Wabash National Corporation (NYSE:WNC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And that will – when those two come together, that’s when you’ll see the investment pick up in our trailers as a service offering.

Brent Yeagy: Yes. I want to double down on that. Felix, the actual – I’ll call inquiry for participation in a trailer as a service offering from potential customers far exceeds what we’ve demonstrated so far. Again, we take a – excuse me, a programmatic approach to how we’re doing this. And as Mike alluded to, once we reach a certain inflection point where the business model, the methods that which the services provided, and then internal digital capabilities meet, which could be as early as call it mid-2024, we’ll be in a completely different position to talk about how we would scale that through additional deployment of capital to make that more material and late 2024, 2025 and beyond. We’ll just – we just need to wait until we get that sewn up and then we’ll be able to kind of blow it up accordingly.

Felix Boeschen: Okay. Got it. And then just my last one, but you mentioned doubling cold chain revenue over the next, I’m going to call it two years. What’s the base of cold chain revenue today that we should be thinking about?

Mike Pettit: Today as we sit here, it’s somewhere between $100 million and $200 million of revenue kind of a runway basis, Felix.

Felix Boeschen: Okay. Awesome. Really appreciate it. Thanks, guys.

Brent Yeagy: Thanks, Felix.

Operator: Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Mike Shlisky of D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Mike Shlisky: Yes. Hi, thanks for taking my follow-up question. Actually I have two. First, there was – been some headlines the last few weeks about a large fleet of trucks that may be facing bankruptcy. They seem to have gotten over some humps here that may or may not make it all the way through. And another company in the parcel group has kind of also achieved some labor piece recently after quite a bit of questions there as well. I’d be curious if a large, I guess on the one hand, if a large fleet were to go out of business or be liquidated in any way, how would that affect Wabash’s business? And secondly, that large parcel customer or that large parcel fleet that just recently got piece in it with their labor force. Do you know of any changes to their contract that may impact either your truck body business or your trailer business?

Brent Yeagy: Great question. Let me start out by saying obviously, we wish no ill will on any carrier out there. However, the reality of our customer base does not expose us at in any way shape or form to that carrier population. It is natural during the spot rate and cost inflationary market that carriers are facing right now that we will go through a – we’ll call it a purging of the far end of the carrier spectrum. Those carriers at many cases really confound spot rates to begin with. The customers that we have look at this as a very advantageous scenario. And they would tell you that they applaud and are – we’ll say pleased with the culling of the herd, which allows them to grow market share more profitably and to think about what a more stable back half of or more profitable 2024 and 2025 will look like.

That’s why they’re positioning their asset purchases accordingly, its why they’re positive. In the context of a large carrier that may or may not go bankrupt, that would only from a Wabash perspective be a tailwind into how we think about as early as Q4 of 2023 all the way through 2024 as carriers continue to reposition to take advantage of the hole in the market that will be created.