J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. (NASDAQ:JBHT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 8 of 11

Brad Delco: Hey, Todd. It’s Brad Delco. You hit the fortunate pleasure of me responding to that question. One, we don’t provide guidance, but I think maybe one general statement I would say and we’ve talked about this before, we haven’t really seen seasonality over the better part of the last two or three years just based on elevated demand levels that we’ve seen. Clearly seasonality is come back in to play. You saw that in the fourth quarter. In fact, I think Brad Hicks’ comments and Darren’s comments suggested that we actually saw atypical seasonality where fourth quarter was overall from a demand perspective weaker than Q3. I’d also just say, I think you heard there probably isn’t a lot of expectations from the demand environment changing much at least in terms of what visibility we have here in first quarter.

What happens after that, we really €“ we don’t have any crystal ball than anybody else. So, I think giving you any more detail on guidance and how the year plays out would probably not be in our best interest.

Operator: We now turn to Ari Rosa from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.

Ari Rosa: Great. Good morning. I wanted to ask, John Kuhlow mentioned that you guys might be willing to take up leverage for the right opportunities. I just wanted to press a little bit more on that comment and understand if that was a reference to M&A or if it was a reference to something else and if it was a reference to M&A, what are the types of opportunities that you would be thinking about that would justify that, sort of taking up of leverage?

John Kuhlow: Yes, there wasn’t anything in specifically that I was referring to. It was just more commenting on the strength of our balance sheet, our liquidity position, and the ability to take advantage of opportunities that exist. We still continue to look at buyback or excuse me, at M&A as it becomes available we’ll continue to do so. But buybacks and dividends are also a core piece of our capital allocation process and we’ll evaluate that as well.

Operator: Our next question comes from Bascome Majors from Susquehanna. Your line is open.

Bascome Majors: As you went through the competitive bids with Schneider leaving your rail partner and moving over to the , can you tell us what you learned about your customers desire to perhaps stay with the BN versus create some competitive or maintain some competitive tension in their intermodal suppliers and how that’s inflecting your strategy long-term to grow the business? Thanks.

Darren Field: So, I don’t know that we have enough details yet to really have a strong position on that. We universally hear from our customers that they want to maintain a significant share on BNSF. They have confidence in our ability to talk them through the service improvements and our ability to provide the capacity that Schneider has taken with them. So, I think there’s no doubt out of our customer base that we have the capacity to backfill anything Schneider was operating on BMSF. It’s also not the top of mind topic when we’re talking to our customers, the first subject is not, hey, can you take on Schneider’s business? Our process is to go into a customer and talk about their network and look for solutions with intermodal where it’s the right solution regardless of who the competitor might be handling that business.

So, we’re just out trying to solve for our customers and we think they have real confidence in us. I think that the Schneider exit means a ton in the way we talk to BNSF, how we collaborate together, how we’re talking about operations in the terminals, how we’re going to market together. So, the Schneider exit from BNSF to me is significantly valuable in the way we’re communicating with BNSF. And I’d like to believe our customers will get a benefit out of that.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jason Seidl from Cowen. Your line is open.

Jason Seidl: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. One quick one from me. You talked a little bit about expectations for growing intermodal this year. I guess how do you think about contract rates on the truckload side and where they might put some pressure on that. They’ve held up largely, but we’re starting here from some private carriers that expectations are anywhere between let’s call it 3% and 8% down?

Page 8 of 11