J.B. Hunt Transportation Services Aktie

Great. Let's kick off the session here. And very happy to welcome back to Laguna, J.B. Hunt, represented by CFO and EVP, Brad Delco, EVP and President of Intermodal, Darren Field, and Senior Director of Finance and IR, Andrew Hall. Gentlemen, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks, Ravi. Appreciate you having us.

Absolutely. So let's start talking about the cycle because that's obviously where the focus of everybody's attention is. And I'm sort of excited about this session, and I'm glad we can make the timing work because every Laguna conference, the feedback we get is that people sort of look at you guys to get the real temperature of where we are in the cycle. They may agree or disagree, but everybody is like,"What did J.B. Hunt say?" So just to level set your -- in 1Q, you said that you believed you were in the first part of an up cycle. In 2Q, you I think, described it as a clear step change in truckload capacity following Roadcheck. What's the right phrase for where we are right now.

Well, I feel like you set the bar real high for this answer...

No pressure, but it's going to be the main takeaway of the conference, Day 1.

Well, historically, we've not really been very open about more intra-quarter trends. But I think it's fair to assume because the availability of data is widely available that we have continued to see really strong demand for our services over the course of well, the quarter but also most of our businesses. I think final mile might be the exception. We've talked about some of the unique things going on there. And really, it has been a progression. And going back to last year, we talked about "Hey, this feels really just supply-driven." This goes back to, I guess, comments we made in January about fourth quarter. We get forecasts from customers. And what we were seeing was, "Hey, the demand is coming in line with these forecasts." What was surprising us is just the big disconnect between our ability to source capacity relative to kind of in-line demand. And so that gave us sort of this view, "Hey, this is largely supply-driven."

I think when we updated in April, we talked about, "Hey, some of these forecasts have actually ticked a little bit higher." Now I think we wanted to be very clear, and I think I'm going to reiterate it here today. As a matter of fact, I believe Cass, I've never actually followed Cass, but I think directionally, it's probably right. We've seen the first inflection in freight volumes since 2023. Is that right? Yes? And an example would be like if you look at our performance in our business in the second quarter, we saw the first double-digit volume quarter in Intermodal in over a decade. We saw double-digit volume growth in JBT. We saw double-digit volume growth in ICS. And clearly, at least I don't believe the industry volumes are growing at that level, but we have been taking share.

And so what I would say is the cycle continues to sort of evolve and I would say nothing really outside the norm from our perspective. I would say one of the unique things and a point I've made a couple of times over the last, call it, quarter or so is, I think J.B. Hunt has been a little bit unique in this cycle in terms of our performance. A little over a year ago, we talked about removing structural costs, lowering our cost to serve. And when you think about the trajectory of our business really coming out of third quarter, so much of our performance was driven by discipline on how we're managing our people, our efficiency, our productivity and removing structural costs.

When about 90% of our business, so think of -- or 90% of our earnings have generally come from Intermodal and dedicated. Intermodal, I think most of the industry knows that pricing generally lags truckload by, call it, 2 quarters or so. In dedicated, we're on 5-year contracts with ECI, CPI price escalators. And that business has performed remarkably well over the upside or the up part of the cycle and the down part of the cycle. I think we're on, Andrew, help me here, 11 consecutive years of double-digit margins in that business. And so as we progressed through second quarter, I mean, we saw one of the most acute changes in the cost of purchased transportation.

I believe intra-quarter spot rates moved up 30%. And so we had to make adjustments. You saw our JBT business actually lost a little bit of money. ICS broker margins got squeezed. And so here we sit today, and I would tell you all the plays that we would normally call at this part of the cycle, which is we need to dramatically ramp up our driver hiring department. We need to institute driver sign-on bonuses, we need to raise driver pay, we need to prepare for peak season.

We're sort of facing all that right now. And so I do believe there is a little bit of a mismatch based upon the delayed part of pricing that we see in Intermodal relative to the cost we're feeling now that we just -- we kind of want to be transparent with investors and give an update that in light of these costs that are sort of hitting us, we are expecting our Q2 to Q3 earnings to actually drop 5% to 10%, sort of to give you a range. This is not something that we normally do, but I think it's indicative of just this incredibly strong demand we're seeing across our businesses, where Darren can talk to you about Intermodal, dedicated, can talk to you about record pipeline and the startups that we're seeing. And this is, to me, just a really strong indicator of what our customers are feeling in terms of the challenge of sourcing capacity.

So I know we've progressed this to being a little shy at calling an inflection in the cycle. I think there's still things to be concerned about. The risk-free rates now is at north of 5%. Gas prices, I think, jumped another $0.30 this week -- last week. So we should be concerned about the consumer, but I see some of the structural challenges on driver capacity, not letting up at all. If anything, it's probably getting worse.

Got it. That is incredibly helpful. A few things to unpack there. The fact that you said 2Q to 3Q is going to drop by 5%, that sounds like a textbook definition of a good quality problem to have, that it's causing you an issue, but there's clearly going to be positive payback...

Yes. And I'll unpack that a little bit. And I think just to give some more context, and this is going to help us talk to investors and other analysts. When we think about sequentially what we're seeing in our business, and just to put really big numbers in the context: driver-related costs, I would assume -- I would include that to be the cost of recruiting, advertising, onboarding, training, sign-on bonuses, help me if I'm missing one of them, we're going to see about $25 million more in Q3 versus Q2. So when I put that into a bucket, that says J.B. Hunt is preparing for growth.

Yes.

I would say we have seen some of the most radical and abnormal swings in fuel prices that I think we've ever seen. And I think we're at record high diesel prices today. And I think the comparison between Q2 and Q3, I'd call that at least a $10 million headwind sequentially from Q2 to Q3. And then I would wrap higher claims cost. Some of that, I think, is just the natural trend of what we're seeing in the industry. But included in that would be group medical. Group medical, I think, is not a J.B. Hunt issue. It's not a transportation issue. It's our country's issue. We have medical costs that are outpacing just general trends of inflation. So those kind of to me, put into buckets, some of the incremental pressures we're seeing in Q3 versus Q2.

But I mean, Darren, I'll let you speak to the demand that we haven't seen for Intermodal. I mean, think of the value proposition of Intermodal today. Driver costs are going up, fuel prices are high, and it's really tough to find capacity. And Darren, on our last call, said, the value proposition of Intermodal is as strong as it's been in over a decade. And I think he would reiterate that and maybe add 5 or 10 years to that statement. What are you celebrating, 32 years?

It will be 33 next summer, yes.

Darren, I'll follow up on that one. So Brad, are you saying that's just the cost impact without considering any tailwinds on the revenue side from Intermodal share gains? Or is that a net number?

I want to make sure I understand that. I would say sequentially, sure, we would expect volumes to improve. And so there're certainly offsets to those incremental things. But I just wanted to point out maybe some of the bigger cost items we're seeing hit us in Q3 versus Q2. And I would say, I mean, you pointed out, it really is more of a timing issue. And I think you could look at a glass half empty or glass half full. I'm really glad that we have visibility to these costs right now because we're about 15 days away from Intermodal bid season for 2027 starting up and I think it opens the door to a pretty big opportunity. And I think as the public data suggests, we've been talking about seeing the widest gap between the cost of where truckload rates are today, which I'm not convinced that they're staying where they are today versus where Intermodal is, and there's a big opportunity to close that gap.

And I think we have -- I mean, our priorities for this year have been around disciplined growth through operational excellence. And I think we've really been performing and executing really well on priority #1. Number 2 is leveraging the investments we've made in our people, technology and capacity. Throughout the entire freight downturn, we did not do any reductions in force. And so we're really fortunate to manage through the depths of a very prolonged freight cycle, maintaining all of the experience that we have. And I think that's a very unique advantage for us as we think about how we're preparing to support our growth going forward. And then number 3 priority is to repair our margins, and we have certainly been on a really good journey of repairing our margins. I think there's still a lot of work to go. And I think that the pricing opportunity is still very much largely in front of us.

Got it. So Darren, over to you, has your phone ever rung off the hook more than it is right now? Kind of what do you see the kind of next 3 months, 6 months, 12 months demand outlook looking like?

Well, certainly, peak season is -- we're well into or behind us in terms of planning for that. Our customer base has given us a host of forecasts that I would say, I would consider pretty normal. Again, I don't think that there is a retail Southern California peak season demand that is just off the charts. I'm not ready to say it's just breaking us down. I don't know that we're going to set any kind of Southern California volume records during this particular peak season.

I would say, demand for our Intermodal services across the country is very strong, largely driven from highway to rail conversion in our Eastern network. The transcon business, the Southern California retail demand is also good. And it's just -- it's not off the charts. What I think is different is our customers are faced with: you can't find a team today. It's very, very expensive to buy highway capacity. And so any kind of highway capacity that might have been a retail supply for even really long length of haul, what we would consider traditional Intermodal lanes, is just the most expensive it's ever been. And so our customers are trying to be out in front of their own supply chain demands. Can they plan their inventory in a way to just maximize the use of Intermodal, and I feel really good about that.

There continues to be constant opportunity to convert highway to Intermodal capacity. Now Brad talked about challenges from the driver market. And I would say that what has me most energized about the longer-term future is just this -- the need for Intermodal dray drivers has never been higher for us. We're trying to onboard, and we have pulled all those levers that Brad mentioned: that's raising pay. That's sign-on bonuses, it's retention bonuses. It's...

Safety bonuses.

Extra training for maybe drivers with a little bit less experience. I mean, we're doing every -- we're pulling every kind of lever we can, working with our outsourced carriers. And I can't remember a time when our drayage capacity for the industry was more of a challenge. So that's what I would consider a little bit unique at the moment.

Now our particular network coming off of Q2 with double-digit growth, I mean, we've put some pressure on the system with that growth, and that's awesome. It's a great opportunity. And more than anything, seeing these challenges right now as we head into the bid season gives us a better picture of what it's going to take. And I want to reiterate Brad highlighting: look, getting back to our long-term margin target is a top priority for us. Certainly, we entered into last year at this time, really a lot of hard work on our cost to serve initiatives. I don't believe we've given up any of those advantages that we delivered through the cost-to-serve initiatives at all to this point, but these new cost challenges that we're facing are a little bit more ingrained in this part of the cycle, really.

They seem more cyclical than structural -- when I think of what cost...

Think it's more structural.

Yes. We think we're facing this part of the cyclical cost pressures that really are the signals you want to see that just give you an incredible amount of confidence to go out and make sure you're pricing your business to the value you can create for customers.

Got it. Super helpful. A couple of follow-ups there. Let's assume that fast forward a month from now, you're doing your earnings call, let's say, diesel prices are still over $6 a gallon. So it would be 6 weeks of diesel over $6. Is that really good news for you guys? Is that really bad news for you guys?

Well, it's a double-edged sword. I mean, certainly, stability in fuel prices would help. These massive upswings week-over-week is very hard to deal with the timing of it. I do feel like our fuel surcharge programs are effective at covering the cost of fuel, but when you take really step changes and a week delay in your fuel surcharge billing against what you're actually paying at the pump, can be a little bit of a headwind. So stability in it would be helpful. All that being said, high cost of fuel, higher truck rates are very good for Intermodal demand. So that's good thing now. Health of the consumer does have it very tied -- so do I want fuel to be at $6 a gallon? No, not long term. But for today, it can be a helper as it relates to Intermodal, but I'm probably more concerned about the health of the economy from that result than anything.

And I see a lot of familiar faces in the audience, but to the extent that you're not, I mean, obviously, Intermodal, we think, is about 65% more fuel efficient than putting something on the road. And so the value proposition of Intermodal clearly goes up, the higher the fuel price is or the higher the alternative cost of the truck is. So clearly, stronger value proposition for our largest segment, which is Intermodal. But again, yes, the concern of higher fuel prices on the consumer would be the only offset to that.

Darren, if you can just tap into your 33 years of experience here and go back to past periods where fuel has spiked like this, whether it's 2022 or 2008 or whatever. Do shippers call an audible and just say, "I need to get my stuff in Intermodal now?" Or are they saying -- or do they still kind of say, "Don't panic, stay calm and, kind of, do it the next -- slowly in the next bid cycle?"

All of the above. I mean, there is, to the extent a customer splits a lane. There's a lot of shippers out there that may use Intermodal for 75% of the lane, and they use highway for 25%. And maybe they tweak that to 90-10 or even 100% Intermodal. So there's plenty of that opportunity. There will be customers that are under intense pressure from their own budgets that are calling and all of a sudden initiate a mini bid, and the mini bid is an opportunity to say, "I want to try to attack my cost now." So we'll see all of that activity. And then there will certainly be some customers that wait until their bid -- normal bid program.

Got it. Brad, to your point, you are 15 days away from the start of '27 bid season. I am not asking you to give away...

We have made that up. I mean, I think we start in October. Is it actually October 1?

That's how we've always defined.

Close enough. Close enough. Not asking you to give away a pricing strategy here, but does this make you want to add 200 bps to whatever number you had in mind a month ago? Or how is that going to work?

Man, I'd really love to answer that question, but let me let Darren answer. That Intermodal, the answer is always more. Listen, when you ask the CFO what the pricing strategy is, it's get as much damn pricing as you can get.

Is he in the room?

They don't let me talk to customers...

Because it's amazing what would happen if we didn't have customers, right? So certainly, the pricing environment, I do think throughout the summer months has really indicated that where we were at just 2 and 3 months ago, yes, it's more. I'm not going to answer what -- kind of what magnitude that is. I mean the core here is we're probably leaning into price a little firmer than we are volume in this cycle. We have stated how important it is that we repair our margins and get into our long-term target ranges. We did the hard work on our cost last year. There will always be cost efforts. But at this point, in order to repair our margin, it is largely a pricing discussion, and that's where our focus certainly is.

I'd like to reattempt to answer that question. So we talked about the spread between truckload pricing and Intermodal pricing being as wide as probably we've ever seen it. I think normally in the East, it's about 10% to 15%. I believe it's probably north of 30% at this point, Darren. In transcon normal is, call it, 25 to 30, it's certainly well north of that. And so to me, that sort of shows the spread as to what the opportunity is. But Stacey Griffin, our Senior VP of Intermodal pricing, traveled with us earlier this year to a conference and she talks about it being customer by customer, lane by lane, and we really do take a very thoughtful, disciplined approach to value and integrity of the network. And so thinking about how do you balance up and how do you think about improving the overall profitability of the network and that's how we price.

It's not just -- everyone thinks you just slap, let's go slap 10% on it. It's not really that easy, but growing the network and doing so profitably, I think, it's the best way for us to create long-term value for shareholders. And so glad to hear. And clearly, it's a strategy and a top priority for us. And it's not just Intermodal, it's in all 5 of our business segments, get back to our margin target ranges and then really focus on growing the business.

Yes. I'm going to ask you the other segments in a second, but just given the extraordinary circumstances and given that it's going to take you 12 months to bid season, is there opportunity to do an accessorial or a surcharge or use some other immediate mechanism to recover some of this?

Well, certainly peak season comes with empty repositioning programs where -- but typically, the loads where that kind of surcharge applies also incur really significant costs. I wouldn't call that a -- that's not an effort to expand our pricing faster or improve our margins. That is all done in an effort to recover extra cost that comes with the surge volume. We have long believed and have learned lessons the hard way that going out of cycle can be a penalty that the customer applies to you that is really long and hard to overcome.

At this point, we're mid-September. The bid season is upon us. It is absolutely in our best interest to stick inside of our cycle. That doesn't mean customers aren't coming with new opportunities. Those mini bids, all these when the customer asks for something unusual, that presents an opportunity to talk about ways to solve for that customer. And that's not meant to be just to open the door for an opportunity. It's meant to say, "Look, I have real cost associated with executing for this, I need to cover those." And customers will hear that. They understand it. They're not...

I mean, it's not a secret like, everybody knows about it...

