C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHRW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHRW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 1, 2023

Operator: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the C.H. Robinson Third Quarter 2023 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the company’s prepared remarks, we will open the line for a live question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, Wednesday, November 1st, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ives, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Chuck Ives: Thank you, Donna, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today is Dave Bozeman, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Mike Zechmeister, our Chief Financial Officer; and Arun Rajan, our Chief Operating Officer. Dave will provide some interdictory comments. Arun will provide an update on our initiatives to improve our customer and carrier experience and operating leverage. Mike will provide a summary of our 2023 third quarter results and our expense guidance for 2023. And then we will open the call up for questions. Our earnings presentation slides are supplemental to our earnings release and can be found in the Investors section of our website at investor.chrobinson.com. Our prepared comments are not intended to follow the slides.

A fleet of rented trucks parked alongside a warehouse, emphasizing the company’s logistics services.

If we do refer to specific information on the slides, we will let you know which slide we’re referencing. And these remarks also contain certain non-GAAP measures and reconciliations of those measures to GAAP measures are included in the presentation. I’d also like to remind you that our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. Slide two in today’s presentation lists factors that could cause our actual results to differ from management’s expectations. And with that, I’ll turn the call over to Dave.

Dave Bozeman: Thank you, Chuck. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. As has been well documented by many industry participants and observers, global freight demand continued to be weak in the third quarter. This combined with ample carrier capacity continued to result in a loose market with low spot rates. Low to truck ratios remain near the low levels of 2019. And route guide depth in our managed service business of 1.15 in Q3, indicates that primary freight providers are accepting most of the contractual freight tender to them, resulting in fewer spot market opportunities. In the freight forwarding market, ocean vessel and air freight capacity continues to exceed demand, resulting in suppress rates for ocean and air freight.

We are staying focused on what we can control by providing superior service to our customers and carriers executing on our plans to streamline our processes by removing waste, and manual touches. And delivering tools that enable our customers and carrier facing employees to allocate their time to relationship building and exception management. Our focus on delivering quality and improvements to our customers, such as enhanced visibility, and increased automation has been reflected in very positive feedback from my meetings with customers, and validated by net promoter scores this year that are the highest one record for the company, which we believe sets us up well with customers for the eventual positive inflection in the freight market. Our customers value the quality, stability and reliability that we provide as they work to optimize their transportation needs.

This has taken on greater importance to shippers who had exposure to transportation providers whose business models were not financially viable. During my many discussions with customers over the past four months, it’s clear that they prefer partners who have financial strength and can invest through cycles in the customer experience. They also want partners who have the expertise to provide innovative solutions enabled by technology and people that they rely on to serve as an extension of their team. C.H. Robinson is that partner with a combination of people, technology and scale to deliver an unmatched customer and carrier experience. And as I mentioned earlier, we’re executing on our plans to streamline our processes by removing waste and manual touches.

The result has been meaningful cost reductions and product productivity gains across our business that are ahead of our stated targets. In our North American Surface Transportation business, our productivity improvements have translated into an 18% year-to-date increase in shipments per person per day. Assuming a typical seasonal volume pullback in Q4. We are on track to meet or exceed our target of 15% year-over-year improvement by Q4 of this year. From a cost reduction perspective. We reduced Q3 operating expenses and NAST by 22% year-over-year versus a volume decline of only 3.5%. In our Global Forwarding business Q3 operating expenses, excluding $23.6 million of restructuring charges declined 12% year-over-year, despite a slight increase in the number of shipments.

And for the full enterprise Q3 operating expenses, excluding $24.5 million of restructuring charges declined 17% year-over-year compared to a 3% decrease in overall volume. As we continue to improve the customer experience and our cost to serve, I’m focused on ensuring that we’ll be ready for the eventual freight market rebound. This means growing volume without adding headcount. We believe our team’s continuing efforts to streamline our processes and remove manual touches gets us there. Even though I’m pleased with the progress that the team has made, I’ve challenged them to increase our clock speed on decision making and improvement efforts. I started by asking our employees companywide to share what was impeding their speed, and where they saw an opportunity to create greater efficiency in their daily processes.

