Schneider National, Inc. (NYSE:SNDR) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jason Seidl : Wanted to focus a little bit on the Intermodal side. You said a lot of good things about some of those new transit times coming across border. Wanted to sort of dive into that and see how much you think that could become a percent of your total business, those cross-border moves, and how we should think about the yields on those going forward?

James Filter : Yes. So I’m very happy with the performance of that business. I mentioned the transit time actually going from Monterey to Chicago, we’re running — the stated transit is four days. They’re actually running about a half day faster. So it puts us right on [par] with our truck business. And that business just began in May, and we’ve seen 5% growth out of that segment of our Intermodal business. So we’re thrilled with where we’re at. I think there’s opportunities as we go through a full bid cycle to continue to grow that and expand. And also, longer term, expect more near shoring, and we see opportunities to grow there as well. And overall, that business performs very well, the North-South Mexico business.

Jason Seidl : And the other part of my question in terms of how we should think about the yields and impacting the Intermodal yield going forward as that grows?

James Filter : It’s a long length of [pulse]. So it’s on the higher end of our average.

Jason Seidl : Okay. Fair enough. I appreciate that color. The other thing, just trying to get a little clarity on the guidance here. You said M&M is going to just be moderately accretive. Should we think about like sort of that $0.05 range, so I can get a sense of what you’re bringing down on the core business?

Steve Bruffett : Yes. This is Steve. I’ll take that one. We did incorporate that into our full year guidance. And as we mentioned, of course, M&M Transport’s a programmatic-type acquisition. So if you take five months of that versus 12 months of our legacy business, it’s obviously not a huge needle mover. Said another way, I think our guidance range would have been the exact same range even without the M&M Transport acquisition occurring. M&M just helps us move a bit upward within that same range.

Operator: Next question comes from Jordan Alliger with Goldman Sachs.

Jordan Alliger : Just sort of curious, with all the stuff going on in less than truckload with Yellow, is there any anticipation of knock-on benefit over to the Truckload sector? And could that happen? And would you see it?

Mark Rourke : We don’t anticipate a great deal of benefit that comes to the Truckload side of the segment. I think there’s — I guess, our assessment, there’s plenty of capability within the LTL providers there. And so we don’t — and haven’t felt it or don’t expect that to be a catalyst on our side of the house.

James Filter : But we do believe that’s indicative of the type of pressure that’s on carriers that are less well capitalized and some of what we’re seeing in terms of the carrier exits in the market — in the truckload marketplace.

Operator: Our next question comes from Scott Group with Wolfe Research.

Scott Group : So when I look at the one way — when I look at one way revenue per truck, basically flat sequentially. And Truckload margins actually improved a bit from Q1 to Q2, which I think that’s going to be a lot better than most. Any color on the price versus utilization pieces in Q2? And then I guess I’m wondering how much of the bids would you say are implemented at this point? Any color on how to think about rev for truck and margin from Q2 heading into Q3?

Mark Rourke : I don’t know if I can exactly answer maybe what you asked there, Scott. But I would tell you that we are through the allocation season. And certainly, the third quarter will feel the full brunt of all the implementations and to finish up what occurred in the second quarter. So as we look at overall revenue per truck and our ability to hang in there, there’s a couple of influences. Clearly, contract pricing has come down. And the — we would consider in the upper single-digit range. We’re also in that part of the network utilizing higher than our typical spot rate or spot volume to include some optimization on some of our Power Only volume. And so those are the implications of getting it a little higher reduction on the revenue per truck.