Absolutely. I think I mean to -- and it's not necessarily a huge surprise, but a lot of the big shippers that use Intermodal also have a lot of familiarity with the cost of trucking. And so they see what's happening, and they know we're in a pretty inflationary environment in terms of the cost of transportation, cost of their supply chains. And so they're looking for solutions, and they generally look to large companies, sophisticated companies that they trust. And when you think about our scroll of services, this is when customers generally lean into us because whether it's in brokerage or drop trailer in JBT or can we can create dedicated fleets. We haven't hit on that yet, but record pipeline in terms of what we're seeing take place in dedicated. Obviously, Intermodal, we haven't seen growth like this in Intermodal in over a decade.

So really good things and customers really leaning in looking for solutions. And I think it's very indicative of some of the supply challenges that are out there in the market, and these supply challenges are really focused on making sure to improve safety on our nation's highways. And it would really be hard for me to really not be in favor of some of the stricter enforcement of existing regulations that we're seeing happen right now.

Got it. Brad, can you quickly touch on the other 2 main segments, dedicated and ICS, and what this means for those segments? Because they may not necessarily have the share tailwind that Intermodal will have?

Share tailwind...

I mean, Intermodal will gain share on trucking and so that will be a revenue offset to any cost headwinds, the other 2 segments may not have.

Well, I think one of the things that's unique about dedicated is when you think about the scale of our broader operations, particularly in driver recruitment. That's not the only reason why a customer may think about outsourcing their private fleet. But if you go to a large company that has its own private fleet, their driver recruitment department may be 6 people. Ours is hundreds of people. And so our ability to attract in that driver is quite different. And so I actually feel like this presents us more opportunities to convert some more of those private fleets.

So -- hence, why today, and the backlog is bigger today than what we saw even in the peak of COVID. And the difference is in the peak of COVID, we did have some larger 100, 200, 300 truck fleets. We have over [725] locations across the country with 12,600 trucks. So the average size of our dedicated fleet where we're on site with the customer is 17 trucks. And so think of a record backlog and pipeline that is made up of those small type of opportunities. It creates a great portfolio.

Each one of those locations has its own P&L. The manager of that location gets bonused off of its performance, like it just creates a tremendous amount of accountability. And again, I think, it's one of the few other than LTL core trucking operations that has seen double-digit margin -- by the way, GAAP margin performance for 11 consecutive years. So that business, I believe, will continue to see tailwinds. I think near term, they're struggling with the same driver challenge. The cost of accidents continues to go up. The cost of risk is going up for our industry. And I think it's going up for everybody.

I'm real proud we've really leaned in on safety. We're one of the few, I think, publicly traded trucking companies where 100% of our fleet has both outward and inward-facing cameras. We've seen dramatic improvements in our safety performance. And so we've had 3 consecutive years of record low DOT preventable accidents per million miles, and we continue to see double-digit improvement in that metric for the -- this will be the fourth consecutive year, knock on wood, to hope that trend continues. So even with the incidents going down, our costs are going up. We're going to control what we can control. I expect the cost of risk to continue to go up. But as long as our cost of risk is going up at a lesser degree than everyone else is, I think, this is again how we create separation between us and our industry, which creates more opportunity for us to take share on the private fleet side.

ICS, we've struggled with that business for most of the last several years. I feel like we're catching a gear there, made money in the second quarter. I think we're continuing to make good progress and good improvement. Most of the cost challenges we've sort of talked about here about the cycle would be really more borne in Intermodal and Dedicated, which is very illustrative of the driver environment. So -- and then opportunities in truck. I think truck is really -- we talked about them taking a lot of risk in the second and third quarter and wanting to move rates closer to where we feel like market was, and we've had some success doing that. And so just an update on some of the other items....

No, that's super helpful. I know your hands are full with dealing with all this in the short term. But I did also want to throw a long-term question at you kind of on autonomous trucking because that is a topic that we're getting a lot of questions on. I know that we've spent a lot of time talking about this ourselves in recent weeks. Is that potentially -- I know that you guys obviously are leaders here, you're kind of running pilots. You're working on this. Is that potentially a long-term solution to some of these challenges? Kind of how do you see that playing out over time?

I think the answer is yes. I mean the reality is the technology is here and the technology is quite good. I think the question is, is the application and then the business model or the business case. And so whether it's hub-to-hub or if it's -- what's the right application for it? And if it is hub-to-hub, are you really solving for the challenges over the next 5 years to where, in the future, we can go point-to-point, and we would need hub-to-hub. So would you really invest all that capital to, in essence, try to create a network?

Intermodal for the road?

Yes. And where will that application take place? I mean, listen, I'm not a physics major, but steel on steel still creates less friction than rubber on road. And so it's really going to be hard for me to be convinced that fuel efficiency or fuel economy can be better in over the road versus on the rail. And so there will be very unique distinct advantages having what 5-mile long trains with 300 containers, double-stacked, there's a lot of efficiency in moving freight long distances with Intermodal. But there could be applications. Is it on 100% of the freight that's trucked today? No, technology is good. You obviously know we're always -- we're a very innovative company. It's one of our core values. We're familiar with all the opportunities, risks, threats. We have multiple pilots going with multiple customers, multiple vendors. And so we're staying close to it and just seeing where the opportunities are.

I would just also want to say, look, it will be a disruption to the industry in some form or fashion. So a lot of times, the theory is, "Well, you're just going to eliminate the need for a driver, so eliminate that cost." Well, that's not. Somebody still has to hook up air hoses. Somebody -- there's a lot of work and there's a cost element that has a lot left to be understood. To Brad's point, the technology is really good. And there's no doubt that the technology is going to advance over time. We're all still watching to see how will poor weather play a role. I don't have any doubt that the industry and the technology and the investment behind it will solve for that. We talk a lot, "Hey, can autonomous technology be a complement to Intermodal?" Certainly, it can. When people ask, are you concerned that autonomous trucks are going to pressure Intermodal?

Look, if the investment in that technology is best served to come burn highway diesel across the country to take an Intermodal load off the train and put it back on the highway. That seems a little counterintuitive. There's so much opportunity to use that kind of technology where business is already running over the road. So really feel like as these next 3 to 5 years go by, we're all going to be leaning in to understand it better. And even understand what's it really going to cost.

You can get 10 different versions of a cost model presented to you, and it's very difficult to understand how do I even model, but I know that there is a day in the future coming with value from that. I guess we're probably going to be a little hesitant to say when we think that will be.

That is super insightful. Any questions from the audience, from the team? [Madison]?

I was wondering you guys still have thousands of containers available for growth and believe better turns can create additional capacity. But you also recently said the point at which you need to buy containers is closer than you thought a year ago. At what level of utilization would you begin adding containers again? And how much volume can the existing fleet support before that happens?

Well, I think that over, gosh, more than a year ago, we highlighted that the capacity underutilized probably had as much as 20% of growth available to us. And here we were in the second quarter, after making that statement a couple of years ago, we're up to 10%. So just call it, I don't know, somewhere in the 10% to 15% of capacity still available to unlock. There have been times in our past when we turned our fleet in the high 2 loads per month per container.

Today, that really the rail system probably operates a little slower than it did back then. That would have been 2016 for us is the last time we really were able to turn the equipment at that pace. And then you've heard us highlight the challenges from driver capacity. And the percentage of our cost that is represented by the driver today has never been higher, and the percentage of the cost of owning a container, while it matters -- it just -- it's more important to drive utilization of that driver. So we're at this point where we're really evaluating, do we seek out 2 turns per month? Well, that's an angle to go.

We have to watch out for, will that put pressure on the drayage system and actually produce a result that isn't as strong as maybe turning at something less than 2 loads per month, but we actually generate more income for the business. And that's where we're at.

I'm going to duck your question and not answer it directly. I think that we are excited about our growth opportunity. As we go through 2027, we'll be looking at where we're at. But certainly, the need to identify where we will acquire containers from in the future is front and center even today.

Gentlemen, that was super insightful. There's a reason why the room is full, as everybody wants to hear what you have to say. So thank you so much for the time.

Thank you, Ravi. Appreciate it.

Thank you, guys.

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Deutsche Bank's Industrials Conference. I'm Richa Harnain. I am the freight transportation equity analyst here. And pleasure having you. We're here with J.B. Hunt today. We got a lot to talk about. So maybe we'll just get right into it. We got Brad Delco, Andrew Hall, Stacey Griffin, who heads up -- Brad Delco, CFO; Stacey Griffin does pricing at Intermodal; and Andrew Hall, who heads up the Investor Relations effort. So thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it.

And yes, like maybe we can just start by getting a mark-to-market and how you're feeling about the state of the cycle. The team sounded quite upbeat when we heard from you about a month ago now. You've entered what has historically been a seasonal lull low for demand. And just as you reflect on how the cycle went up to this period and the potential heading into peak, how do you feel? And I know you're going to tell me J.B. Hunt is way better than the cycle. But yes, just maybe frame how the cycle is going, and then we'll talk about how you're outperforming.

Well, first, Richa, thank you for having us. Great set of meetings thus far and great to join you here for our webcast. Excited, Stacey Griffin is joining us who -- I think this is her second conference ever. And so we felt like intermodal is usually a popular topic. And considering she prices about 1/3 of the industry volume, no better person to come give some perspective on cycle and pricing opportunities ahead of us as we think about the value proposition of intermodal.

Obviously, Darren has been talking a lot to investors and to the market about the value proposition and where we think it is. In terms of the cycle, I mean, I don't -- I feel like we just started, right? Go back to fourth quarter, I think some of the things that we shared, we do get forecast from our customers. And what we noticed in the fourth quarter was our customers were very much performing in line with their forecast, but what was a surprise to us was covering some of that freight, meaning the supply or available supply of capacity was getting tighter.

And so we were attributing most of what we were feeling in the market to supply attrition. I think as we moved into the fourth quarter, there were a couple of anecdotes about forecast being revised higher. And so I think we, at least internally, directionally, we're like, okay, we definitely see supply correction continuing, but we do think that there's some positive elements of demand. Obviously, we've had ISM above 50 now for 5 or 6 consecutive months.

The one thing that I think is really missing is housing as anyone that probably moves freight knows that housing starts generally create a lot of demand. I think it also has an impact on supply, right? People would rather be working in construction and being at the same job site every day versus getting behind the wheel of the truck and driving across the country. And so I think that we are still very much in the early innings of a supply correction. But also, I think there's opportunities for demand to get stronger.

So I think what you have historically seen, and I brought this point up, I think, Richa, on our last earnings call, the majority of our earnings come from intermodal or dedicated, call it, 90%. And dedicated, these are 5-year contracts, fixed and variable components of those pay, that's how we get paid. A lot of our CapEx there is success driven, right? We'll get a contract from customers and go deploy capital. We underwrite all those deals to our ROIC targets, really like that business, but it doesn't really have the sort of cyclical dynamics that I think most are accustomed to seeing in trucking.

And we've proven that. We have had double-digit GAAP EBIT margins for 11 consecutive years in that business. Everyone knows that intermodal pricing generally lags truckload pricing by 2 to 3 quarters. And we saw a pretty meaningful inflection in our financial performance about a year ago, largely driven on things that we could control. And so I think as we sit here today, what has us excited is when we think about most of our businesses usually lagging kind of what we traditionally see in the transportation market, the fact that we've seen this much of an improvement in our financial performance with still a lot of tailwinds to come on the pricing side, I think, is what has us excited.

Okay. Yes, let's get into that. Brad, you reminded me what Darren said regarding J.B. Hunt's intermodal value proposition, right, strongest in more than a decade. Maybe we can dig into that a bit more. Not over a decade ago, do we have record levels of demand for the industry during the COVID-driven boom. So the comments suggest your value proposition is stronger than it was during that COVID time period. I guess talk to us about why.

Well, sure. I mean I think when we think about our value competition or value, we're thinking about how we compete in the market. And we really compete on cost, capacity and service. And so when I think of where we are today, you have high fuel prices, you have truckload pricing that is -- has moved higher and is moving higher, and you have good rail service. And so I think when you add -- when you combine all three of those elements, to me, that's why I think the value proposition is the strongest we've seen.

Service has been great from railroads. And when you have great service and you can offer a discount to truck prices and be more fuel efficient in doing that, I think that's sort of the trifecta. Stacey, anything you'd add there?

Well, maybe I'll give Stacey a more pinpointed question, bring in your secret weapon, right? Given that value proposition then, incredibly interesting time, I bet to be pricing this product. I would love to be a fly on the wall in your department. But just maybe talk through what's different now about your pricing strategy versus maybe the last peak and what you make of the pricing outlook going forward?

You described it as interesting, it's actually really exciting. We've certainly seen a marked uptick in the demand for J.B. Hunt's Intermodal product. Really, you have to think back to the spike that happened in highway spot rates and then followed by highway contract rates, and that's really generated increased demand for intermodal services. And so the value proposition is huge. And quite frankly, we don't think we were able to fully reflect the value proposition of intermodal in the last 12 months. The environment we've been operating in simply didn't support it.

But we have a clear line of sight on meaningful opportunities to get paid appropriately as we move into 2027. Now recognizing there's that lag, that 2- to 3-quarter lag. So we see the opportunity that we did not see inside of the kind of great recession years that we've been in for the last few years. We talk about -- and I think Darren sort of shared this previously, in the 2026 bid season, the first part of the bid season, the transport pricing world didn't respond as we expect it to. It was more competitive than we expected. While we were both positive and -- you know, we were positive price and volume, it wasn't significant inside of the transcon. So I'm expecting more opportunities and better opportunities as we go forward.

Has that Transcon competitiveness, has that leveled off?

Our 2026 bid season is essentially done. And as we go forward in the next few months, we're really going to see how everyone is responding in this, quite frankly, very different market than what we were in this time last year. So it's too soon to tell.

And just thinking big picture about the pricing opportunity. I think Intermodal historical gap between that and truckload is like 15%. Today, I think in certain markets, you're running as high as 35%. Does that mean -- trying to do math, 15% to 20% type long-term pricing opportunity as you narrow back to normalized levels? Or is that not the right way to think about it?

First, bear in mind a piece of that is fuel.

Okay.

Because that's an all-in metric. So fuel is going to move one way or the other. It depends on the day of the week, but that will move. But once you fill that out, I would say that we don't anticipate that gap getting wider. That's just not practical. It would make sense. We have drivers too, inside of intermodal. In fact, we require at least 2 for each load because they're doing the pickup and the delivery.

But I do think we'll have different magnitude in terms of the pricing cycle because of what's happening in that space. We've got to be able to cover that inflationary cost pressure. And we have to actually be able to support the rail environment. One thing to keep in mind, when an intermodal provider takes a rate to a customer, we're really taking a rate that's going to be shared with, in our case, J.B. Hunt and with at least 1 or 2 railroads. So there's a lot that we're addressing inside of that rate conversation.

Yes. And just to clarify, Richa, we typically see a 10% to 15% gap between intermodal and truck in the Eastern network, and we typically see about a 25% gap in transcon. So maybe just for the audience to make sure that's clarified. So -- but clearly, I think the gap, as Stacey alluded to, is wider than that. And that's based on where we are today. I think our expectation is we've really yet to see all the anecdotal numbers we heard on more recent earnings calls from truckload guys as to where their truckload prices are resetting. We haven't necessarily seen that in their results or performance yet, right? And so I think truckload rates may continue to move up, which means that, that gap it will create more opportunity for Stacey and her team to make sure that we're getting the right value for what service we're providing.

Does that also mean the lag could be a little longer, like we're starting kind of later in terms of when we're seeing it in actual results, so it should flow through into your results maybe later? Are you optimistic that 2027 bid season will bring those kinds of opportunities?