The incredible response rate confirmed the desire of our employees to strengthen the company and to speak up culture that exist. The responses validated some of our focus items, and also highlighted some new opportunities. We’re now driving focus on a handful of concurrent work streams that are addressing the highest leverage areas to eliminate productivity bottlenecks. We’re bringing forward past lessons on team structure, and on mechanisms to drive adoption, in order to deliver an improved customer experience through process optimization are 18% year-to-date, productivity improvement is an indicator of the progress that we’re already making. I’ll turn it over to Arun shortly to share more about this, and how we’re utilizing generative AI.

But these focus workstreams are an example of how the leadership team and I are making changes and driving focus so that we position ourselves for growth in our core business. Ultimately, our focus on continuously improving the customer and care experience. And removing waste from our workflows will result in a company that is quicker, more flexible, and more agile. And solving problems for our customers, providing better customer service, and creating operating leverage and profitable growth. I’m excited about the work that we’re doing to reinvigorate Robinson’s winning culture. And I’m confident that together we will win for our customers, carriers, employees and shareholders. With that, I’ll turn it over to Arun to provide more details on our efforts to strengthen our customer and carry experience and improve our efficiency and operating leverage.

Arun Rajan: Thanks, Dave. And good afternoon, everyone. As Dave mentioned, we’ve identified a handful of concurrent work streams that are addressing significant opportunities to eliminate productivity bottlenecks, and deliver process optimization, and an improved customer experience. We’re leveraging the strength and experience of our single threaded business process owners who are leading cross functional teams across these work streams with dedicated product engineering, data science and AI resources assigned to each work stream along with alignment of shared goals, incentives, and process accountability. A couple of examples of these work streams on the productivity roadmap or quoting an order entry. In both of these areas, we’re reducing manual touches and our response time to customers driving faster speed to market and higher customer engagement.

In addition to our past learnings, we’re leaning more heavily on generative AI to deliver process improvements. In our quoting work stream with utilize Gen AI to fill in the blanks where there’s incomplete and unstructured information and an automated and efficient process, which has reduced the time to provide a quote from approximately five minutes to less than one minute. From the time the request was received via email. In the last week of the quarter, over 10,000 transactional quotes were created using a Gen AI agent. And we have a significant opportunity to scale and grow in this area. As we bring this capability to more customers, respond to more quote requests, and leverage the ability to provide transactional quoting 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

With more data and history to leverage than any other 3PL we have opportunities to harness the power that this advanced technology now offers to further capitalize on our information advantage. And we’ll continue to look for and pursue those opportunities. In addition to improve customer service and engagement, these efforts are increasing our digital execution of critical touch points in the lifecycle of an order from quote to cash, thereby reducing the number of manual tasks per shipment and the time per task. This translates to productivity improvements measured in terms of shipments per person per day, which creates operating leverage. For example, a 15% productivity target translates to an ability to grow volume by 15%. Without adding headcount, to support that volume growth.

And a volume growth is less than 15%. The 15% improvement target would be achieved through a combination of volume growth and headcount reduction. Either of these creates operating leverage. As Dave mentioned earlier, we’ve surpassed our goal of a 15% year-over-year improvement in shipments per person per day by Q4 of this year, with an 18% year-to-date improvement achieved through Q3. As we raise the bar in our clock speed, and deliver further process optimization, and an improved customer experience. We plan to deliver the compounded benefits of additional productivity improvements beyond 2023 with technology that supports our people, and our processes. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Mike for a review of our third quarter results.

