J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. (NASDAQ:JBHT) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

I think they have a lot of optimism and they want things to improve. We don’t have the data to help support some of that. So I think it’s more of our experience that’s having us have a slight change. I spoke earlier that we’re less optimistic, but it is a timing issue more than anything.Operator Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from David Zazula with Barclays. Please proceed.David Zazula Hi. Thanks for taking my question. If you could just talk a little bit about dedicated and just what the expected pace is for truck sales this year? Whether you’re expecting customers to lean maybe a little more into dedicated, like, given some of the services it’s going to provide in 2023?John Roberts Thanks for that question. We’ve had — we’ve been talking about and looking at our sales compared to last year and last year was just terrific and our sales have slowed down a touch.

But we’re very optimistic when we look in the pipeline. And we’re starting to see some of our customers really ask some questions on some private fleets that we’re working on to really take out cost and using our engineering resources to really not just put out a procurement bid, but really how can we do things more efficient since their volume was down. So we’re encouraged by that. So I would say we still will hit our targets. We feel comfortable hitting our sales targets that we lay out every year. So we’re optimistic. Our volumes in general are okay, I would say, in Dedicated. So we’re continuing to go to the stores and all the things that we do on a consistent not robust, but we have a lot of interest from a lot of different customers looking for us to help them with some solutions to take out cost.

And we think that plays into our strength very nicely.Operator Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from Elliot Alper with Cowen. Please proceed.Elliot Alper Great. Thank you. Staying on the Dedicated side. You spoke out about the pipeline beginning to soften a bit. I guess, is there anything more you can share on that? Are these customers reducing their freight need by, say, X number of trucks? Are you seeing pockets of weakness in certain product categories?John Roberts I would say we’re clearly seeing some weakness when it comes to building and construction, it’s where we’re seeing some stuff and we kind of look at it by industry kind of on the [indiscernible] side around that. But overall, I would just say, when I say it’s slowing down, we’re seeing decisions.

We’ve got a lot of stuff out there waiting decisions on it. Our customers are a little more skittish on making decisions, trying to figure out what’s happening with their core business. And we’ve seen more decisions in the last couple of weeks pick up from what we’ve seen the previous month. So hopefully that’s a little bit a lot in our area, but we feel very optimistic about it.Operator Thank you for your question. Our next question is from Bruce Chan with Stifel. Please begin.Bruce Chan Good afternoon, everyone. Maybe just a clean up here for John Kuhlow, specifically around the segment realignment. I’m wondering if there are any savings that we should expect in that process just in terms of leveraging people that maybe perform similar functions?

Or is that really just more of a reporting or commercial impact there?John Kuhlow Yes. I think — I don’t want to draw too much attention to this, it was a little bit more of a reporting. And looking at our services, we felt like those as we talked about, we felt like those services — could be better managed and/or more aligned in some of the different segments. And so that’s why we made the move. We do feel like once in those segments, there can be some margin improvement there. But for the most part, it’s more of an accounting and reporting issue to get those more aligned to where the other similar services are.Operator Thank you for your question. Our final question is from David Vernon with Bernstein. Please proceed.David Vernon Thanks.

Good afternoon. Thanks for fitting me in here towards the end. I’m wondering if you can maybe talk about your posture into this bid season. Are you are you kind of approaching it in a more balanced fashion? Are you focusing on maybe a little bit of share take just given that we’re in what sounds like based on your commentary, a temporary downturn in in freight demand? Just trying to think about how you guys are thinking about managing this period of uncertainty, particularly around the Intermodal bids?John Roberts Well, I’ll start with Highway. We’ve been very public in our desire to grow our published volumes in particular in ICS. We have had success in doing that, not enough at this point to offset the overall decline in freight demand. And I will highlight that we did see growth inside of our 360 box offering in the quarter, double digit growth and so very satisfied with the trajectory and the growth of that particular product offering for our customers.