Well, I think Stacey kind of tried to touch on that. I mean I think the real big move we saw between supply and demand really was triggered in May around Roadcheck. And I think that's when we saw 20% or 30% intra-month move in spot rates. And at that point, you're sort of at the tail end of our bid season. And so I don't know, as Stacey sort of alluding to that we were able to take -- it's not take advantage, but let the market recognize where prices were going to land. And so I think as her and her team start back up in October working on next year's bid season, there will be a lot more opportunities. I love what you said in some of our meetings today about the -- what has your summer been like? What are we calling it?

The summer many mini bids, so many, M-A-N-Y, mini, M-I-N-I, because we've had such tremendous opportunity come at us. For the pricing team, this summer is our lull. And because of what's happened in that highway space and our customers' uncertainty around cost, capacity, we've had lots of opportunities coming to us to price business we've not seen before, reprice business that we saw earlier in the year, find solutions for our customers to move freight that's been moving over the highway into intermodal. So been very active summer and been a great opportunity for us.

And Brad talked about opportunity really just to adjust prices in front of us. The way our bid season works is in Q4, we've repriced about 10% of our business. And then we repriced about 30% in each of the following 3 quarters. So when we -- at the end of March, we will reprice around 40% of our business, and that will be under this new kind of understanding of the structural changes that have happened in terms of driver supply with an entire industry understanding of kind of the permanence of that and that we still don't know exactly where that's going to go. So we see a lot of opportunity there as we move forward. But it will flow through the end of the year and then it will start showing up once we get into '27.

Okay. On the many mini bids, is that for more immediate sort of transactions? Or is that something that we'll really see around the peak season in Q4?

It's for both. And so we've seen a large uptick in new customer names. So that's always exciting. It's certainly very exciting for our sales organization. So new customer names, maybe customers who have not explored intermodal before. A lot of that is Eastern network, but certainly a lot of the same names. If we were looking at that freight, it's the last to convert to intermodal that they're looking at now. It's a long length of haul, but maybe it's going to our customers' customers and having consistent on-time delivery is critical.

So they've historically moved it highway, and now they're looking at an intermodal option. And in the transcon space, JBI has a Quantum solution with BNSF that is targeting that customer delivery freight where consistency around service and delivery is most important. It's not about speed, it's about consistency. Because 7 days, it's 7 days every single time, we're delivering it on time. So much greater interest inside of that, new customers. We're seeing projects and we're seeing customers specifically look for this is what I have moving over these next few months, what solution can you give me? So we're seeing those capacity concerns pop up for immediate need, for peak -- traditional peak season needs, but then just looking for that long-term conversion as well.

Stacey, I have a...

Does the service [indiscernible] talked many years about that migration or service grade, I think all shifted. Is that what happens, or is it price forcing people who's looking...

The underlying rail service is good, and it has been good for about 2, 3 years now. If you asked that question 3 or 4 years ago, it was definitely a different answer. It was a source of great frustration for intermodal carriers, for the railroads and certainly for our customers. And what we've heard from our customers is, I need intermodal rail service to be good. Not just when volumes are low across the industry, right, but as volumes start moving up, that service has to be stable. And that's what they're experiencing right now, which is really helping our customers have that modal conversion conversation inside of their own organization.

Yes. I want to give Darren Field a lot of credit because he was sitting in a lot of these investor meetings three years ago, and it was -- and he would always joke and say I have the same conversations with folks at the railroad, which is, of course, we all like rail service was good last week, where is the volume this week? Like that's just not how that works, right? But you have to -- it takes time. You -- they want to dip the toe in the water, right, before they jump in.

And so here we are now 3-plus years of really consistent rail service. Yes, I think we're coming off of one of the worst freight recessions we've ever seen. And in 2025, J.B. Hunt did an all-time record amount of intermodal volume. And then in our most recent second quarter, we grew Eastern volumes 16%, Andrew, against a plus 15% comp. And so I really feel like the highway to rail conversion story is playing out. I think there's lots of growth. We've talked about 7 million to 11 million loads of opportunity out there.

This is what Stacey and her team look at and price each and every year. This is volume that we see, we think could and should go from highway to railroad and the overwhelming majority of that freight that we see is in the East. And so you're sort of seeing that now play out with -- I think we have 5 consecutive quarters of double-digit volume growth in our Eastern network. And so hopefully, both CSX and Norfolk Southern see and appreciate the opportunity in the business that we're creating and serving together.

And I definitely -- I think I want to be mindful of like walking before we run. But just in light of that service improvement being offered by you and your rail partners, we talk about getting back to historical ranges of like the gap between intermodal and truckload 10% to 15% in the East and 25% transcon. Can't it be better than that if the service product is better than it was in prior up cycle?

I mean, in theory, yes. But I think we would really need to see very consistent service. But again, at the end of the day, as Stacey alluded to, speed is one factor. I think consistency of service is really what customers are looking for. And as long as we can be consistent at a discount to truck because it will be slower, then I think it's a really strong value proposition.

Okay. Maybe we can switch gears and talk about some of the bottlenecks for the industry. You discussed the tightness around drivers, particularly drayage drivers in the market at large that was on your last call. We believe a lot of your competition relies more on that type of third-party lift versus you. Is that creating an opportunity for share shift?

Yes. Absolutely does. And it's not just the opportunity for share shift. Our drayage operations and the efficiency we drive with that really does give us a competitive advantage. We outsource in J.B. Hunt Intermodal about 10% to 15% of our drayage lift, and we've done that intentionally. We can make that number work. But then we would be building the church for Easter Sunday. So that's not most efficient way to do it.

And when there's peak, we want to have -- be able to tap in to those outsourced freight carriers as well. So it's important that we have them as part of our structure. But that really gives us an advantage certainly in our service, is very meaningful. But we have a driver hiring machine, which allows us to tackle the challenges that are existing right now in the industry in a meaningful way with how we recruit, hire our drivers and the investments we make in to retaining the driver, which is kind of where it starts.

Yes, Richa, I'll love to sharing this, but Kirk Thompson is, I think, a 52-year employee of J.B. Hunt. He was our CFO, CEO, Chairman, now Honorary Founding Director. And back when I was in your seat and covering the stock, Kirk would just make things very simple. And he said, let's just be honest, Brad, there's only 2 types of freight markets, one with too few freight and one with too few drivers, which one would you rather be in.

And so right now, we're in a market where there is a driver shortage. And so yes, every single transportation company is facing driver wage inflation and driver pressure. And so you're ramping up -- you're hiring teams, you're ramping up your people teams because he who has the driver wins. And so J.B. Hunt has very attractive jobs. If you actually -- I don't -- we say this in most meetings, but more than half of our trucks are day cabs, which means people will come to our terminal, park their car, jump on the truck, work a shift, come back to the terminal, get in their car and go home. And so our dedicated -- average length of dedicated, we have 12,600 trucks. I think our average length of haul, Andrew, is like 180 miles. And so I think that our driving jobs are typically viewed very favorably in the industry. And so I think that's been an advantage for us in recruiting and keeping the best drivers on the road.

Along with that added shift. You go for it.

Richa, go ahead.

So the intermodal margin like long-term guide, whatever you call it?

Margin target range is 10% to 12%.

10% to 12%. So that obviously is well for the regulatory options have been ruled upon or enacted. I really can't think it's better to set up for that to be like better than 10% to 12%. And there was like 2 years ago...

I'm about to say that. 2 years ago, people said there's no way we'll ever get to those margin targets. And now people are like, why can't we go higher? First of all, if you do -- anyone knows me, they know how much passion I have and how much I love talking about margins or not. We think and what really informs our decisions as to what we're targeting in our cost structure as well as where we feel like our margin should be based upon our businesses is truly based on returns on capital.

And so based upon what capital we think is required that we have to continue to invest in our chassis, our trucks, our terminals, our maintenance infrastructure, a 10% to 12% margin, we believe, is a very fair and appropriate return on the capital we take, particularly for risk, right? We are all in the business of managing risk. Clearly, putting 80,000 pounds on a highway has proven to be a very risky business. And so we have to be compensated appropriately for that risk. And so...

I think that's a really good answer. Then your growth should be better?

Then our growth should be better. Yes. So we would love to be in our 10% to 12% margin range. And if we can still execute and believe we will stay very focused on executing on our lower cost to serve initiative, we should be able to grow faster. And so clearly, those opportunities are being presented to the team with, again, setting record volume coming out of a freight recession.

Just to tie my next question into that margin framework. Again back to the driver point, inflation, like do you think that driver pay increases that we're having to implement, albeit in selected markets, still nothing broad-based for what you last said, do you think it's similar to what we saw during COVID? Is it more manageable?

I think it's different. I think for the first time, we saw real labor challenges across not just truck driving, but warehousing. I mean I think all industries were facing some sort of labor challenge during COVID. In terms of the driver challenge, I think it will be difficult so long as we continue to enforce the regulations that exist today. I mean, keep in mind, the supply that's come out of the market isn't a function of new regulation. It's just the enforcement of existing regulation. And so where we go from here, not quite sure, but it feels like we're going to see more supply come out of the market as we enforce non-domiciled CDLs, obviously, cabotage, what are some other ones, Andrew, I'm missing. CDL schools...

ELDs.

ELDs, the self "certification" that, yes, this thing is compliant and maybe they're not. So a lot still more to come on the supply side.

Maybe let's talk about peak, your expectations heading into the peak month, these mini bids are going to start showing up. But how do volumes typically shift from first half to second half? How could this year be better? Or I mean, you've already talked about it could be maybe better, but how could it be maybe worse than normal? Any sort of -- any other things to worry about?

I'd say there's nothing I'm worried about. Every peak season, just a little bit different, a little bit nuanced. If you look at just generally speaking, the traditional peak as measured by Southern California, right? The Southern California outbound, really grow those retail importers will typically surge anywhere between, call it, 10% and 25% during peak season. And it's a fairly sizable range, but I think that range effectively captures what is considered normal over the course of multiple years.

There could be other factors at play from year-to-year, whether it's shift between Eastern ports and the Western ports, although anything that's happening there is kind of done. Consumer spending could still be a surprise one way or the other. Rail velocity has been very stable and good. So we don't necessarily anticipate any challenges there. So it's -- we feel like it's going to be normal. There's just a range of what normal is.

In terms of being maybe better than normal peak surcharges, the way I understand is last year, around July was when you introduced them to customers. But during the peak season, I think customers could generally work towards the limit of those peak surcharges and then maybe solve around you because they didn't wanted to avoid paying the fees. And now with the cycle much tighter, maybe it will be more difficult for them to navigate that. So should we expect better from peak surcharges this year versus last?

It sounds like guidance...

Yes.

No.

I'm careful about what I say here. But I do want to speak to peak surcharges specifically if we navigate that because it is absolutely something that we navigate with our customers every year. The whole idea around peak surcharges is around recovering costs. There's a significant amount of costs associated with moving those empty containers -- incremental empty containers into Southern California specifically to handle those above normal volume. We'll do unnatural things with our drivers as well. We'll outsource more, but we'll literally fly drivers into Southern California to work for a couple of weeks at a time to support peak season. And then we do a lot of, call it, unnatural moves to drive velocity and cover our customers' freight.

So there's costs associated with that. There are cost that the railroads incur and a peak season surcharge is the mechanism for recovering that cost. From a -- in my seat from a pricing perspective, I hear very consistently that our peak season surcharges are above what the industry norms are. I'm not in a position to speak to what others do, but we're in a cost recovery effort when we're talking about peak season surcharges.

And certainly, our customers are looking for our solutions this year. And we've been having those conversations with the customers since they did the bid. It was particularly in the first half of the year as the customers are planning what is my 12-month solution for capacity based on what my forecasts are, we talked about what that peak season structure would look like inside of their bids. Trying to remove uncertainty for them and help facilitate the planning.

Understood. And regarding all these sort of unnatural moves you're doing, heaven and earth for your customers is kind of what you do. Just again, tell us about like the competitive landscape. Like are your competitors able to keep up? Do they have the resources? Because from our perspective, it seems like it's challenging out there, especially if you're reliant more on third-party drayage, struggling and things like that. So...

I think right now, I mean, genuinely, I was going through this as well, but I think the industry is, you have to sort of balance, your customer really wants you to be all things, but it also in the same way, doesn't necessarily want to pay you to be all the things and you have that sort of tug of war. And I think our industry typically sees some of the inflationary costs hit them first, whether to prove out your service or prove out the model, ahead of when the pricing comes.

And so I do think right now, you're seeing an industry that is struggling with hiring drivers. Our management team meets every week. We met last week. And again, I told you all that Kirk Thompson quote, it's a good thing, generally speaking. But our driver need is the strongest or the highest it has been all year, which means our driver need is the strongest it's been since 2022. And so that sort of tells you we are -- we've probably more than doubled, if not tripled the size of our driver recruiting team. They're hitting the phones. We're increasing advertising and marketing to get drivers in. And this is all so we can get ahead and make sure that we are prepared to meet what we're anticipating to be strong demand and to meet what I think our customers expect us to do from a growth perspective.

And so again, I think we're sort of in this limbo stage where you are seeing some of those cost challenges hit some of the businesses, but you're having to go out and try to get cost recovery from customers. And I know we have -- we certainly have opportunities to do that with peak season, but I think we're going to have a lot of opportunities to do that once our next round of bid season starts in October.

Can we switch gears and talk about ICS and truckload a bit. They're growing volumes there quickly. You talked about how those are more leading businesses for you. But yes, purchase transportation costs remain headwinds. What has to happen for that growth to translate into meaningful operating profit still operating well below what you saw during the last peak in those? And how quickly can customer pricing catch up?

Yes. And so ICS is our brokerage business. And I think generally, where pricing is more transactional. And so we can move price a little bit faster in that business. I believe the second quarter was kind of like the squeeze quarter, if you will, for a broker, right? You're going out and buying capacity at spot. You actually have some contract mix in terms of how you're getting paid by your customer. And we saw a pretty meaningful year-over-year gross margin pressure. I think the opportunity is just, one, resetting price and make sure you're buying most efficiently out in the market. And so we have been able to scale that business. I think the one thing I am proud of is it was the first quarter we've made money in how many, Andrew...

Many, many...

A couple of years. But we did that when I think you saw probably peak pressure on that relationship between revenue and PTE. And so to the extent, like you mentioned or you were alluding to like the July blip, July is always the second worst freight month of the year besides February. And so I'm sure you saw margins improve in July if you were running a brokerage business because it just wasn't as tight. Typically, that's very seasonal and very normal before things start picking up in mid-August as you go into peak. So I think that team has been working really hard at getting back to consistently being profitable, and we got one quarter in and hoping to keep the momentum going.

And you'd be disappointed if it wasn't in the black again this quarter.

If I answer that, I think I'd be giving guidance.

All right. Let's talk about the broker liability issue. So ICS, very large broker in the market. We had one of the largest nuclear verdicts in the industry brought against your peer C.H. Robinson recently. Just what do you make of the unfortunate outcome of the case and implications for your business, ICS and maybe the industry at large?

Yes. I mean I think it just -- it's a big headline and it puts a big spotlight on each broker's process around how they select their carriers. And I think bottom line is you have to make sure you have a very consistent and firm process and it's airtight. And so to the extent you're making exceptions as to why you did or did not hire a carrier to haul a load, you just need to make sure you're well documented on your reasons and you got to feel really good about your team and your safety culture.

And I think one thing, Hunt has a very strong culture -- Hunt has a very strong safety culture. We've been reporting -- this is outside of brokerage, but we've been reporting on our DOT preventable accidents per million miles, first year after we rolled out inward-facing cameras. And I believe we're one of the only publicly traded companies with inward-facing cameras. Richa, you might be able to correct me if I'm wrong there. We saw a 25% improvement in our DOT preventable accidents per million miles. That was a record safety performance year for us. The year after that, we improved it further, 3%. The year after that was 2025, we've improved that further 10%.