Mike Zechmeister: Thanks, Arun. And good afternoon, everyone. The soft freight market outlined by day resulted in third quarter total revenues of $4.3 billion down 28% compared to Q3 last year. Our third quarter adjusted gross profit or AGP, was also down 28% year-over-year or $252 million driven by a 31.4% decline in NAST and a 31.6% decline in Global Forwarding and partially offset by a 4.6% increase in our other business units. On a monthly basis compared to Q3 of last year our total company AGP per business day was down 34% in July, down 26% in August and down 21% in September. The third quarter contained one less business day than both third quarter of last year and second quarter of this year. In our NAST truckload business, our Q3 volume declined approximately 6% year-over-year, and 4.5% on a per business day basis.

On a sequential basis, NAST truckload volume increased 2% versus Q2, and 3.5% per business day. During Q3, we had an approximate mix of 70% contractual volume and 30% transactional volume in our truckload business for the third quarter in a row as the spot market remains suppressed. The sequential declines that we’ve seen in our truckload line haul cost per mile since Q2 of last year continued into Q3 of this year. On a year-over-year basis, we saw a decline of approximately 13.5% in our average truckload line haul cost per mile paid to carriers excluding fuel surcharges. Due to the usual time lag associated with contract pricing, resetting to follow spot market costs, our average truck load line haul rate or price built our customers excluding fuel surcharges declined 16.5% on a year-over-year basis.

With this price decline coming off of a higher base than cost. These changes resulted in a 34% year-over-year decrease in our truckload, AGP per mile, and a 36.5% decrease in our AGP per load. Within Q3, our truckload AGP per load was relatively flat through the quarter. In our LTL business, Q3 orders were down 2% on a year-over-year basis, and 1% sequentially. On a per business day basis, our Q3 LTL orders were down a 0.5% year-over-year and up a 0.5% sequentially. AGP per order declined 13.5% on a year-over-year basis driven primarily by soft market conditions and lower fuel prices. On a sequential basis, the cost and price of purchase transportation in the LTL market increased in Q3, resulting in a 2% increase in AGP per order. This was primarily driven by capacity that has likely temporarily exited the market.

By leveraging our broad access to capacity in all modes of LTL. We were able to meet our customers LTL needs at a high service level. In our Global Forwarding business market conditions continued to be soft behind weak demand and plenty of capacity. In Q3 Global Forwarding generated AGP of approximately $170 million a 32% decline year-over-year. Within these results, our ocean forwarding AGP declined by 35% year-over-year, driven by a 34.5% decline in AGP per shipment and 0.5% decrease in shipments. On a sequential bases or ocean volume grew 2.5%. Compared to pre pandemic levels, we have grown ocean market share through adding new customers diversifying trade lanes and verticals and leveraging investments in technology and talent. Turning to expenses, our productivity initiatives continue to enable us to deliver on and exceed our expense reduction expectations.

Q3 personnel expenses were $343.5 million, including $3 million of restructuring charges, and that was down 21.5% compared to Q3 of last year. Excluding the restructuring charges our Q3 personnel expenses were down 22.2% year-over-year, primarily due to our cost optimization efforts, and lower variable compensation. Our ending headcount was down 14.2% year-over-year in Q3 to 15,391. Q3 ending headcount was also down 2.4 sequentially compared to Q2. As a result of the progress on our cost optimization efforts, we now expect our 2023 personnel expenses to be $1.43 billion to $1.45 billion below the $1.45 billion to $1.55 billion range that we previously provided. As a reminder, our expense guidance excludes restructuring expenses. Moving to SG&A, Q3 expenses were $177.8 million and included $21.4 million of restructuring charges primarily related to asset impairments, driven by our decision to divest our global forwarding operations in Argentina.

Operating in Argentina has become challenging due to its strict monetary policies and rapid currency devaluation. And this divestiture will help mitigate our exposure to the deteriorating economic conditions and increasing political instability in that region. As a part of divesting our operations in Argentina, we are pursuing a path for a local independent agent or agents to ensure continued service to our customers with shipments in that region. Excluding those two, three restructuring charges, SG&A expenses of $156.4 million declined approximately 3.5% year-over-year, primarily due to reductions in contingent worker expenses and legal settlements. We expect our 2023 SG&A expenses to be near the midpoint of our previous guidance of $575 million to $625 million, including depreciation and amortization expense that is expected to be toward the high end of our previous guidance of $90 million to $100 million.

