XPO Logistics, Inc. (NYSE:XPO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Kyle Wismans: Hey, Jason. It’s Kyle. So when you think about cost per shipment, let me start a little bit with Q3 and then some of the costs we saw that were slightly higher in the quarter. So from a cost per shipment standpoint, overall, we’re down about 2%. There’s progress made in a lot of areas. Mario talked about the insurance and claims. That was down almost 35% in the quarter. We also saw a drop in fuel. There’s a couple of areas where we saw kind of higher transitory costs in the third quarter. That’s going to include some of the purchased transportation expense. So we were about $10 million sequentially, and that’s reflecting the effort needed really to make sure we can service the additional shipments in the network. We’d expect as we continue to ramp up the line haul and sourcing for that to come down both in Q4 and into ’24.

Jason Seidl: So overall, you would expect cost per shipment to trend down into ’24. Just wanted to clarify that?

Kyle Wismans: No, I think we’re expecting more cost productivity into Q4 and into ’24.

Jason Seidl: Okay. Fair enough. And then as a follow-up, I know we haven’t really brought it up because it hasn’t been a focus, but maybe a little bit of an update on Europe. And then as we roll into the New Year, do you think the M&A market might be favorable enough to bring that back up again?

Mario Harik: Jason, our long-term plan remains to be a pure-play North American LTL carrier. But in the meantime, our European business continues to perform really well. When you look at the European economy, it’s been softer here over the last couple of quarters, but the team was able to deliver great results, growing EBITDA on a year-on-year basis. I’m just fighting on all cylinders. We’re onboarding more customers, we are getting more cost efficient in our European business and the team is performing well. But long-term, our goal continues to be a pure-play North American LTL company.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is from the line of Brian Ossenbeck with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your questions.

Brian Ossenbeck: Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Just wanted to see if you could comment, Mario, on capacity available in the network and what’s actually the limitation of the bottleneck now. I know last quarter, you talked about needing to add some more. You talked about the doors you’re adding, the new service center you broke ground on. Where does that stand? And how do you see the limitations at this point you’re running up into any conditions that need a little bit more capital expenditure, especially when you’re boosting that up here in the fourth quarter looks like a pretty big increase to get to that midyear target — midpoint of the target rather you just raised?

Mario Harik: In the third quarter, we had high-teens excess capacity in our network from a physical perspective, so in terms of how many doors we have. But as you know, this is not evenly distributed across our network. In some markets, we are bumping against capacity limits, but in many, many markets, we have available capacity from a doors perspective. And our service center expansion plan thus contemplate those markets where we see that higher demand from customers, where we’re going to expand physical capacity. But we were run rating in the high teens. Our goal is to be in the 20% to 25% range is where we would like to be on a longer-term basis. Now in terms of rolling stock capacity, we have had tremendous progress since the beginning of LTL 2.0. We’ve added more than 10,000 new traders over the last 1.5 years, 2 years.

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