And I think, Andrew, in the second quarter, we said year-to-date, we're 11% or double digits better than last year. So we're on a -- we're on pace to have a fourth consecutive year of record safety performance. And so our industry has to manage risk and putting 80,000 pounds out on the highway each and every day is a meaningful risk to our motoring public. So we have to make sure we're hiring the best drivers. We have to make sure that we're training our best drivers, and we have to make sure we're keeping bad actors out of our industry. And I think there's just -- I'm glad to see a lot of energy around that, both in Washington as well as across our business.

Okay. Let's talk about cost savings coming up less, which I think is natural as you grow, we move further into an up cycle, less significant is paid to cost takeout, but it is a good story here. And like you said, you started generating strong returns even before the cycle started to turn. But just talk about what else is left there? Talk about what inning you feel like you're in, $130 million run rate?

$135 million.

$135 million, yes. Where do we go from there?

I think that Shelley recently was talking with our team at our town hall. Our cost to serve initiative wasn't a 1-year, one-and-done type of event. I think it's more of a mindset and Richa, it kind of goes back to what you were asking. If we can be competitive in lowering our cost to serve, it's just going to allow us to grow faster. And when we can grow faster, it creates more opportunities for our people.

We obviously are a very people-focused organization. We believe we take care of our people. They take care of our customers and takes care of the business and everybody in this room would be very happy with the outcome of how we perform there.

What inning are we in? I think we are probably through a lot of the low-hanging fruit in terms of the $100 million that we originally identified. Obviously, we exceeded the publicly stated target. But I think the real challenge for us now is as we are growing and as we are scaling, making sure we stay very disciplined to our cost metrics, and we stay in those ranges. And so as we scale, we can scale in a way that allows more of price to help repair our margins. That's one of our 3 priorities for the year, is to continue to repairing our margins.

And so what's not really in terms of where we are very early innings, I think, is as we think about all of the processes we have across our organization and where we think technology and particularly AI can help us. We think AI has a lot of opportunity to drive improvements in our processes and take out cost and give our people better opportunity to do more meaningful work. And so I think we're early in that stage and hopefully more to come that we can share in the future.

Okay. Cool. CapEx, you prefunded a lot of that. I think that's part of the allure to the J.B. Hunt story for sure. I guess if you continue to grow at a similar trajectory as your impressive first half suggests, how long before you need to start investing in more equipment? And until then, is 5% CapEx to sales the right rule of thumb?

We shared this what is as a percent. I think it depends on the pricing and the fuel environment. But $700 million feels about right when I think about what our maintenance CapEx is. That's net, so that's gross CapEx less proceeds. As I mentioned in dedicated, a lot of our CapEx is success-based. So we will go out and sign a 5-year contract. What's in that contract is the equipment, obviously, whether it's specialized or standard equipment.

And then we'll go out and procure that equipment in order to meet the needs of that new contract. So my hope is that our CapEx starts trending up a lot because I have to fund a lot of the growth that's coming in dedicated. Brad Hicks recently talked about seeing a record pipeline there. And so that has us excited about, I think, deploying capital in what we think are very good return type of business.

For intermodal, obviously, we have plenty of intermodal containers to grow into, but we will continue to need to buy and grow our chassis count and replace trucks, but most of that should be captured within our maintenance CapEx, that's of the $700 million that I laid out.

Do I want to tell you when I think we're going to need to buy more containers? I don't know. But if we keep growing like we are, it's not as far out in the future as we thought it was maybe a year ago. So growth has been good, first double-digit volume growth quarter since 2014 in the second quarter. So I think it just, again, speaks to what we just -- we started the conversation with, which is the value proposition of intermodal is quite strong right now.

Okay. Let's switch gears and talk about autonomous trucking real quick. You've invested in technologies. In fact, I think one of your partners is presenting next door. What do you say to folks that consider this as something that threatens maybe the terminal value for your partners and railroads? Yes, like I know you feel sort of passionate about this topic, and I think you do a good job addressing it. So talk to us about that.

Well, I mean, it's -- I think there's still a lot of unknowns, what is it going to cost. I think we really like what we see in terms of the technology, and we think the technology is real, and we think there are real safety benefits to that technology. Why can't we apply some of that technology to the trucks we already have today on the road to make them even safer, I think that's something that needs to be explored.

We think that autonomous trucks have an opportunity to expand the addressable market in intermodal, right? So if you have long drays that make a certain intermodal move not as economic as maybe truck or the circuitous miles, then you can bring autonomy into play there. But at the end of the day, again, I'm not physicist, but steel on steel creates less friction than rubber on road. And so the most fuel-efficient way of moving freight will be rail over -- it doesn't matter who is or is not driving the vehicle. It's just going to always be more fuel efficient to move it over the rail versus the highway.

And so I think that there will be opportunities for a lot of new technologies and entrants to sort of create value in transportation. It is a very large market, and there's plenty of opportunity for us to grow organically in this large addressable market.

Okay. Speaking about growth opportunity, maybe we can end with this transcon rail merger that's being proposed right now, made some steps forward in recent months. Your view on the evolution of partnerships and just how you see this affecting J.B. Hunt, especially if your primary partner in the West has a product that could prove to be maybe less attractive next to a seamless end-to-end rail product.

A lot in that question. I would just say, we've been pretty neutral on this. I mean we think that there's opportunities and risks that come with some of the unknowns. And I think our teams are still looking at and reviewing all the facts and filings. And as you know, there are many pages to them. At the end of the day, I think what I'm encouraged about is railroads see real meaningful opportunity value and growth with intermodal. And I think who they partner with is going to be very important.

I think the key to running a successful intermodal business is having density. And in order to have density, you have to have a lot of volume. And thankfully, we do have a lot of volume. I think we've proven an ability to create a lot of value for our customers. And so we're going to be very mindful of what is in the best interest of our customers and make sure that we're doing what's best for them going forward. So...

Maybe to come at me directly, I think you've given a helpful stat on how much of your business is actually true end-to-end transcon versus just stops in the middle, right? So it's not like -- can you remind me of that?

Have we given that...

Andrew, you definitely given that.

We have, yes. I don't think we provided that.

All right, fine. Well, TBD there. But all right. With that, I think we're up to time. So thanks so much for your time today and for participating. Stacey, it was great to have you in a fresh perspective. And thanks for everyone in the room.

Great. Thank you, Richa.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the J.B. Hunt Transport Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Hall, Senior Director of Finance. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Before I introduce the speakers, I would like to provide some disclosures regarding forward-looking statements. This call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, anticipates, intends, estimates or similar expressions are used to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on J.B. Hunt's current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results to be materially different from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. For more information regarding risk factors, please refer to J.B. Hunt's annual report on Form 10-K and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Now I would like to introduce the speakers on today's call. This afternoon, I'm joined by our President and CEO, Shelley Simpson; our CFO, Brad Delco; Spencer Frazier, EVP of Sales and Marketing; our COO and President of Highway Services and Final Mile, Nick Hobbs; Brad Hicks, President of Dedicated Contract Services; and Darren Field, President of Intermodal.

I'd now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Ms. Shelley Simpson, for some opening comments. Shelley?

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon. I want to start by thanking our employees across the organization for their hard work and relentless focus on serving our customers safely. We continue to operate in a dynamic environment that requires us to be nimble, make decisions quickly and adapt as conditions change. Time and again, our people have demonstrated their ability to do exactly that while remaining operationally excellent.

As we move through the year, we remain focused on executing against the priorities we outlined at the beginning of 2026. First and foremost, that means driving disciplined growth through operational excellence. Customer conversations around pricing continue to evolve alongside a market that is changing rapidly. We are pushing where we can and where we need to.

Second, we are leveraging the investments we have made in our people, technology and capacity to create sustainable competitive advantages. While the market environment has improved, our focus on cost control has not changed. We remain committed to removing structural costs from the business and improving the way we operate. That discipline is a critical component of our long-term strategy and positions us to perform well across market cycles.

Third, we are focused on repairing margins and generating long-term shareholder returns. We have made meaningful progress repairing margins. And while further opportunity remains, we are encouraged by the trajectory of the business. We continue to have transparent conversations with customers about the investments required to maintain the service, capacity and innovation that supports their growth while producing appropriate returns for our shareholders.

It is increasingly clear that the freight market has changed. Capacity has tightened across the industry as safety-focused enforcement and broader supply pressures continue to affect available truckload capacity. We saw that tightening build throughout the quarter, including a noticeable step change around the annual road check event in early May that has persisted. While demand is improving gradually, the current market tightness is being driven primarily by supply conditions.

We didn't spend the last four years waiting for the cycle to turn. We spent the last four years preparing for it. In this environment, I am confident in our strategy that has enabled us to gain market share. The foundation we built over our history, our commitment to people, technology and capacity, being a leader in safety performance, consistent operational excellence and delivering value to our customers through our CVD process has positioned us to succeed today and to deliver even stronger results in the future. We have structurally lowered our cost to serve customers, creating additional growth opportunities while driving progress towards our margin goals, even without a material benefit from pricing.

The financial leverage in our business model continues to improve through disciplined growth and the application of technology across the enterprise. All of this positions our company to compound growth through cycles.

Looking ahead, I'm excited about the opportunities in front of us during the second half of the year. We expect demand for our services to remain strong and remain closely aligned with our customers on their capacity needs. We have proven that our model works and that our service delivers value. We remain focused on ensuring that we receive the appropriate return for the value we provide while continuing to create disciplined, sustainable growth and long-term value for our shareholders.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Brad.

Thanks, Shelley, and good afternoon. I'll start with some quick comments about our financial performance in the quarter. As you've seen in our release, on a GAAP basis, total revenue increased 19%, operating income improved 32% and diluted earnings per share improved 45% compared to the prior year period. These results reflect disciplined execution and continued momentum from the strategy we've been discussing for several quarters around operational excellence and lowering our cost to serve.

While market conditions have improved, the biggest driver of our performance continues to be our people, executing at a high level on service, safety, productivity and cost discipline while leveraging our technology investments. As demonstrated this quarter, our cost discipline performance wasn't at the expense of supporting future growth as we achieved double-digit volume growth across JBI, ICS and JBT in the quarter. The investments we have made over the past several years in our people, technology and capacity are creating meaningful advantages for our business and allowing us to respond quickly to opportunities in the market.

Let me turn to our efforts on lowering our cost to serve. While market fundamentals have shifted, this remains one of the most important operational initiatives underway across the company. Over the past year, we've removed over $135 million of structural costs from our company, and we continue to look for opportunities to simplify processes, improve productivity, increase asset utilization and leverage technology to automate work. Just as importantly, these efforts are improving the customer experience while creating operating leverage across the organization. Our objective remains the same as it has been since the beginning of this initiative, build a stronger, more efficient company that can generate higher returns across all market environments. We are encouraged by the progress we are making and believe there remains additional runway ahead as we continue to scale our technology investments and improve efficiencies across our scroll of services.

Turning to capital allocation. Our approach remains consistent. We are a disciplined growth company, and we are equally disciplined in how we deploy capital. Our first priority continues to be investing in the business where we see opportunities to generate attractive long-term returns. We remain committed to maintaining a strong investment-grade balance sheet, supporting the growth of our dividend and being opportunistic with share repurchases when appropriate. We believe the investments we have made throughout this cycle have positioned the company exceptionally well for future growth. Importantly, much of our capacity has already been funded, providing us with significant flexibility as demand for our services improves. The combination of a strong balance sheet, healthy cash generation and disciplined capital deployment gives us confidence in our ability to continue creating long-term shareholder value.

That concludes my comments. I'll now turn it over to Spencer.

Thank you, Brad, and thanks to everyone for joining the call. I'll start by saying how proud I am of our team's performance this quarter. In a rapidly changing environment, our people stayed focused on what we could control, serving customers, managing through volatility and helping them make the best decisions across their transportation networks.

During the quarter, we saw an acceleration of the structural changes in the market that we discussed in April. Truckload capacity continued to tighten from ongoing regulatory enforcement, while at the same time, many carriers continue to face higher operating costs that are not fully supported by prevailing rates. As a result, several industry indicators, including higher tender rejections, higher spot pricing and lower driver employment moved towards levels not seen since 2021 and 2022.

The pace of change has created real planning and execution challenges for our customers. Many shippers were not positioned for the speed and magnitude of these shifts, and they are now looking to the best providers who can help them build more durable and flexible plans around capacity, cost, service and mode.

In the second quarter, overall freight demand improved modestly from the first quarter. Demand in many industrial markets is improving and U.S. consumer demand remains resilient. That said, demand for J.B. Hunt's suite of services continues to outpace the market, supported by record volumes in JBI and double-digit volume growth in both JBT and ICS. We gained market share across our services. Retention remains strong, and our pipelines in all business units continue to expand.

As demand improved and capacity tightened, pricing and planning conversations with customers became more transparent, more frequent and more flexible. We saw customers initiate more out-of-cycle/mini bids as they work to keep pricing aligned with the rising cost of capacity. Customers are also becoming increasingly mindful of the carriers they rely on, consolidating more of their business with providers that can deliver capacity at scale. This is where our mode-neutral business model and our continued investments in people, technology and capacity create meaningful value. We are positioned to help customers optimize across orders, shipments and modes and to provide practical solutions as their networks adjust.

During the quarter, the strongest areas of customer engagement centered on highway to intermodal conversion, dedicated fleets and access to safe, secure and reliable capacity. Looking ahead, we are actively helping customers prepare for fall peak, reset capacity assumptions and begin transportation planning for 2027.

While many customers did not plan for this level of a change to occur this quickly, through external customer surveys and our ongoing customer conversations show a growing recognition that it is becoming more expensive to support the capacity, service and professional driving jobs that power our nation's supply chains. We believe that reality will shape future supply chain planning and budgeting discussions, and it reinforces the role J.B. Hunt will play in helping lead customers through a very dynamic operating environment.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Nick.

Thanks, Spencer, and good afternoon. I'll share updates on our Final Mile and Highway businesses. But first, as we do at internal meetings, I'll start with an update on safety.

Safety is core to our culture at J.B. Hunt, and we continue to challenge ourselves to improve on our record safety performance as measured by DOT preventable accidents per million mile. I'm proud that year-to-date through the second quarter, we are vesting last year's results by 11%. To support our current and future growth, we will bring on drivers to maintain our high service levels to our customers. As the driver market has tightened, we have implemented various strategies to recruit and retain drivers to meet our growing need. We have implemented sign-on bonuses in several markets and targeted driver wage increases in select markets. While these are important early actions, we believe the industry will need to continue investing in professional drivers who operate safely and comply with regulations designed to protect both themselves and the motoring public.

Moving to Final Mile. Demand remained stable across our core end markets of furniture, exercise equipment and appliances. Demand in our fulfillment business remains strong, driven by off-price retail channels. Our sales pipeline remains healthy, and we are adding new opportunities as we work to offset as much of our previously disclosed $90 million revenue headwind due to our focus on being disciplined. We remain committed to being safe and secure and providing customers with the high service levels that they have come to expect from J.B. Hunt.

In JBT, our focus on operational excellence continues to drive growth and market share gains, highlighted by our fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit volume growth. As we discussed last quarter, the tight truckload market remains challenging for independent contractors, leading us to rely more heavily on third-party capacity at current market spot rates. During the quarter, our revenue increased 35% with load growth of 14%, but our gross profit dollars declined 12%, primarily due to higher purchase transportation rates. While we are seeing spot market opportunities in ICS to help offset some margin pressure, we don't have the same degree of opportunity within our trailer network business. Given the pace of market change, pricing implemented just a few months ago is no longer sufficient. Going forward, we remain disciplined in taking appropriate risk and are working with customers to better align rates with current market conditions and the value we provide.

I'll close with ICS. The positive momentum we have felt in our business is beginning to translate to improved financial performance. We have been successful in bid season, winning more volume and are securing double-digit rate increases. While gross margin remains under pressure compared to last year, they improved sequentially from the first quarter, supported by increased spot and mini bid opportunities and contractual freight repriced closer to current market conditions. The market remains dynamic and going forward, our focus remains on leveraging our cost as volume scales through the platform and generating more gross profit dollars. While encouraged by the second quarter results, we remain focused on building sustained momentum.