As you recall from our Q1 earnings call, we raised our cost savings commitment to $300 million of net annualized cost savings by Q4 of this year compared to the annualized run rate of Q3 of last year. With the progress to date on our productivity initiatives, we are on track to deliver approximately $360 million in cost savings in 2023. At the midpoint of our updated guidance, with the majority of cost savings expected to be longer term structural changes. Consistent with our strategy, these cost savings improve our operating leverage, and will help our operating margins as demand and a more balanced freight market returns. Q3 interest and other expense totaled $20.7 million, up $4.8 million versus Q3 of last year. Q3 included $21.8 million of interest expense up $1 million versus Q3 of last year due to higher variable interest rates against a reduced debt load.

The reduced debt load drove a $1.4 million decrease in Q3 interest expense on a sequential basis. Our Q3 tax rate came in at 11.7% compared to 16.9% in Q3 of 2022. The lower tax rate was primarily driven by lower pre-tax income and incremental tax benefits from foreign tax credits. We now expect our 2023 full year effective tax rate to be in the range of 14% to 15% down from our previous guidance of 16% to 18%. Adjusted or non-GAAP earnings per share excluding $24.5 million of restructuring charges and $5.5 million of associated tax provision benefit was $0.84 down 53% compared to Q3 last year. Turning to cashflow, Q3 cash flow generated from operations was $205 million, which demonstrates our ability to generate cash and make meaningful investments despite the continued soft freight market.

Our Q3 cash flow compares to $626 million in Q3 of last year. The year-over-year decline in cash flow was primarily driven by changes in our net operating working capital. In Q3 of last year, we had a $359 million sequential decrease in net operating working capital, driven by the sharply declining cost and price of purchase transportation. With the more moderated sequential declines in cost and pricing, Q3 of this year, we had a $55 million sequential decrease in net operating working capital. In Q3, our capital expenditures were $16.7 million, compared to $31.3 million in Q3 of last year, where we now expect our 2023 capital expenditures to be toward the lower end of our previous guidance of $90 million to $100 million. We returned $76 million of cash to shareholders in Q3 through $73 million of cash dividends and $3 million of share repurchases.

The cash returned to shareholders equates to 92% of Q3 net income, but was down 88% versus Q3 last year, driven by the $153 million of cash used to reduce debt. Now onto the balance sheet highlights. We ended Q3 with approximately $1 billion of liquidity comprised of $837 million of committed funding under our credit facilities, and a cash balance of $175 million. Our debt balance at the end of Q3 was $1.58 billion, which includes debt pay down of $615 million versus Q3 last year. Our net debt to EBITDA leverage at the end of Q3 was 2.1 times up from 1.81 times at the end of Q2. Our capital allocation strategy is grounded in maintaining investment grade credit rating which allows us to optimize our weighted average cost of capital. Our $615 million in debt pay down helped maintain our strong liquidity position and investment grade credit rating.

Keep in mind that the cash that we used to reduce debt generally reduces the amount of cash for sharing purchases. Over the long term, we remain committed to growing our quarterly cash dividend in alignment with our long-term EBITDA growth. Our dividends and share repurchase program are important levers to enhance shareholder value. Overall, I’m encouraged by the progress that we continue to make on our productivity initiatives and look forward to our ability to build on that progress. By leveraging generative AI combined with machine learning to take the capability of our people to an even higher level, we are positioned well to further reduce waste, and increase operating leverage and value for Robinson shareholders. With that, I’ll turn the call back over to Dave for his final comments.

Dave Bozeman: Thanks, Mike. Over my first four months here, it’s become apparent the C.H. Robinson has a secret sauce with people who have deep expertise in the freight market and long standing relationships with their customers and carriers. Combined with Robinson’s strong technology and large data set our people are able to provide innovative tech-enabled solutions powered by our information advantage for the benefit of our customers and carriers. This secret sauce is not easy to replicate with a digital-only solution. Robinson has shown the strength of its model through cycles. And our balance sheet continues to be strong. The investments we’re making to improve the experience and outcomes for our customers and carriers.

