ArcBest Corporation (NASDAQ:ARCB) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jeff Kauffman: Thank you very much. Well, congratulations. And, David, going to miss talking to you, so I guess I’ll have to ask you a question before you go. Judy and Dave, a more strategic question, so we’re at $5.3 billion in revenue, you expressed your confidence in achieving the long-term targets by 2025. I’m just going to assume 2023 may not push that all that much forward. So, when I think about ’23 to ’25, we got to grow revenue 35%-40% to hit the low-end of that range. Organically, I don’t know if it gets it there. So, can you give us an idea of what types of potentially acquisitive growth would make sense the way you’re building the franchise? And then the David part of the question is, with the CapEx bump, there’s not as much free cash this year, but your balance sheet looks very strong. How high would you go leverage-wise for the right strategic opportunity?

Judy McReynolds: Okay, well, we — Jeff, as you’ve seen us do with the approach that we’re using, is we’ll look for opportunities that add scale to our already existing solutions that we’re providing customers. We’re constantly listening to customers to see what they need. We have opportunities to advance our tech platform and what we’re doing on some of these customer pilots. And we also are always involved in the startup space, looking at disruptive sort of technologies that are going to be either something that could help us better execute and perform or better achieve results on the top line, and then also to benefit our customers. So, we have all those things. We’re very active in looking at what comes on to the market, and excited about how that could make its way into the results for 2025.

But I’ll say this; we don’t have to have an acquisition, as we see it, to achieve those — those targets. But again, just like we did with MoLo, if you see a company that’s out there that has an approach that’s advantageous we’re in a position where we can go after that. But we do see robust opportunities to invest organically which gets you to David’s question.

David Cobb: Yes, and it’s, as you —

Judy McReynolds: Yes.

David Cobb: And I’ll just say that, generally speaking, we would like to stay within an investment-grade credit and metrics. And so, that’s going to — we had a strong EBITDA, and we’ve got — for the year. And if you were just to go one-times that EBITDA you could borrow up another $400 million or so just under our additional facilities that we have place. And so, with total liquidity of $566 million at the end of the year, we feel like we’re in a good place, and have a good, solid CapEx plan for the year, and investing into our business there, and with good returns. And so, we’re excited about where we are.

Jeff Kauffman: Well, that’s my one-and-a-half question. So, thank you.

David Humphrey: Thanks a lot, Jeff. Hey, Frank, I think we’ve got time for one more question.

Operator: Our question comes from Bruce Chan with Stifel. Please proceed.

Bruce Chan: Hey, good morning, everyone. Just want to follow up on some of the comments around having some of those broader supply chain conversations with your customers. And maybe understand a little bit more about how pricing works in the cross-selling process. You gave us a good rundown of all the benefits of cross-selling in the slide. So, I guess thinking about all of those, philosophically, is there any inclination to maybe incentivize cross-sold growth or growth in one part of the business versus another? Or is that just an entirely separate RFP and sales process?

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