With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Brad.

Thanks, Nick, and good afternoon, everybody. I'll provide an update on our Dedicated business. Starting with the quarter, our second quarter results once again highlight the strength of our Dedicated business. Despite a slow start due to weather, demand in the lawn and garden category improved and demand across our other end markets performed as expected. The second quarter also delivered another record safety performance for DCS as our team's commitment to safety and operational excellence continues to lower our cost to serve and deliver greater value for our customers.

It's worth reminding everyone that while fuel is primarily a pass-through in our business, it is dilutive to operating income margin percentage. In the second quarter, we estimate that fuel was close to a 100 basis point headwind to operating margin percentage compared with the prior year quarter.

During the second quarter, we sold approximately 250 trucks and remain confident we will achieve our full year target for gross truck sales of 1,000 to 1,200 new trucks. Our sales pipeline remains robust and has strengthened over the past few months as the tightening truckload market has driven increased customer interest in a dedicated solution. In fact, our pipeline is currently at a record level in terms of number of trucks, which is a testament to the strength of our dedicated business and the value we consistently deliver for our customers. Even with more opportunities in the pipeline, we have not altered our pricing or return discipline to chase growth. We have a proven track record of value creation through our customer value delivery platform. And with our scale and density, we believe we can offer differentiated solutions to customers in the market.

Last quarter, I outlined our expectation that we would return to fleet growth this year while achieving only modest operating income growth for 2026. On the fleet side, we need to see a wave of new truck growth for a few months before that growth translates into improved profitability given the expenses associated with starting up an account. I remain confident that this wave of growth is coming. However, we remain unwilling to sacrifice our discipline around margins and returns, particularly at this point in the cycle simply to accelerate growth. Doing so would add risk and variability to our Dedicated business, which has proven resilient throughout cycles. In fact, our win rate on new deals remains consistent with historic levels.

While Dedicated has historically been the last part of our business to see an inflection from a change in the freight cycle, and that will likely be true again in this cycle, I remain confident in our business and the growth opportunities ahead of us. We have a large untapped addressable market to grow into and a proven track record of disciplined financial and operational performance.

I remain proud of our entire team's efforts, the great work of our professional drivers and the value we create for our customers.

With that, I'll turn it over to Darren.

Thank you, Brad, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. The consistent execution of our strategy over the past several years has positioned us well to capture market share gains in the current environment. Service levels remain strong, and we have available capacity to support customer growth at a time when Intermodal's value proposition is the strongest it has been in more than a decade.

During the second quarter, demand for our intermodal service outperformed normal seasonality for the third consecutive quarter, and we also set a quarterly volume record with over 578,000 loads. For the quarter, volumes were up 10% year-over-year, the first double-digit volume growth quarter in over a decade. On a monthly basis, volumes were up 9% in April, up 9% in May and up 12% in June. Transcon volume grew 5%, while our Eastern volume increased 16%. Our Eastern growth comped against a plus 15% performance in the prior year or said differently, up 31% on a two-year stacked basis.

We continue to see significant road-to-rail conversion opportunities in the East, particularly as rising truckload rates, fuel prices and tightening truckload capacity make intermodal an increasingly attractive solution for shippers. While we have available container capacity to grow with our customers, we remain disciplined to ensure the growth is sustainable over the long term and at acceptable returns for the value we create.

The rail network is experiencing quality growth, and we remain actively engaged with our rail providers on resource planning to support both current and future growth. While rail service has moderated slightly as volumes accelerated, conversion activity is at levels we have not seen in more than a decade. We remain confident in our rail providers' commitment to service and our collective ability to support higher volume levels while maintaining dependable and reliable performance.

The same supply challenges affecting truckload capacity are impacting the drayage market, where driver availability remains tight, and we are working diligently to attract quality drivers to support our growth. In this environment, our in-sourced drayage strategy is a meaningful competitive advantage by owning our tractors, containers and chassis and utilizing primarily company drivers, we maintain greater control of the customer experience while reducing reliance on more costly and less reliable third-party drayage capacity.

We previously outlined a path to the low end of our long-term margin range through contributions from cost, volume and price. We have done great work on lowering our cost to serve and believe we have achieved the point of margin from cost. On volume, the growth has materialized while remaining disciplined to attract the right freight that adds balance and connectivity across the network. So I would say we are pretty much there with the point from volume. The opportunity that is still in front of us is price.

As you all know, our intermodal bid season begins each year in October and finalizes in Q3. So we're nearing completion of the 2026 bid season. In the first half of this year's bids, the operating environment at that time didn't present the same pricing opportunities that the current environment has. Historically, intermodal contract pricing has lagged truckload pricing, and we continue to believe that to be the case moving forward. However, given the pace of change in the truckload market, we are increasingly encouraged by the pricing opportunity heading into the 2027 bid season than we were even a couple of months ago.

Encouragingly, our improved financial performance over the last several quarters is unrelated to any material contributions from price to cover inflation. While in prior cycles, we would typically see our financial performance lag other transportation modes, we feel like we've led the broader industry as this cycle ensues.

With that, I'd like to turn it back over to the operator to open the call for questions.

Thank you. We'll now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question will come from Bascome Majors with Stephens.

Darren, following up on sort of how you ended that on the pricing discussion and the optimism going forward. Can we talk through how prevalent the multiyear price agreements are with intermodal customers today compared to prior cycles? And how much visibility did these commitments give you into the contract rate renewal plan into 2027 and even beyond? And just beyond the renewals, taking a step back beyond our past core pricing, what opportunities does Hunt have to increase intermodal revenue per load over the next few quarters that might not show up in the renewal number, but could still meaningfully impact the business?

Sure. On the multiyear conversation, certainly, we have customers that we have engaged with multiyear programs. I don't know that we've ever talked about the percentage of our business that, that entails. And so I'm not ready to highlight that specifically, but we're aware of customers' value to our network and maybe areas that we can work with those customers specifically related to cost around serving their business. And so the behavior of our multiyear business is typically a little bit different than the constant change that we may face with customers that aren't engaged in multiyear agreements.

Look, the environment we're in today does present new opportunities for us. I think that the number of mini bids or the number of times customers are reaching out to us looking for an answer. I don't remember it ever being any stronger than it is right now. We have tremendous numbers of opportunities to talk to our customers about new opportunities. Not every single one of those opportunities is going to drive intermodal volume. It's coming in the door for J.B. Hunt's total book of solutions. And so we're constantly looking for that opportunity. I do think new business pricing has contributed to benefits in our network, and I fully expect that will continue through the remainder of this year and deep into next year's bid cycle.

I know Spencer may also want to comment on this.

Yes. Bascome, thanks for the question. And Darren, I'll kind of start where you left off, really around mini bids. I think the frequency of bids has definitely increased. You said extraordinary. It was actually a record in the quarter, the number of opportunities. And that comes across bids, proposals as well as reviews.

The main point on mini bids, I'd like to say is I'd almost like to get rid of the mini bid term. They are structurally larger bids as customers are competing for capacity to reset their networks. Our customers are still having significant challenges across their routing guides. And that gives, again, all of our services opportunities to step up and be the go-to for them and create opportunities again to hopefully get the right returns that we need on all of our businesses. So we look forward to continuing those conversations and working through and set our customers up with capacity plans that they can count on.

The next question will come from Chris Wetherbee with Wells Fargo.

I guess maybe just picking up on that point, Spencer, you're talking about mini bids. I guess we understand sort of how the bid cycle works and kind of what's locked in and maybe what needs to wait a bit. But I guess, how do you think about the back half from sort of a realized yield on the Intermodal side with the combination of mini bids and then maybe a little bit of an opportunity around peak season because we have seen some announcements from other folks about peak season surcharges. So maybe just sort of wrapping that all in and maybe how we can think about the second half, if there is going to be any change in what maybe we could see.

Yes. Chris, thanks for the question, too. I'll let Darren talk about yields and things like that. I think he's got a good answer for you there. But regarding peak season, I will talk about that. We do engage in peak season planning conversations at the end of the peak season of the prior year. So we've been in peak discussions since the end of '25. We do have peak agreements with our customers today that have proactively planned for the 2026 season. And then we're in discussions right now trying to get forecasts with our customers and setting up really our plan and sharing with them the cost to serve and execute peak.

So as far as that goes, I would say that peak from my perspective, is going to be similar in timing and shape. The import peak that talks about coming in early, that can happen early, a little bit later. But really, the lag -- there's always a lag from the import peak to the execution of the domestic peak because that domestic peak is really matched to meet their consumer demand. And so that's why I say the timing and the shape we expect to be similar, and we continue to have ongoing discussions to make sure we're set up for success with our customers.

Yes. Chris, let me just jump in. It's Darren again. I'll jump in on pricing change and magnitude. Look, we're not going to -- I don't have a forecast number for you or any kind of guidance. What I'll tell you is our Eastern network business behaves and trends -- tracks against highway competition, and we have massive opportunities coming in the door.

Spencer just highlighted that we're setting records with the opportunities. that we see, the gap between the highway rates and intermodal rates has grown in this cycle. And we have long time -- for a long time, we've said somewhere between 10% and 15% discount, fuel inclusive in the Eastern network is and has been sustainable for Intermodal. And we have a larger gap in the price today, largely because of rates that are now 6, 7, 8, 10 months old. So as we go through the rest of the year and bring on new business, we anticipate certainly closing that gap. I don't know what magnitude that presents in terms of the mix of the rate, how you model that. Just know that certainly the opportunity to improve pricing.

Now we're also faced with inflationary pressures. Driver wage cost is going to move up. The cost of labor is going to move up. Our rail providers are all going to be talking to us about cost challenges they're facing. And so we're looking for pricing to recover against inflation while also improving our margin a little bit. So certainly, as the rest of the year goes on and as we move into the next bid season, we will look for that gap from Intermodal to truckload to close.

The next question will come from John Chappell with Evercore ISI.

Darren, on the volume side, the acceleration from April through June and then we look at the second half of '25 or even if you want a 2-year stack it, it feels like it's an easier comp. So when you take that June number of 12%, look at potentially easier comps, the backdrop that you just laid out as it related to capacity, rail service, the spread. Is that a number now for volume in the second half of the year that continues to build off of that 12%? And if not, what kind of derails that, no pun intended?

Chappell, is that a guidance question?

No, no, no. It's a cadence question.

Listen, I think the demand for our services is extraordinarily strong. What you heard in some of the prepared comments is a lot of focus on disciplined growth. There were opportunities in the second quarter for even more volume that wasn't going to be sticky or might have contributed to even worse cost challenges for us. So we're being careful in ensuring that intermodal is the correct long-term answer for volume to onboard and convert from the highway. And I would anticipate that opportunity will continue.

We're also careful with our own capacity challenges. We need to hire more drivers. We need to onboard more drayage capacity today. So that can be a bit of a headwind for us, but we're -- but I'm confident in J.B. Hunt's ability to go out and attract and retain and bring on drivers for our needs. As the rest of the year goes on, I don't know how to give you a forecast of percentage change, but I know that demand is really strong for what we're doing.

The next question will come from Tom Wadewitz with UBS.

Congratulations on the strong growth and execution on the plan. I wanted to get a sense related to intermodal margin of just where you're at on drayage productivity and also, I guess, just rising utilization of containers. It seems like you probably had a period where productivity was below normal, maybe against a weaker freight backdrop in, say, '23, '24. And then I think for -- I'm not sure how long maybe in the past year, you've had some nice improvement in that productivity, which I think has helped. Just where are you at on like loads for dray truck and container utilization? Is that -- can that go up further and help your margin in Intermodal? Or is that kind of peaked out and you can't squeeze out more there?

Sure. So on productivity around assets and our people, our driver productivity as well as our tractor productivity has been extremely strong. And clearly, we didn't prefund capacity on the tractor front or the driver front like we have containers. So we do have excess containers still, and there are thousands of loads for us to go grow into that capacity. So certainly, volume growth in Intermodal will continue to help spread fixed cost out over the system and continue to unlock margin improvement.

I don't want to lean into driver productivity and tractor productivity on the dray front as being a major contributor to margin expansion. I think over the last 12 months, we've really, really did a great job as an organization and the team was very successful in finding productivity benefits, and that is part of our cost-to-serve initiatives that we announced a year ago. And so we've been successful there, but I don't -- I will always put some pressure on that team for productivity improvement, but I'm not looking for that area to really unlock margin expansion.

On the container front, certainly getting back to, call it, 2018 type container terms is certainly where we would anticipate to move. And over the last year or 2, seeing that improvement, while we stopped buying containers was one of the ways that has really helped that while we continue to grow into it.

The next question will come from Jason Seidl with TD Cowen.

Impressive quarter. I wanted to ask you, have you seen any impacts from -- at least early on from the Montgomery decision, both looking at ICS as well as the asset-based side? And then if you haven't seen it thus far, what are you expecting down the road from both a capacity as well as an insurance cost standpoint?

Yes. I would just say -- this is Nick. So I'll jump in on that. I would say that we've seen more carriers come to our platform and more carriers getting approved. So I think we have seen carriers migrating from small brokers is our speculation on that, trying to go to higher ground. Plus we have a lot of freight, as we've talked about, our volumes are way up. So I think we have a lot of opportunity.

But from our standpoint, the Montgomery decision, it's just increased a lot of focus in the carrier selection and broker responsibility, but we already exceeded the federal minimums, and we have dynamic monitoring going on. So no risk exposure increase there for us because we think we've been doing a really, really good job for many years with our safety focus. So -- but we think we have seen more carriers migrate over to our platform because of that.

I might just add, too, this is Brad Hicks. From a dedicated standpoint, in my prepared remarks, I talked about record pipeline -- how much of that is directly related to the outcome of that ruling is hard to say. But I certainly think that along with the other regulatory enforcement and the pressure on drivers, I do think there are examples where shippers want to ensure that they are partnered with the right reliable supply chain partner. And I do think that's a factor. It's really hard to pinpoint to what extent, but I do think that, that is showing up to some degree.

And Jason, this is Shelley. I would just add that in the driver market, there are specific markets that are as tight as we have ever seen. And so you're facing several markets where you're hearing customers come to us, but also really an advantage for us being on the asset side, thinking about how we attract, recruit and retain the best drivers. And so it is a challenge in the market, but I think it's a welcome challenge for us.

The next question will come from Brian Ossenbeck with JPMorgan.

Maybe just two follow-up questions on capacity. Shelley mentioned some of the markets are really tight in terms of the driver size has ever seen. Darren, is that a cause for concern on the drayage side? I know you have a lot in-house, so everybody else probably feels it more than you would. But is that something where if you're already kind of at the top end of productivity, maybe that becomes a little bit more of a challenge.

And then if you can just talk through a little bit more about the pulling back some of the containers off of the stacks because I know you're over about 90% right now for the first time in a while. So really peak season discussions already underway. What are you thinking about managing that stack and maybe bringing some of that more to the market?

Well, certainly, any time there's a challenge with the driver supply, all parts of the supply chain that hire professional truck drivers are going to face some amount of challenge. I think the third-party drayage capacity out there has been under some pressure. And so I do think we have an advantage against our competition given the amount of in-source -- the amount of company drivers we use. We do partner with outside carriers, though, and have had a lot of success for a number of years to do that, and that will remain an important part of our strategy. But as we see specific markets that are most challenged, we feel that as well. And it just sends customers looking for an intermodal conversion opportunity from the highway that much faster in those markets. And so it just kind of contributes to even more pressure in those markets where we're trying to onboard and hire and grow our driver base so that we can grow with customers, and we'll continue to work on that.