Combined with the work that we’re doing to accelerate our clock speed, waste reduction and productivity improvements should position us well for the eventual freight market rebound and to deliver improved operating leverage and returns for our shareholders. I continue to see an opportunity for the company to reach its full potential and create more shareholder value by improving our value proposition, increasing our market share, accelerating growth, improving our efficiency and operating margins and increasing overall profitability. I’m incredibly excited about our future. This concludes our prepared remarks. I’ll turn it back to Donna now for the Q&A portion of the call.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Today’s first question is coming from Chris Wetherbee of Citi Group. Please go ahead.

Chris Wetherbee: Hey, thanks. Good afternoon, guys. Like to start maybe it’s helpful to get the monthly breakout of AGP. Can you give us a sense of maybe how October is trending kind of keeping in mind that there have been some changes in the dynamics within brokerage? Obviously, there’s been some headlines about some high profile exits from the markets, kind of curious about how October is trending. And if we are seeing some volume move back to Robinson. Dave, I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks that the customers are valuing some of the stability and strength that you guys provide. Just want to get a sense of maybe how that’s playing out in October?

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Q&A Session

Dave Bozeman: Yeah. Hey, Chris, how you doing? Arun might break in and just kind of give you some details of what we’re seeing you said that question of well, and let’s just jump in.

Arun Rajan : Yeah, overall we’re seeing a soft freight market, we referenced that, I think you’ve been hearing that from others seems to be lingering. We’re not seeing any meaningful inflections yet in volume or rates. But I would also add that, the way we approach this is regardless of where we are in the cycle, our pursuit is to outperform the market. And we remain focused on providing exceptional service to our customers and streamlining our processes, amplifying the expertise of our people with our tech, improving our operating leverage gaining market share. We feel like in Q3, we made progress on all those fronts, you kind of asked about going into October where we’re at, I think looking forward, there’s going to be some consumer spending that normally happens during the holiday season.

And that’ll impact the market a little bit. Generally speaking, we see a seasonal bump in spot rates in Q4, mostly driven by the upcoming holidays, and some carriers taking time off over the extended holidays. But nothing there that would suggest there’s something sustaining or something different. I think, generally speaking, the trends that we’re seeing have been pretty consistent.

Chris Wetherbee: Got it. Thanks for the time.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Jack Atkins of Stephens Inc. Please go ahead.

Jack Atkins: Okay, great. Good afternoon. And thank you for taking my question. So, I guess I would love to get your thought, kind of broadly, as we kind of begin the bid season process here over the next 30 days to 45 days and kind of think about the spring bid season of next year. How are you guys approaching that? Obviously, it’s an extremely challenging market out there. I think most folks are expecting digital capacity to come out and perhaps a turn in their pre-market at some point in 2024. How are you balancing, the potential for going out and capturing market share versus the need to preserve the profitability of the business? If we were to see, the pre market turn next year? How are you guys thinking about that, as we head into the, to the bid season process here?

Dave Bozeman: Yeah, Jack, let me touch on some things there. So, first of all, just maybe I’ll cover the capacity side, the carrier capacity is contracting, but I think less so than we would have expected at this point in the process. And when the markets been bouncing along the bottom, like it has, the pricings really operate, we’re really pricing at or near the break-even cost for the carriers. So, the exits been a little slower. You know, that may be a result of their ability to subsidize their business because of the big profits that they made a year ago or government subsidies or maybe the lower operating costs or whatnot. But in terms of the bid season coming up and how we’re approaching it, let’s be clear, our pursuit is to gain in both margin and share.

