United Parcel Service, Inc. (NYSE:UPS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 5 of 5

Within that $3 billion, Coyote made up 38% of the decline for the year and 48% of the decline for the fourth quarter. So you can see the volatility in the revenue line, and then we’ve got a business that has a very low margin. So if you’ve got that kind of volatility on the revenue line, you’re going to have even more volatility on the earnings line. So we’re like, gosh, is there are another way to skin this cat. Can we think about an alternative that continues to allow us to provide the service but without all the overhead? Or perhaps this business is worth more to someone else than it is to us. We don’t know. We don’t know the outcome of our alternative work. But as soon as we do, we’ll share that with you. And on the freighter question.

Brian Newman: So the two planes were picked up through Qatar and really it’s part of a broader airline strategy to retire some of the MD11s in terms of efficiency and sustainability.

Helane Becker: Got it. Thank you.

Carol Tome: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question will come from the line of Scott Group of Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.

Scott Group: Hey, thanks. Good morning. Just wanted to follow up on a couple of things on the guidance. Brian, I know you said 10% US margin exiting the year. Any color on the shape of the year? You also talked a couple of times about just Q1 being hard. Any more specific color on Q1 and then just lastly, I know every year on this call, you typically give an update on the biggest customer exposure, if you can give us an update there? Thank you.

Brian Newman: Happy to, Scott. So from a domestic margin perspective, we’re looking at the back half of the year being in the range of — from an OP profit perspective, we’re looking at 20% to 30% growth, Scott, from a margin will be in the 10-plus range for the fourth quarter. The challenge we have is the first quarter, we actually expect to be down in the neighborhood. We had a low mortar mark in Q3 of last year. So we’re not going to be down to that point, but I don’t think we’ll be much better from a margin perspective in the US in the first quarter of this year. From an Amazon perspective, we finished the year at 11.8%. And that was not due to an increase in the business. We’re still executing our plan with them in terms of a glide-down. It was more to the overall enterprise revenue coming down as a part of the enterprise.

Carol Tome: It just came down faster than Amazon, yeah.

Brian Newman: Exactly.

PJ Guido: Steven, we have time for one more question.

Operator: Our final question will come from the line of Jordan Alliger of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead, sir.

Jordan Alliger: Hi, good morning. So I was sort of thinking about the small package growth that you guys targeted at less than 1% this year. Feels pretty conservative after a couple of years of probably negative industry growth as well. So I’m just sort of curious what’s informing that? Is that your economic outlook, your forecast? And then maybe this is your Analyst Day, you’ll address it, but sort of on a normalized basis, what kind of small package domestic growth, underlying industry growth you think about over a longer-term basis? Thanks.

Carol Tome: Yeah. The longer-term view is very good. It’s 3%. So that’s really good growth actually. And we’re looking forward to getting into that growth mode. We use a number of external factors to inform our perspective on the market growth. We triangulate from a number of different sources and come up with our best view. This is our best view.

Jordan Alliger: Okay, thanks.

Brian Newman: Thanks, Jordan.

Operator: I will now turn the floor back over to our host, Mr. PJ Guido. Please go ahead, sir.

PJ Guido: Thank you, Steven. This concludes our call. Thank you for joining, and have a good day.

Follow United Parcel Service Inc (NYSE:UPS)

Page 5 of 5