ArcBest Corporation (NASDAQ:ARCB) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Ravi Shankar: Great, and maybe as a follow up, and maybe from Matt, kind of with the new labor deal, can you just quantify how much of an apples-to-apples impact the new labor contract has on? Or if you want to use a mid-cycle award or something? And is the main offset from that coming from their productivity initiatives in the contract? Or do you need to get priced to offset that?

Matt Beasley: Yes, so overall, it’s just looking at it on its own, I would say three to 400 basis point impact on, we talked a little bit about kind of the average, increase over the contract. And if you take it on a compound annual basis over the five years, looking at wages and welfare and pension, it’s about 4%. But on an OR basis, it’s three to 400 basis points we did talk about, we are intensely focused on efficiency and productivity, we do have a lot of initiatives ongoing on that front, we’re redeploying some resources to really further increase that focus. And so — as we sit here today, and think about, the opportunity that we have to offset that, I think, it comes both from just the expectations that we were already seeing, as our core business was starting to strengthen some.

And then as well as some of these, these changes in efficiency and productivity and scaling the network to the point where we can, be in a more optimal place with carded uses, purchase transportation, overtime rates, things like that.

Judy McReynolds : Yeah, and Ravi you mentioned price. I mean, when you look at that step change, just as you go into July, I mean, the expectation — my expectation is that we’ve got to work on the cost side, perhaps a little bit more than we are on the pricing side there initially, because I mean, that’s just a lot to feel like that our customers would absorb. But, we do feel like that the contract rate increase over time is reasonable. And we feel like that, that’s something that should be manageable through our longer-term pricing actions. But we do have a, I think, an obligation and action plan in place to address the cost side. And the good news is, Seth mentioned this earlier, we’re going to have, our people fully engaged.

And we can emphasize the utilization of our people, we’ve added a lot of new people over the last two years that need to become, even more productive. And the contract allows for us, to hold people accountable. And, some of the software enhancements, the operating software enhancements that we’ve made, allow us to better see that. So, all those things are going to have to work together to achieve the — OR ranges that, that we’ve set out there for ourselves. And we’re very focused on doing that.

Ravi Shankar: Understood, thank you.

Judy McReynolds : Thank you, Ravi.

Operator: Our next question is coming from the line of Jeff Kauffman with Vertical Research Partners. Please go ahead.

Jeff Kauffman: Thank you very much. Hello, everyone. Hey, and congratulations, Matt. I want to — you’ve answered this a couple different ways. But I want to go back to growth and market opportunity here if I can, and maybe ask it in a different way. So, you’ve got a certain amount of freight in your network that is really more transactional in nature, that we’re filling in the network plugging holes, so we could always reduce that and replace that with opportunities. But when you think about kind of what the right kind of growth is, I know you throughout this 21,000 per day shipment level but it seems like you could have the opportunity to go above that. As you think about the right kind of growth for the network. Maybe talk about what you would be willing to flex to for the right kind of business, right kind of customers and is that 21,000 limited based on the existing network?

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