And so that’s what we’re going after. It’s a competitive market. And, we’re seeing that, for sure. And it was only five quarters ago that we’re seeing all-time record high prices and AGP per shipment. And now we’re on the other side of that, and the cycle on the spot market volumes very hard to come by. And it appears that brokers generally are being more aggressive that they’ve been in the past. And I think with this kind of environment, I would expect to see more brokers struggling and going out of business, given where we’re at. But as we approach the season, we’ve got to operate within the market that we’ve got, our job is outperforming the market. And like I said, we’ve got to protect our margins, and make sure that we’ve got a good balance between the two.

Jack Atkins: Okay, thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Jeff Kauffman of Vertical Research Partners. Please go ahead.

Jeff Kauffman: Thank you very much. And, David, appreciate your overview on the direction of progress. I’m just kind of curious with some of the other brokers out there starting to shut down operations. If we saw a turn, whether it’s after the holiday season, lunar new year, early ‘24, with your employee count down, what do you think your excess capacity is to be able to handle incremental volume without having to add bodies at this point?

Dave Bozeman: Yeah, good question. It’s something that we’ve talked about often, first of all, I’ll start and say I feel really strong about our capacity. And it’s something that we execute on each day. As a matter of fact, we’re building ourselves up, as you know, for the eventual rebound of the market. And that eventual rebound, we need to have the capacity while keeping our headcount in check. For me, it’s about our installed capacity base, and we’ve been talking about installed capacity, we feel like we have sufficient capacity for what would be a normal recovery. And certainly, we talk about different execution styles on the types of recoveries that will happen, very aggressive for or mild recoveries. But the bottom line is, I feel good about our install capacity, where we are, I think we’re well positioned for the eventual turnaround that puts us in pole position here. So, good question. Glad you asked it and we feel good about where we’re at.

Jeff Kauffman: Great. Thank you. That’s my one.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Scott Group of Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Scott Group: Hey, thanks, afternoon. So, your slide with truckload profit per shipment is basically at an all-time low. Are we confident that we’re at the trough? Or is it just too early to tell? And then just separately, I just want understand what’s going on with personnel cost, there was a big step down from Q2 to Q3, but based on the guidance, it looks like personnel then takes a step up from Q3 to Q4. Is that right? And just help us understand what the right run rate for personnel is heading into ‘24? Thank you.

Dave Bozeman: Yeah, Scott, let me chime in on those. So, first of all, we kind of talked about the marketplace and where we’re at, you’re right, I think it’s slide eight in the deck that points to where we are in the cycle. And at this point, we’ve been bouncing along the bottom for quite some time. And so we’ve — what’s unusual, I think about this point in the cycles, we’ve had an opportunity to reprice our contracts pretty much across the board. So, we’ve kind of reset them now. And its question about when the rebound comes. And when it comes, a couple of things happen, as you know. So, when the when the demand comes back, or the capacity exit, the markets are a combination of two, we would expect prices and costs to start to move up.

And the impact that that has on our business is obviously different in the contract market versus the spot market. So let me take contract first, on the contract side. You know, because we’re locked in on contracts for different terms, as the prices go up, we’ll feel the normal pressure on those margins associated with those. But the good news is on the spot market, as demand comes back, we’ll get both better AGP per shipment and more demand. At the same time, so there’s offsetting impacts there. And that’s not unique to Robinson that’s kind of the way it works in this market. Your second, so I’ll leave that one there. Well, maybe I should add one more point, which is, just to talk about where we are right now, given how soft the spot market has been, our mix of volume and truckload is 70%, contract and 30% spot.

And that’s unusually tilted towards contract for where we are in the cycle. But again, as those things turn, you’ll see us go back to closer to where we were in 2021, where three quarters of that year, we were at 55%, contract and 45% spot. So, that’s just to show that, when that price turns, and when the costs turn, there’s an impact on contract, that’s squeezed, and there’s an impact on spot that’s beneficial, and I can help you dimensionalize how that how that can go. Over to personnel costs, I think you’re right, I think what you’re doing is you’re looking at the guidance that we provided. And just as a recap, we were at $1.45 billion to $1.5 5 billion in personnel expense, we took that down to $1.432 billion to 1.4 5 billion, which is a reduction of $60 million at the midpoint.