As far as the container supply, we don't -- obviously, we manage forecast with customers. We manage expectations. We have a network plan around our volumes. And as we see new opportunities come at us, we're going to look for how much capacity do we need to bring out of storage. That's been an ongoing process for us for well over a decade now. It's just been more visible with the amount of equipment we've had in storage over the last few years. So I don't think that our behavior around when to bring containers into the market is any different today than it ever has been, but certainly you can understand and appreciate the question.

Brian, I would say in Intermodal, it's a strategic advantage for us. And so if you just think about what the market looks like today, it is very, very tight markets. Our customers are coming to us, and that's a direct correlation to the service that they're receiving in the intermodal market. We continue to have strong service performance. I believe that's the operational excellence that's happening inside our intermodal business, and that includes how much that we actually in-source with our own professional drivers.

The next question will come from Jacob Lacks with Wolfe Research.

Maybe just a follow-up on that. How much capacity for incremental growth do you think you have today within Intermodal? And how do you think about balancing volumes versus pricing going forward? And then is the competitive backdrop in transcon improving at all?

So, first of all, on the volume front, how much excess capacity, I don't know. We've got -- I think for the last couple of years, we've said we've had over 20% available capacity for growth.

And then we grew 10%.

It's we grew 10%. Good point.

So, we'll settle on 10%.

And as it relates to the comparison of price versus volume, look, we're in this business and own these assets to generate a return on those investments. And so we certainly balance our pricing opportunity, the volume growth opportunity around how it can contribute to our network and add value and expand our margin. And those decisions are going on every day with the opportunities, and we'll continue to come through the door like that.

I think in the transcon competitive space, I do think it has behaved a little bit different than normal and would have expected a little bit more pricing strength there than what we've seen. That has just shown up a lot of rail competitor -- rail-owned asset-based I'm sorry, the rail control competition that we face has been a little more aggressive than what we've seen in the past. And so there's times when we've been able to use our service quality and our ability to provide benefits to our network to defend that, to win more, to grow. We're not losing share in transcon, but it has been a little bit more difficult pricing environment there.

Our prices are improving. I want to make sure everyone hears that. Our prices are up year-over-year in the transcon. It's just that the truckload capacity market is not as big of an influencer on that market as it is in the East.

The next question will come from Ken Hoexter with Bank of America.

Nice job on handling the double-digit intermodal load growth into flowing into results. Brad or Darren, if utilization up to 90% and you've got 10% excess capacity, where does utilization get to before you start buying equipment? And can you detail a bit more on the rail service level comments that you made? Are you concerned this is a cap on your growth rates near term? Is there any particular region or market feeling more pain?

Yes, Ken, let me start with maybe not necessarily correcting my statement. But I think just going back in history and saying, hey, we have 20% capacity and the simple math of saying we grew 10% would suggest 10%. I think there's still opportunities, particularly, and I'll let Darren support this comment.

When we're growing in the East, we have opportunities to turn those boxes faster. And so a load isn't necessarily a load in every instance. And so with the growth we're seeing in the East, I think there would be opportunities for us to turn this equipment faster. I don't recall there ever really being a time when we put out an earnings report and you see a length of haul in intermodal below 1,600 miles. I think we've had two consecutive quarters of that. And so the 31% two-year stack growth in the East, if that trend continues there's probably opportunity to get more productivity on that container. And so let's not just get too set in viewing that we only have 10% capacity.

And then, Darren, I'll let you take over from there.

Well, I think on the rail capacity front, look, when you start throwing the amount of growth that has come at those teams in pretty short order, everybody needs a minute to sort of build their plan, understand their resource planning.

I'm not at all concerned about rail service moving forward and especially just the commitment to growth capacity and having the people available for our rail providers to operate. And that's universal amongst all of our rail providers. Everyone is very focused on maintaining the right levels of their headcount and their equipment and just all of their ability to do that.

So will there be blips along the way if growth shows up unexpected or if we and our customers are unable to forecast it and communicate what's coming, that's what makes me concerned. So I think we're doing a really good job of highlighting information we need and the ability to forecast how much volume is going to come at us and how do we communicate that with our rail providers and everybody is very receptive and the teams have never worked more closely than they are today in preparing for this growth.

Hey, Ken, just to add, we are going to challenge ourselves on our turns on our boxes. If you think about a market that we have entered you do get the opportunity to think about the type of freight that you move and how efficient is the freight that you move. And so we'll have an opportunity to really get more efficient on our current boxes, and then we still have several thousand that -- or thousands that are still available and ready for growth. So between those two, we will not put in capital plans until we get confident what our turns can move up to with our base fleet first.

The next question will come from Richa Harnain with Deutsche Bank.

I guess just zooming in on some things. First, Darren, I think you said pricing was positive in transcon. So the intermodal pricing that we saw reported ex fuel going positive for the first time since 2022, that's not just driven by mix, right? It's driven by some real same-store pricing growth. I wanted to clarify that.

And then regarding a little more than normal transcon competition, it was encouraging to hear you're still able to defend share in the market despite that. But we're just trying to understand if there's anything changing that would prohibit Intermodal's ability to narrow its gap to TL rates over the next several quarters. You reminded us that could be a very attractive pricing opportunity over time given how wide the spread is. Just yes, I just wanted to see if there's any significant opportunity for JBI or if the competitive environment has changed to make that more or less likely.

Well, more than anything, I want to make sure 1% positive price on revenue per load ex of fuel is what we reported and is accurate. But as you heard, our Eastern growth is up 16%, where transcon was plus 5%, taking our -- that's a negative to mix. So the positive pricing that's out there is more has been material for us to overcome a negative from the mix. As we grow in the Eastern network, those loads are lower revenue per load units than a transcon load is. That doesn't make it works at a worse margin. That's not at all what I'm saying is it's all contributing to positive benefits inside our network.

But prices in the transcon, I absolutely believe will absolutely continue to close the gap back to what is their historical norm against truckload over time. It just hasn't it hasn't moved as fast because the amount of business that comes to us to convert from the highway to rail in transcon is just a smaller percentage of the opportunities. There's not as much of that business for us to go convert today as there is in the East. And so that's where you see a greater opportunity to impact price mid-cycle with new opportunities that present itself. It's just stronger in the East than it is transcon.

As we move into next year's bid cycle, I fully anticipate the opportunity to talk and work with our customers around inflationary cost and generate positive improvements in our margins on that business as well.

And I want to add -- hey Richa, it's Brad. I want to add something to that and kind of reiterate points that Darren made in some of his prepared comments, but also take a step back and think about our broader portfolio. I mean, in cycles past, everyone sort of understands that intermodal pricing lags truckload pricing. And pricing is typically what drives improvements in financial performance.

And I want to just make sure to reiterate, this team has executed extremely well on being very disciplined on cost, controlling what we control, being operationally excellent on safety and service and then obviously giving you guys the update on our cost to serve initiative. And with our two largest segments, both Intermodal and Dedicated that don't really have as quick of a movement in transactional pricing as what we've seen in ICS. And I think what we'll see in the coming quarters with JBT, our financial performance has largely been driven by what we can control with the benefits of what is happening in the market still to come. And so I fully anticipate Dedicated Intermodal, JBT, ICS, all of the businesses will have the benefit of seeing improved pricing opportunities. But what you've seen executed from the team over the last several quarters has largely been what we can control.

And so I know pricing is a big topic. We look forward to what the market presents us for opportunities to price to the value we create. Truckload pricing has moved up a lot. We haven't even really seen truckload providers print results yet that show a meaningful movement in contract pricing. And so we'll just see how supply and demand play out in the industry. But I think that there will be opportunities for us to take advantage of what the market presents.

The next question will come from Jordan Alliger with Goldman Sachs.

So a couple of things. One, I'm just curious, just coming on -- talking about Dedicated in the context of what you mentioned on the pipeline and against the start-up timing and how do you think about that modest EBIT growth that you talked about? I don't know if you provided an update around that or sort of the progression as we think from here.

And then I just wanted to come back to a volume question again. I think you had mentioned the shape of the peak could look similar. And I just wanted to understand if you mean similar to 2025 as we went from 2Q to 3Q and into 4Q.

Jordan, this is Brad. I'll start with Dedicated and maybe flip it over to Spencer to reiterate comments on peak. One thing, we've certainly seen the pipeline grow. It's at record levels, even higher than we saw at the peak of COVID. And so I do think that demand for professional dedicated solutions is peaking.

Is that a factor of the driver market and the pressure that people are seeing? Yes. Is it a factor on what we're seeing in the one-way rate market and the pressures that shippers are seeing? Yes. I commented already that Montgomery probably plays a role as well. But we can't forget that it's often a long sales cycle in Dedicated. Historically, that's 12 to 18 months. There are times when shippers are motivated to go a little faster to introduce those solutions and the value that those solutions create.

Hard to say at this point, if we're seeing that speed up decision-making, but we're really excited about not only where we sit with the pipeline, but really just the great performance that our team has had through execution, our safety performance of our professional drivers and really the great work of our field operations and execution supporting our customers and driving value.

A lot of our growth historically has been organically, and there are numerous conversations and opportunities inside that pipeline growing with customers that we already have. We certainly are always motivated and driven to grow our customer count and grow with new customers, and there's a fair amount of those opportunities inside of our pipeline as well. And so we're really optimistic about where we sit. Really excited about our performance coming through Q2. If you really think about close to 100 basis point headwind or pressure on what fuel did coming in at 100 operating ratio in terms of how our fuel surcharge mechanisms work puts us fundamentally inside of our target margins just fairly, but we're excited that we made that step.

I'll turn it over to Spencer.

Yes. Jordan, I think to your question, I would answer that, that it would be similar to 2025 and also as our volumes move from Q2 to 3 to 4 when I talk about shape and timing.

The final question will come from David Vernon with Bernstein.

Just a quick follow-up on driver wages. I mean, Shelley or Nick, could you maybe put some numbers around what kind of wage increases you're seeing out in the marketplace, a little bit about how you guys are positioned for the rest of the broader industry? And if you're talking to a generalist and you're seeing this -- sort of supply-demand problem with labor, if wages go up, where does the industry [indiscernible] labor from in this kind of market?

David, you kind of were coming in and out. I think we understand it to be the driver wage question and where do we think the supply of drivers would be coming from? We'll -- I'll let Nick handle that.

Yes. I would just say we are seeing some pressure on driver wages. There are certain markets where we've had high sign-on bonuses and those are increasing. The locations are increasing where we have sign-on bonuses. So the driver market is clearly getting tighter, but that really flows into our sweet spot with our corporate driver personnel and our ability to hire drivers and attract drivers. We think it sets us up very well across pretty much every segment. And so we're really excited about that.

The second part of the question, where you think you'll get -- I think it will pull some people that maybe have left the industry previously come back into the industry. I also think there'll be some good training opportunities for young people, but that's nothing quick that's going to solve that. So I think we're in for a longer-term answer to get the capacity where it needs to be. And I think there's always a good source of maybe a lot more military folks come in and some government getting involved on providing some training for people leaving the military. So there's some good sources out there, but there's not a good quick solution tomorrow. So I think that means capacity will remain tight for a while, which that means sets everything up for more intermodal conversions while we get that sorted out on the capacity side.

I was just going to expand on one of Nick's comments around our corporate driver personnel. And I think we've talked about this over the years, but we have tremendous experience. We believe that it is a competitive advantage for us, and we believe that we are positioned to outperform the market with respect to attract, recruit and retain drivers. And so while this pressure is felt across the entire industry, we think that we're best positioned to succeed when that pressure exists. And I think that we've proven that in our history in the past. And I think that we're already seeing signs of being able to win in this environment that we find ourselves in right now.

Yes. That's exactly what I was going to say, Brad. Just a couple of comments. This has been a long time coming. So very welcoming to be in this part of the cycle. And if you look at our performance over the past decade, and if you look at when the periods of tightness occurred, you will see the organization thrives during those periods because our customers get constrained, since you talked about that, and they come to who they trust and they trust our people. And so what makes it great for us to work with our customers is we can help them with conversion in intermodal, we can build better fleets for them, and we have plenty of capacity to help them on the highway and Final Mile side. So I think we are best set up and positioned to do very well in this cycle.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Shelley Simpson for any closing remarks.

This quarter was a great example of what we do best. Our teams stayed focused. We executed. We're serving our customers, operated safely and just made great disciplined decisions and that strengthened our business. And that will happen even over time, you'll see more strengthening. But the results reflect the strength of the foundation we've been building and the work we've done, we've improved our efficiency. We've lowered our cost to serve and the decision to retain our talent through one of the most prolonged freight recessions our industry has experienced, I believe, we are seeing the benefit and we'll only continue to see more benefit going forward. They've made us a stronger company not just for this cycle, but for any cycle. Because of the work of our 31,000 people, we are entering the second half of the year with momentum and clear focus on creating long-term value for our customers and our shareholders. Thanks for your time, continued support and can't wait to update you next quarter.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Started with the transport track here at the Wells Conference. We are very excited to be joined to kick off the morning with J.B. Hunt. From J.B. Hunt, we have Spencer Frazier, who is the EVP of Sales and Marketing. We have Bill Dietrich, SVP, Intermodal Operations; and Andrew Hall, Senior Director of Finance. So gentlemen, first off, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Yes. Well, Chris, thank you for having us here. We always like being a part of this event. And just looking forward to sharing some information about the momentum that we really started in Q4 of last year, and the strength of really our performance through Q1, and answer any questions that you may have. So looking forward to the discussion.

Absolutely. So that's maybe a great segue to where we want to kind of kick off, which is the current market. So maybe, Spencer, I'll turn it over to you a couple of comments. What do you -- sort of what you're seeing here in the second quarter. Obviously, capacity on the truckload side started tightening in the fall of last year. That's continued as we've moved into this year.

I think the month of May might have been sort of the biggest sequential step-down we've seen in FMCSA carrier authorization. So it does feel like things are starting to happen and maybe we can sprinkle a little bit of demand on the top as well. So maybe just a broad overview of what you're seeing in the end markets, so we can kind of dig into each one of your businesses.

Yes, you bet. Well, I do believe you've all read about it. You've seen it. Our customers are experiencing basically the increased enforcement of government regulations and regulations that were existing and a few new ones. And that started basically with some changes and announcements and audits and research done back last spring. And some of those things were implemented in the summer of last year, really started to take hold and show the impact, I'm going to say, in Q4 of '25, kind of post-Thanksgiving.

And we started to see it and feel it and that accelerated, to your point, through Q1 and is definitely being felt this quarter. And there are a lot of different aspects to the regulations that are being enforced -- we put out a white paper back in October of '25. We updated it in March based on specifically the non-domicile regulation implementation. And then we've seen different things, specifically with the Montgomery case, with the Supreme Court having a unanimous decision supporting really the broker liability changes.

And so a lot of different things have happened to impact capacity. And within that, our customers, we talked about this on the earnings call, they really started to understand what was changing in Q1 and this quarter. And I'd say at this particular moment, as we sit here and think about what could happen through the rest of this year and into '27, we're really trying to help our customers educate their internal stakeholders and their organizations about what could be a significant change and the dramatic could be speed, could be amount of change in this up-cycle. So the capacity-driven things that are going on in our market are significant.

And then also, I think one of the things I really like to look at are facts and data. And you look at the facts and data from the LMI, from related concerns about capacity. And if you think about our industry, I might give you a couple of words here. Since 2022, we've been an oversupplied overcapacity, what would be called a freight recession. Well, again, that happened for the last 4 years. I think if you look at the LMI and the PMI since 2022 and both March and May, respectively, they're now at their highs.

And even some of them are all-time highs as indicators of capacity challenges as well as overall potential demand. So I might pivot into that. And then Bill, if you've got anything you want to say on capacity, I'd love to hear it, too. But from a demand perspective, things that we've seen is the companies that we do business with, they always find ways to meet their customers where they are. And again, you look at any kind of macro numbers, but also specific commentary, whether it's a consumer or industrial, demand is solid. Customers are resilient.