And so, we have largely met our bid goals. However, as mentioned numerous times, not just in intermodal, but in all of our transactional businesses, the bid compliance from our customers is at an all-time low. And so we really yet to see or feel the benefit of those wins at this point in time. And obviously, as mentioned, we don’t have really a good crystal ball as to if — not so much if, but when they will recover it?Darren Field So I’ll hit on intermodal on that question from a posture going into the bid cycle. I mean, we spent the better part of 2021 and 2022 without enough capacity to truly do everything that our customers wanted us to do caused by weakness in velocity, caused by slow unloading, slower rail service. And so, our posture in 2000 — this bid cycle, in the 2023 bid cycle has just been to communicate with our customers that things are normalizing with our velocity and our capacity, we went out and acquired and announced publicly a mission to grow our capacity up to 150,000 containers in three to five years.

And we’re trying to really give our customers confidence that we’re going to be there for them, that we’re aware that costs had increased for them and that we felt like we could get some cost takeout by growing volume in our system. And so our approach has been to grow with our customers, but our approach is always to cover our investment with appropriate returns. And so, that’s a balancing act. If you’re asking, did we just set out to take share? We set out to grow because that’s always our mission. That will be our mission next tomorrow and the next day and from here on forward. So that was our posture as we move into the bid season.Shelley Simpson Thank you, Darren. And I do feel like our mission is to help our customers continue to take cost out of the supply chain.

We’ve outlined how we can do that through all of our segments. But let me say, we’ve talked about thriving in any market. And this is a tough market, but there have been good fundamentals happening inside of our businesses. I think in the first quarter, you saw the resiliency of our dedicated contract services model. As they recorded a record quarter one to other quarter ones in both revenue and operating income and still continued demand from our customers in that segment. We’re proud of the work that’s happened in Intermodal and we have a healthy business model. We did a great job on our quality of revenue and continuing just maintain and stay within our margin targets, while having a lot of demand from our customers for our long-term.360 box has grown in an environment that’s had declining volumes in total signaling that our customers continue to want our services in those areas.

We are very pleased with the progress, but yet want to continue to move forward in our Final Mile segment on improving our financial performance there. And finally, we are seeing some improved fundamentals as the quarter progressed and here coming into Q2 and ICS as they are carefully managing their cost in tech and people relative to what’s happening in this environment. And while we’re cautious on the timing of their recovery in this freight recession, we’re going to focus on striking a balance between short term managing our costs, to more in line with current volumes, while being prepared and ready for long-term growth with our customers that will drive long-term compounding returns for our shareholders. And we will remain committed to our three core fundamentals, our people, our technology, and our capacity.And like I say, Darren talked about our people and our safety culture, and it is the number one focus organizationally, how we drive long-term compounding returns for our shareholders and how we drive more value for our customers is leaning into our people, taking care of our people, and making sure that they can trust us, our customers ultimately trust them.

And as a result, we grow over the long-term. So I want to say thank you to the people that have been performing for us. It has been a difficult environment that they can weather the environment as we went up during the pandemic, we’re seeing the same decline just on the inverse of what happened on the incline. I cannot say enough about what our people are doing to deliver. Sometimes our results don’t always show the hard work and effort that’s happening as a result. But over the long-term, we feel confident that our people will get to see the fruit of their labor.John Roberts Thanks, Shelley. I’ll just close this by saying that, as we look at this turbulence, we are very confident in our structure overall, our asset structure for each business makes sense to us in a way that it hasn’t always for me.

And I think we finished a lot of the work coming into 2023 that needed to be done. So that things like 360 box could have a chance to get that traction. It’s looking for as a very unique and we think very needed service. I’m thankful that we asked a question here about Dedicated, although it did take 50 minutes of the hour call to get to it. Because I think we’re again reminding everyone that that’s a very different business than I think what is it is interpreted as. And in this tough climate where you see radical changes in some of our channel demand, you see a real steady state, a very resilient business that is asset intense, but also has a very different rate and contract structure that we are the industry leader at providing. And I think when we take it up to return on invested capital, we look at the performance of margins in intermodal at this point.