Saia, Inc. (NASDAQ:SAIA) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Fritz Holzgrefe: Yes, it’s early to make the call on what the real big opportunity could be. These three to four, I will give you a little bit of color, the three to four that were opening the balance of the year. Two of those were ones that became available to us in the last few months. So this is a pretty fluid environment that we’re in where the assets become available. We feel really good about our ability to identify and purchase facilities, closed them, get them into our system. So it, if more opportunities were to become available, and I think we can move on those pretty quickly, I think we can integrate those opportunities into our network pretty quickly. I would suspect, if there were an influx of real estate that became available in the second half of the year likely wouldn’t get into the system, if you will, this year probably turned into a next year assets.

And the other thing I would point out is that, as we look at our pipeline of opportunities going forward, we have a number of pins on the map, if you will, that we have identified that maybe it’s an opportunity, but if new assets become available, we may switch to something else that gets us into the market sooner or we may have to pause and say, well, we want to access to a piece of property or a location that is kind of going through transition, it may take us longer to get there just simply because of administrative challenges or seller challenges, whatever that might be. But I think that what’s important to take away out of this is that we have the ability to operate pretty quickly around identifying facilities opening them, getting in line to Saia culture and service.

And pretty well. That’s a core competency for us.

Chris Wetherbee: Okay, that’s helpful. Thank you, appreciate it.

Operator: The next question is from Thomas Wadewitz with UBS. Your line is open.

Thomas Wadewitz : Yes. Good morning, wanted to see if you could — Fritz, if you could offer a little bit more perspective on how you think this transition in the disruption takes place? Do you think that it’s some of this flow through brokers? And its kind of we got to get the freight covered quickly, but then what flow through could shift around again? Or do you think it’s like, it’s really important to lock in these shipments, and then they’ll kind of be sticky with you and you can maybe show the service and price up a bit over time? I guess the other piece within that is, if we assume this was less service, sensitive freight, you know, can you get, you know, can you just price it where you want to? Or is that kind of how does that work?

I think the assumption is the yellow freight would have been less service sensitive. So, I guess that’s a couple elements, but just trying to understand how you think about that process of the freight coming in and the quality of freight?

Fritz Holzgrefe: Yes, so I think what we mentioned earlier that there’s still as we’re thinking about revenue for the balance of the quarter, there could be a little bit of flux there is the — that displace freight or disruption kind of plays out, because, listen, we’re our view of this and certainly, there are accounts that we have today that have approved several LTL providers in that mix. So if one of the providers exits, certainly that freight gets distributed around to others. And that’s an opportunity for us to show some — you have some of pickup economies and opportunity. Provide that service to customer and sell it and own that business and keep that business. So, those are certainly possible. There’re also a fair amount of that business that has gone through sort of three PLs and brokerage opportunities, to the extent that those make sense for us, maybe that’s something that that stays with us.

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