And you can see that while there are potential things that could impact demand over time, I think that's the case all the time. But at this particular moment in time, demand is still pretty solid across our customer portfolio. And we do have winners and losers, again, in every industry, depending on how their value proposition stacks up to meet their customers' needs. And we see that too in our portfolio.

That's a great overview. So maybe let's dig into a few of those things. So I wanted to start on the capacity side, kind of that's been the big topic over the course of the last several quarters. As you noted, I think customers or you're probably doing a bit of education to some of your customers about this. I think as we're going through the wintertime, there's a lot of discussion about weather. I think it's probably pretty clear that it hasn't just been weather that's been driving sort of the tightness in the market.

So I guess as you think about some of these initiatives, whether it be the safety and regulatory enforcement that's really kind of coming down on the non-dom CDLs or maybe it's going to be enhanced carrier vetting post-Montgomery. Any thoughts you want to throw out there on what you think the capacity reduction might begin to look like on the truckload side? I think some people are beginning to think this is a bit more structural. So kind of curious your take.

Yes. Yes. I might say a few things, and then Bill, if you got some comments on it. I think structural is the right word. It is different this time. There have been capacity challenges in our industry in the past. Those things were typically met by rapid increases in supply. And I think this time, when you think about the regulatory impact of really stopping the importation, illegal, and fraudulent drivers in our industry, all in the vein of improving safety, that is a structural change.

And the ability for our industry to respond to that in the old way is just not going to be there. Now within that, we had some estimates that there could be an impact of 200,000 to 400,000 drivers. I think the non-domicile FMCSA's internal impact, they thought 200,000 drivers could be impacted. We've seen tens of thousands of drivers come out of the system so far and believe that we're just in kind of, I would say, the early innings, maybe the second inning, which could be a long inning of change from a driver perspective. And then just one benefit from that.

Obviously, safety on America's highways is number one. But additionally, this industry, like any other, will respond and find a way to do that. Well, the way to do that is going to be creating good-paying American jobs. And I think that lines up with other things specifically that this administration wants to do. And the challenge will be is how quickly and how significant the cost impact of driving that change will be because one more comment specifically around cost.

If you look at our industry since 2022 and really look at our cost categories, ATRI, the American Transportation Research Institute, does a great job with their annual study, and they study costs for carriers to operate. And every cost category has basically been up 30% to 50% over the past 5 years. So the industry has a catch-up period from a cost perspective to go through. And then secondarily, whatever this impact is from a driver perspective going forward is that we're going to have to invest in. So, I don't know, Bill, do you have any thoughts on the capacity side?

I mean I would just add from my perspective on operations, I've certainly felt that capacity crunch and has slowly ramped up recruiting drivers for Intermodal has been more difficult throughout the year. And really, the past 6 to 8 weeks has been even a little bit of an inflection point to Spencer's points around some capacity coming out immediately, whether that's from enforcement of cabotage or the non-domicile CDL piece. To me, that's part of it, but also new entrants. I think these enforcements of regulations are throttling supply as much.

So you kind of have a double-edged sword, you're pulling stuff out, but then a large majority or I think a large percentage, I don't know what percentage that is of new entrants tended to be maybe foreign-born, or maybe English isn't your first language will enforcement of English language proficiency. Do you want to be a truck driver and be concerned about being harassed when you're pulled over? Can you speak XYZ? So I think there's definitely more barriers to entry and pushing people to do other jobs than truck driving. So at some point, the correction is going to be very difficult, more difficult in the past.

So that makes a ton of sense, and I think lays the groundwork really nice for the next part of the conversation, which I think is the natural one, which is we're starting to see spot rates really inflect much more meaningfully on the truckload side over the course of the last several weeks, but it's really been going to your point, I think, since the fourth quarter, post-Thanksgiving time frame, we've seen these step-function moves. And importantly, we seem to be holding these higher rates. You spent a lot of time talking to customers.

So like you said, educating customers about what's happening here. How is the contract negotiation process kind of going? We're getting towards the tail end of bid season. Most implementation for you guys is going to be sort of 3Q and beyond. What sort of is the dynamic? I think you gave us an update last time on some of the highway businesses were kind of double-digit kind of contract increases. I know Intermodal is going to be less than that, but maybe if you could kind of help us understand what you guys are seeing.

Yes. If you think about our bid season, you're right, it is kind of winding down in this quarter and then getting ready to ramp back up here starting in July. It kind of goes July to June is the typical cycle. And within that, I would say going through the fourth quarter and through Q1, we saw a normal approach from our customers, pretty much staying on time, also the same types of discussions, not really anticipating or preparing for much change. But when those bids implemented, this is probably the biggest indicator of change in the market and customer behavior is the amount of mini-bids or rebidding that takes place post-bid implementation.

And the only reason that happens is because routing guides once implemented, start to crumble. They're falling apart. And that's what has happened at an accelerated pace. And I would say, Chris, really probably from March through today. And then if you think about what's changed in the mini-bid, it might not even be called a mini-bid anymore. It's almost a rebid of the entire network. A bid where there might be some routing guide fallout historically would be maybe a couple of lanes here and there, nothing of magnitude, maybe a few hundred loads, maybe 1,000 on an annual basis.

We're seeing almost full network rebids, rebids that have tens of thousands of loads in them. And with us sitting here today, if you look back at last week, I think tender rejections on Sonar were almost 18% -- that hasn't happened since really probably '21, if ever. So significant change. Our customers are feeling it. We're trying to work with them through the discussions post-implementation through this mini-bid process and then again, also setting up into the next bid cycle.

Okay. So it does seem like there is more of a real-time reaction function because we are seeing route guides fall apart, and so there is this more sort of incremental activity occurring.

That's exactly right.

Okay. That's helpful. And I guess as you start to think about that, any context on maybe how we think about what that means from a rate perspective, whether it be broadly across Highway Services or on the Intermodal side? We know that that's going to lag. I think there's traditionally a couple of quarter lag between what we're seeing on TL and then flowing through to Intermodal. But how are you breaking down those different parts of the business?

Yes. I think to your point, obviously, we can see everything that's happening real time in the spot market and what's changed there. And again, that impacts the broker world more significantly first, both on the rate side and also the cost of capacity. And then second, really having the rebid opportunities to change pricing from a contract perspective. Typically, highway comes next, and that's happening at the moment. And then Intermodal has the opportunity there as well.

And so really, our discussions are more forward-looking, talking about and trying to anticipate what the cost of capacity is going to be to make sure that it's relevant to service our customers' freight and also then the rates across all of our services and what we need to execute. But go back to what I said from an industry perspective, this industry is behind. It's been 4 years in a cost inflationary environment and a rate deflationary environment. The industry is still not healthy. It hasn't generated the returns it's needed to reinvest, and that has a catch-up aspect that's going on right now. So the magnitude of what could happen from a catch-up perspective, but also going forward on what we need to execute is still in flight and in motion. So it could be significant, as Bill said.

Yes. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the volume side of it. So I think it's very interesting for J.B. Hunt specifically coming into 2026 as we're seeing some of this inflection on the capacity side and maybe some incremental demand that volume is running at sort of peak-ish levels. I think record levels is probably the better way to phrase it for the Intermodal business. Margins are starting off on the lower side. You've done some self-help around that.

But maybe starting on the volume side, I would guess the selling proposition of Intermodal in this environment is getting a bit easier, but just coming off of already very record levels. So I guess maybe kind of walk us through a little bit of what the volume outlook might be here. We're obviously seeing the IANA numbers look reasonably constructive on the domestic side in particular, but I think there's been some discussion about peak season. So maybe talk a little bit about volume on Intermodal.

Okay. Well, I'll just say volume across the Board, I'll go into Intermodal, but volume across the Board for all of our services is strong. And again, when you think about the momentum that we had coming through Q4 and into Q1, the reasons for that is because I believe we're taking market share because our value proposition focused on operational excellence is creating something unique for our customers across all of our services. And that's something that we are very focused to continue doing.

And then as you also said, Chris, focused on lowering our cost-to-serve and making sure that we continue on this march of a structural cost takeout. And right now, I believe we're on around $130 million run rate. And that's something that we're making sure that we have discipline in our execution as well as in our pricing and that execution focused on service creates value. So that's number one that drives volume. And we think volume that's increasing in a faster rate than the overall market. And then specific to Intermodal, when you think about where we're at with Intermodal, our industry had prior to -- I'm going to say about 3 years ago, had a decade of inconsistency and inconsistency of service.

And that creates question marks in our customers about deciding, can Intermodal be a reliable part of my supply chain strategy? Well, we and our railroad partners heard that. And I would say now we're on a multi-year run, a very consistent, reliable service. And then really the proof point going forward, customers always said, okay, well, what about if it gets busy? Well, to your point, last fall was busy. Also, this spring was busy. In March, we had a record week in Intermodal. I think our volumes for the month were up 7% and so Intermodal is busy and Intermodal is performing.

And so based on great execution and then Bill's team as well, making sure that we treat each customer and each load to the service parameters that it needs to, to hit that mark for our customers gives them confidence. So confidence in operational excellence. And then you've got this capacity issue that now says, okay, our customers are going to struggle to meet their budgets. Intermodal is the right lever to pull for them to possibly get back in line on their budget line items for transportation expense, but the confidence in execution makes it then a more durable long-term change.

And that change, just one more comment. It's not just as easy as saying, okay, I'm going to pull a highway box out of a customer's location and put an Intermodal box in. There are things inside their routing guide, inside their supply chains, adjusting transit, making sure that their internal stakeholders are aware. So when they make that change, it's not just for an on-off switch. So something that we believe we're expanding the market with more highway conversions, specifically in the East as well as having transcon network efficiency, we're driving growth there.

That's a great segue. I wanted to ask you sort of about the East versus West dynamic. We typically think about the East as being a bit more truck competitive. So when we see what's happening in the truck market and what's happening with fuel, typically seems like it would provide a bigger opportunity for your network in the East versus the transcon, where it's a little bit better penetrated, a little bit more of a mature business, I guess, is the right way to think about it. So maybe some comments about how you're thinking about the growth opportunities and maybe the pricing opportunities East versus West.

Yes. Well, I'd say from a pricing opportunity, the gap between Highway and Intermodal has increased. And again, our goal is to try to make sure that we're investing in Bill's team and our equipment and also then working to close that gap. And so in the East is where it's the most significant, and it could be 25% to 30% depending on who is ever estimate you want to look at. And there's opportunity to probably get that back to a historical norm of maybe 15%, maybe 10% with the reliability that we've got.

And then inside the Eastern network, we had our strongest growth there in Q1, and I believe it was 8% and our transcon was relatively flat. Well, inside of that, you might ask why? Well, again, that's where most of the freight that Intermodal lost to the Highway in the past is now being won back or converted back. And then it also matches up with our customers' supply chain strategies. They've got a multiport and also regional distribution strategies. They are always trying to get closer to their customer.

And in the East is where that's going to happen, where that competitiveness and even then the length of haul that our customers look at, hey, can this convert to Intermodal, it was 1,000 miles? Is it 800? Is it 750? -- had a customer conversation last week that's looking at 650. So that's an opportunity, again, to expand the Intermodal market and provide a great service for our customers.

And we've typically thought about $550 is roughly the breakpoint, $500, $550.

Yes, that would be pretty tight. But I mean, again, getting down to that kind of short all Intermodal, you just never know what is going to be needed in this particular change.

Got it. So there's opportunity on price, volume opportunity and share dynamics there. You guys -- you noted that the $130 million of run rate on the cost side that you guys started the process on last year to get where you need to go. I guess as you think about '26 and maybe '27 because it feels like this might be a multiyear opportunity of catching up. How do you think about the cost opportunity? Maybe if you think about you have volume, you have price, and you have cost as different levers to pull on the margins. Maybe if you can prioritize and give a little bit of color on those.

Well, I'll say a few things, Andrew, you might come in. I know we've often talked about specifically with Intermodal getting back to our margin targets. And we're still working on that. Historically, I know we've shared that we'd like to get -- think we can get one point from volume, maybe one point from price, one point from efficiency. So that cost takeout that you talked about is having a significant impact. And really, I know the way that Bill is running his business with his team is finding great ways to do that, leveraging technology as well as thinking about how we serve each customer uniquely.

But you also look at the rest of our businesses, our Dedicated business, has had probably, I think, one of the most impressive runs on double-digit returns. I believe it's over 10 years. And that portfolio continues to get stronger. Our pipeline is significant. We've got a goal of growing 800 to 1,000 trucks again this year. That pipeline is increasing. And again, one other thing related to this capacity change and also the regulatory rulings on -- or the Supreme Court ruling on carrier vetting, that's going to help our dedicated business as well expand.

And really make sure, again, whoever you're working with, whether it's your internal private fleet operations or external, you've got the safest people managing and mitigating risk and also creating value. So that gives us a lot of kind of encouragement about where we're at in that pipeline and continuing to grow that business at the return profile it is. So I don't know, did you have any other thoughts on.

Yes. I would just say, you hit on it, Spencer, but if you go back to midyear last year, Darren laid out, we were roughly a 7% margin in Intermodal. He laid out a pathway to the bottom end of the 10% to 12%. So point from cost, point from price, point for volume. I would say on the cost side, we're executing $100 million was the target for cost-to-serve. We're on a $130 million run rate. I think you could say we're -- we've got the point from cost in Intermodal. So I think we've done a lot of good work there.

Bill's team has led a lot of productivity improvements with our assets and how we utilize our trucks and our drayage fleet. Volume, I think you've seen us outperform what I would consider normal seasonality in the past few quarters in Intermodal. So making progress toward that point from volume. To me, the area where we still have work to do is on the price side. Spencer talked about the dynamics there. Will we get a point from price in one bid season? I don't know; it might take a couple of bid season to fully realize that point from price. But I think we're good momentum across the board on all 3 of those aspects to get back to that low end of that 10% to 12% range.

Okay. That's helpful. And I do -- we got 10 minutes here. And certainly, if anybody in the audience wants to ask a question, feel free to go ahead. Either we can get you a mic or I can repeat it, but feel free.

How robo trucks attractive just curious if [indiscernible].

So autonomous truck question. So how do you think about the impact of that?

Yes. I think it's probably a long runway where autonomous trucks can help us. I think that especially on the Intermodal section, I think that we're already doing drayage for the rail. There could be a future where certain lanes, you can -- maybe in the South where you could use an autonomous truck. They have a long way to go around what is the cost structure when you deploy that vehicle? And can you make the economics work for your business? Currently, they're all tested well in the south. They're not prepared for weather.

So there's a long runway in my mind before you can find on the road solution that uses autonomous trucks. I think yards, yard work or maybe the rail terminals will get there to where on a private property, you can take advantage of that. But in our space, not so much. And then long term is even the highway infrastructure, if you were to ever think about it being competitive of other shipments, you need a lot more trucks if you were to try to compete with Intermodal in that space or anything like that.

But I think there are aspects of autonomous trucks that could help the current driver situation, make the in-cab experience for a driver more friendly, less intimidating. So maybe you could use the features of autonomous trucks in the future to attract new entrants. I think that's optimism that I see from that front that could help.

Our industry. Yes, I would add -- I think there's an opportunity to use some of that technology that's in an autonomous truck, put it in the cabs with our drivers today to make our drivers even more safe. We're on 3 years of record safety currently. But if we can take some of that technology and supplement that in our cabs with our drivers to further increase our safety performance, I think that's something we'd be interested in exploring and see a better use case in the near term than a full autonomous truck.

I wanted to touch on Dedicated as well. So you noted some of the dynamics around Montgomery being a positive for Dedicated. It also seems that when we get into these types of markets, you do see the private fleet start to pull back to some extent because it becomes more challenging to operate. Obviously, driver availability is going to start to get a little bit stretched here. So how do you think about the opportunity for Dedicated? I know that's the one segment, which I think because of the degree of predictability, you guys have some guidance out there for that this year. So not necessarily asking you to update that, but maybe think bigger picture about the opportunity around Dedicated.

