2022 and 2023, a time when we weren't providing as good of a service product.
We're now very much in a posture where we're absolutely confident that we're going to be able to get those price dollars above inflation dollars and above enough that it helps our margins and it becomes a tailwind.
All right. So we ran through a lot of issues this morning. I know we are out of time. Jim, if I were to try to sum up and then look for you to add on what I'm missing. One, bulk is up 12%. Great coal and intermodal volumes can decelerate with the air pocket, but still looking very strong on the volume side. Second, out of park on the service levels, as you quoted. Third, growing volume because of improved service. Fourth, it sets you up for that long-term growth that Jen mentioned. Fifth, the operating ratio, you're going to outpace normal, but maybe some variability given the post-the-tariff changes. Sixth, employees will not grow in line with volumes. You'll still show some improvement there. Anything else you'd want to highlight that I might have missed in summing up?
No. Listen, you did a great job. Let me add one thing. When we wake up at Union Pacific every day, what we look at is how do we make the place better? How do we drive value for our customers so that it helps us when we go out to discuss price and how they can win in the marketplace? If we provide those two things, which I think it's clear that we're providing today, I think we take advantage of what the economy gives us, and we also go out and find things that add to what the economy gives us to be able to use this great network we have to be able to drive more volume and more revenue for this railroad and more to the bottom line.
We understand who owns us, and we understand there has to be a return for that investment. We look at things on a quarterly basis because we have to, but we also view things on what's going to happen next year and how we move ahead. I am very excited, glad to be back at Union Pacific. Great team. Ken, thanks for hosting us this morning.
Thanks for joining us. Appreciate your time. Thank you.