Operator: And our next question comes from Steven Ramsey from Thompson Research Group.
John Pierce: Hi, everyone. It’s John Pierce for Steven. Thanks for taking my question. As we think about slower kind of rate of growth right now, are you guys seeing any competitors maybe reducing price or maybe you foresee any kind of irrational behavior in any areas on the pricing side just to kind of gain business?
Brad Barber: Broadly, no, we’re not. Look, what we’ve seen is and again, we spoke about on previous calls, broadly we’re seeing discipline without throughout the industry. And I think that’s reflected in most folks’ CapEx guidance for the year. It will be interesting to watch how that continues to unfold for our peer group. But we see discipline, discipline continues and discipline is what we expect. That being said, we have seen somewhat aggressive pricing on mega projects, not completely surprised. There have been some isolated situations, but there are always projects we’re going to walk away from. You just can’t achieve 17% price improvement in two years and land every deal you would like to land. So as we’ve talked about, if we have a headwind that we’re more concerned about regarding pricing.
It’s really related to mega projects, these large projects that consume a large amount of products for an extended period of time. But broadly, we’re seeing discipline and hope we continue to.
John Pierce: And on the lower CapEx side, does this mean that you guys are with the branch growth, are you populating these new branches with less fleet or is it just kind of a reduction in fleet selling off fleet kind of equally amongst everywhere?
Brad Barber: Yes. No, a couple of things going on. We absolutely are not bringing less fleet to new locations. Our opportunity, we stayed at 12 to 15 locations for the year. And I’ll tell you, we’ve got a bias for the upside of that range. We’ve got nice momentum. We’re selecting great markets. And we’ve got a lot of good activity where we’re going to stamp out locations throughout the year that are going to serve us well for decades to come. And we’re not, we’re certainly not bringing less inventory there. So we’re going to bring their existing needs and grow them as we can. We’re going to sell less out of our rental fleet this year than we did last in ’23. So that’s going to require less replacement capital and we’re moderating our same-store growth as we spoke about.
We’re very focused on returning and hopefully showing some level of leverage in our utilization in the back half of the year. I’d have to look again, but I think that delta in Q1 was something north of 300 basis points year-over-year. And as we sit here today, we’re probably around 200 basis points. So we’re closing the gap. We expect to continue to close that gap and we hope to and we plan to exceed and show some leverage and utilization in the back half of the year.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Seeing that there are no further questions at this time, I would like to turn the conference back over to Jeff Chastain for some closing remarks.
Jeff Chastain: Okay, operator. Thank you. If there are no more questions, we’ll go ahead and conclude today’s call. We appreciate everyone taking the time to join us today and for your continued interest in H&E. We look forward to speaking with you again. Thank you and good day everyone.
Operator: And this concludes the conference. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.