Yes. We think that our business from a Dedicated perspective, we really go after private fleets. And I think that's a little bit unique than maybe capacity fleets that are branded Dedicated elsewhere. But in that private fleet conversion, our value proposition really comes into the opportunity to, a, provide talent; in the cab, also in the operations as well as then, b, mitigate risk. And risk, specifically, I want to click into insurance for a second.

Really, the potential changes, and none of us know what this impact will be on insurance in our industry requirements across the board, whether it's carriers, private fleets, brokers or others, I think, are going to change dramatically. And as that happens, again, managing that risk and protecting a brand, as Andrew said, we've completed 3 record years of safety performance. We're in our fourth year right now and have the same trajectory.

And that's something that really a private fleet, if you don't have the talent and the technology, it's very hard for them to keep up with the challenges of safety and then investing in the equipment. So the third is really -- so you got talent, you've got risk and then also capital allocation. And we think our opportunity to do that at scale or at each individual customer and give them an opportunity to focus on their business really strengthens our value proposition, which is why our pipeline is really strong right now and accelerating.

And that would be, I guess, as we think about the pipeline opportunity, as we see tightness continue, that would probably be something that builds and becomes a bigger opportunity beyond '26. So it starts to become something that's more of a '27 and beyond type of opportunity for you?

Yes, exactly. I think the other part of our Dedicated business, not only is the long-term nature of the contracts that we sign typically 5-plus years, but also our sales cycle. These are C-level sales decisions where people are saying, okay, we're going to take and rebrand our equipment with J.B. Hunt and J.B. Hunt is going to provide the drivers and represent our business. There are significant decisions and that sales cycle can be 9 to 12 months. And so to your point, as the pipeline increases, and that gives us more momentum as we turn the corner into '27.

I want to spend the last couple of minutes talking about ICS because obviously, that's a dynamic part of the market right now with what's going on in brokerage. So maybe the first question, just to get right to it is, have you guys changed your carrier vetting standards now post the Montgomery ruling?

Yes. And I appreciate that question. And we're confident in the standards and our processes that we had in place over the last several years way ahead of this ruling. So the answer to that is no. We haven't changed anything. I think the way that we go out and vet and select and also verify carriers are who they say they are. Drivers are who they say they are. We put those processes in place many years ago. And I'll also say one of the key catalysts, which is another big challenge in our industry is cargo theft. And so having to put in preventative measures to protect our customers' cargo really helped us get ahead of having the need to make any other changes. So we feel real confident about the processes we have to make sure we've got good, reliable, safe capacity in our ICS business.

Chris, I would just add to that. I think we were -- I think we consider ourselves above industry norm in terms of a carrier betting standpoint. We don't use conditional carriers, and we don't tender loads to them. And the carrier has to have been in service for at least a year before we use the tender loads there. So I think that is part of our standard today. And I think that's a little bit above kind of where the overall industry is from a vetting standpoint.

Yes, that makes sense. We've done some work around this discussion and you talked to some of the private brokers out there, they'll sort of suggest that maybe 50% of their volume is going down into like sort of the 20% bottom pool of the carrier world. I'm not sure if that's something that you guys think is right. I guess it would suggest that if there are some vetting standard changes, it could have an outsized impact on the spot market kind of goes back to the beginning of the conversation we were having about structural changes in the market. I don't know if you have an opinion about sort of how to think about that. I'm not suggesting you guys necessarily are playing on that end of the pool, but I'm kind of curious your thoughts.

Well, maybe I'll have to let them kind of answer for kind of however they've been doing business and how it's set up, but I'll share one bit of information with you. As we looked through and changed our processes, and really kind of implemented the standards that Andrew just talked about. We reduced our active carrier -- accessible carrier capacity by almost 50%.

Now that was many years ago and specifically associated with making sure that we had a carrier who is -- who they said they are and a driver who is who they say they are. And we eliminated 50% of our accessible capacity for our brokerage unit. Now what did that do? Well, it absolutely compressed margins in the moment. But was it the right thing to do to protect our customers' freight? Absolutely. So anyway, that's just an indication of kind of the steps that we've taken and the potential impact.

Yes, being ahead of the market probably there. Okay. And then I guess in terms of just market dynamics within ICS, we've heard of and seen more spot activity. Obviously, you're going through the contracting bid season. I don't know if what your thoughts are around gross margin progression, but it feels like maybe we're past the worst, but I don't know, maybe the spike in spot rates means we're not past the worst. I don't know if you have any thoughts around gross margins in ICS.

Well, I would just say when you think about being past the worst, you mentioned just a little bit ago that you saw May change again and have another step change. So that would indicate that there's still a lot of challenges out there from a capacity and cost of capacity. And also, you see spot prices continuing to accelerate.

So the one thing that I don't know that we know or our customers know is, are we going to have kind of a leveling? Or is this going to continue to accelerate? And time will tell on that aspect. But definitely seeing pressure in the cost of capacity continuing, and that's why we have conversations with our customers to make sure that they're working with us, so then their price point is relevant to that cost.

Got it. That makes sense. I guess as we wrap up here, I think the balance sheet and CapEx has pulled back. You guys have capacity. Maybe one of the last questions I have is about capacity because that has been one of the discussions in the market. Boxes stacked. Obviously, we're at record volume. There's an opportunity probably to pull some more of those boxes off. But how do you think about the relationship of box capacity to how you approach the pricing discussions with your customers? Is that the right piece of capacity we should be focused on? Or is it something different?

Well, I would say something we've shared many times. We're proud of the strategies that we've put in place regarding capital and prefunding our growth. And so we are built for this moment in time for our customers, and our customers know that. So they have confidence in that continued conversion from highway to Intermodal. And I think as we look forward, definitely looking at where our capacity is, box turns and all that kind of stuff, but specifically stay focused on the highway side. And our customers know that we can continue to grow into their business needs. As an industry, I think Intermodal still has plenty of boxes right now, but the opportunity to fill those up is happening quickly.

Chris, I would just add, you're right, we have -- we've prefunded our capacity in Intermodal. We're not pricing to fill boxes. We're being disciplined with our approach during bid season and making sure that the way we price our freight generates the return and margin profile we expect.

We are out of time. I could probably ask you 6 or 7 more questions, but I appreciate you coming here and spending some time with us. Always very helpful. So thanks very much.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

All right. We're going to get going with our next session with J.B. Hunt. We've got, to my left, Darren Field, President of Intermodal; and to my far left, Andrew Hall, Senior Director of Finance. We're going to get right into questions.

So Darren, maybe just start with the demand update and March volumes were particularly strong, up 8%. Just give us a sense of directionally, are we seeing that kind of demand strength continue so far into 2Q? And maybe talk a little bit about Eastern trends versus transcon trends and all that.

Sure. I think our Intermodal demand is -- has been what we would call pretty good. I don't have -- what I don't have is some statement that is the customer, the total supply chain demand cycle is really robust. I think it's just steady. And I think our execution and the way that J.B. Hunt has gone about business over the last 2 or 3 years is earning share. And so we're busy with our customers. What's missing is our customers aren't acting concerned or there's no fear or panic-sticking shippers saying, how am I going to meet my supply chain needs going into this fall.

So we're not feeling like there's this overarching really strong demand environment, but how our volumes are working is -- has been good. I would say that in some ways, it can always be better, but our years of really, really high-quality execution translated into strong growth in our Eastern network, and that continues to be a great opportunity to convert Intermodal business -- convert Highway business to Intermodal and help customers save money. And I think that, that strategy and that opportunity will exist for us for years and years to come. And this year, that's going really well.

And so is it fair to read your comments as underlying customer demand is fine and the volume strength is more about either broad Intermodal share gain or J.B. Hunt specific share gain. Is that your view?

I think our view is that J.B. Hunt specific share gain is having success, particularly in the Eastern network. And I think customers have been for a couple of years in a row, a little bit concerned that the truckload market was going to change on them. How can they hedge against that? Can they onboard highway to rail conversion now and really drive sort of bank savings today for a potential truckload pricing environment that's going to put their budgets under pressure. And I think we're seeing that play out. And now you're seeing the truckload market change around them, and it really is just amplifying the way our customers are viewing any opportunity they have to convert to Intermodal. They're going to want to do that as early as they can to get security in their capacity plan and their supply chain plan and bank some savings.

And then on top of that, you have higher fuel costs, which is maybe driving some behavior. I've been surprised it's not a big part of our customer discussion. They're not coming to us with fuel prices being the driver of highway to rail conversion. I think overall, our service and just the base case of the product we offer has produced opportunities for us to grow, and we're really, really proud of the work we've done over the last few years and feel really good moving forward.

Got to add and I have a feel there will be a lot of Intermodal talks. I'm going to weave in a little bit about the rest of the business.

Please, yes. That's great.

So I'd say dedicated. I had Brad Hicks at a conference last week, and he talked about a strengthening pipeline, especially over the last couple of months, it's gotten stronger in terms of customer size and also a broad scope of industries served there. I think a good data point to point out with dedicated is last year, we added 40 new customer names to our portfolio. And historically, once we get in at one site at a customer, prove our value, prove the service we can provide, that leads to additional growth opportunities for us in the future. And so I think we're encouraged about the growth opportunity with dedicated.

I will remind everyone that we need to see a couple of quarters of fleet growth again, get that wave of new trucks started up before you start to see that flow through to operating income within dedicated. But it's a business that's had double-digit operating margins for 10-plus years. And so I think we have an encouraging opportunity ahead of us there. JBT is another one, 4 straight quarters of double-digit growth.

Darren touched on operational excellence, the focus on execution of that business. I think we have outgrown the market for 4 straight quarters now and a lot of momentum there, same with ICS. It's been a challenging few years at ICS, but I think there's real momentum building in that business, 10% volume growth in the first quarter, successful during the bid season so far. And so I think you're going to start to see some improvement in there as well.

That's helpful. So maybe you're going to say don't anchor too much to March up 8%. But fuel, we saw some of the impact of fuel in March, but now we have a full -- going to have a full quarter of it. Truck rates are going up, but they're going up even more now. And based on what we learned last week, they might go up even more, right?

And by the way, like March, April, like probably still have relatively tough comps, maybe there were some pull forward ahead of Liberation Day, right, a year ago. And like the comps get easier, like it feels like there's potential, right, that we should be talking about double-digit kind of volume growth here. And I don't know that you're ready to give guidance around what volumes are going to be. So maybe to ask it a little bit differently and if you want to -- do you have the capacity for that? Does the rail network have the capacity for that right now?

So I really think that, one, the comparison period from a year ago is a little bit jaded in that you're right. May and June a year ago were particularly poor on import volumes. And so could there be if double-digit volume growth came at our Intermodal network? Absolutely. I feel like capacity is available and ready to handle that. We've commented for many quarters in a row, we really -- the rail service that all of our rail providers are providing to us is excellent, and we feel very confident in our rail providers commitment to the resources they need to be prepared.

What our responsibility to them is, is to not allow them to be surprised. So work with our customers on forecasting, make sure that we have good implementation of new awards planned and communicate with the railroads ahead of volume so that nobody is surprised because in this environment, the great work we've done on our service execution over the last 3 years, the last thing we can afford to do as channel providers between us and our rail partners is just -- we have to execute at a time when our customers are expecting us to be able to grow, and I feel very good that we're capable of doing that. I do think, look, we're not going to anchor on March as being anything other than it was a great month, and we highlighted that on the call. As we get into our second quarter call in July, I'll look forward to sharing more about the second quarter. But certainly, we feel great about demand for our product and what's going on at J.B. Hunt right now really feels like we've hit a gear with customers, particularly in the eastern part of the country.

So maybe just volume -- one follow-up on that on the volume side. So like Q1, local East up 7%, transcon flat. Do you think does that sort of spread continue? Do they both start to grow?

How do you I think the Eastern network has sort of foundational growth from this higher truckload price as well as just the excellence in service and a lot of great work. We were growing our Eastern network in 2025 also. So really, that's been several quarters in a row and feel like absolutely, there's no reason to believe that, that would change. The transcon business being flat in the first quarter, certainly, the comparison period from last year was really strong as there was some preshipping before tariffs implemented. And so there had been some rerouting of business in earlier periods to the West Coast to avoid the potential for an East Coast labor strike.

So there's just a lot of noise in those numbers. But the opposite is true in the second quarter in May and June, import volumes through the West Coast were really pretty poor. So does that set up for some growth in the transcon and certainly in the second quarter? I mean, it would feel like there's an opportunity to see some growth there.

That makes sense. And I'm probably getting way ahead of myself, but like any conversations at all like about peak season yet and early peaks or late peaks or?

I think that's what's been maybe the most and it's why you occasionally hear and it seems to be interpreted as caution from J.B. Hunt. I'm really not trying to be cautious on the demand environment. It's more -- we don't have a lot of dialogue from customers that are concerned about what they're going to do to cover their peak season needs. And I would feel more confident and even more bullish if customers were beginning to have dialogue with us asking about what capacity programs do we need to put in place today to prepare for a robust peak season. And we're not having that.

We're also not having customers tell us that they don't expect to have a successful Christmas shopping season. So there's not negative, but there's not a run of customers asking for a peak season plan. And that -- I don't know that, that's unusual for the last couple of years. There really hasn't been a lot of that dialogue because our capacity and the industry's capacity has really been able to accommodate peak season without a lot of stress. And so I'm anxious to see how that goes as we move into this year.

And then so maybe now let's turn to the -- a little bit to the pricing environment. So I mean we all see trucking spot rates up over 30% right now. We even said on your ICS, you're now getting double-digit type increases. J.B. Hunt Intermodal yields ex fuel were down 2% in Q1, and I get there's definitely some mix sort of within that. I mean, I guess at the end of the day, there's always a lag between certainly trucking spot rates and then trucking contract rates and trucking contract rates and Intermodal rates, always. Do you have a view that it's -- we're just in the middle of that lag right now, and this is very normal? Is there a view that the lag is going to be longer than normal, more pronounced than normal?

I don't have a view that the lag would be longer or more pronounced. I think that we're right in the middle of what I would consider normal historically. It's just -- it's been so long since the industry was able to achieve pricing improvements. We're all a little bit impatient and I want to see that happen right now. And I can assure you we'd like to see that as much as any investor would like to see. I think to me, Scott, we watch the -- I don't pay that much attention to truckload spot. I mean that might be the first signal, but we're going to watch the contract rates.

And today, our Eastern network, when we look at where we're pricing our contract intermodal price, inclusive of the fuel surcharge, the discount to truck has grown from 15% to 20% in the last, call it, 6 to 8 weeks. And that is the surest sign that I have that there's an opportunity to raise prices on that business. I think you do have to be in the 15% discount range in the East to really have sticky conversion from highway to intermodal and keep that business, but it just signals that there's certainly pricing opportunities to improve there. The Western part of the pricing world behaves very differently. It's less yoked to the truckload market, and we don't have near as much of an influence. Your competitive forces out West are really -- you're competing against all water cost, you're competing against intact international Intermodal and just a little bit of truckload capacity.

So that's a different world out there. But certainly in the East, feel like the pricing opportunity is right in front of us. And I would expect the cycle to behave just like it always has. There's going to be a lag in Intermodal. I don't know that we can close that 20% discount gap back to 15% certainly in just this cycle, but I would anticipate certainly our intermodal pricing opportunity to start to improve as we go through the rest of this cycle. And I think the next pricing cycle in 2027 is surely set for both volume and pricing improvements.

And just so like -- so you want to be at a 15% delta. You think you're at 20% now. And that's even -- I'm guessing like...

I'd like to be at a 0% delta, but the market is not going to allow that.

The market says you should be around 15%, you're closer to 20%. That 20% is even before we've really seen truckload contract rates go up much yet. I mean they're starting to, but like if you're looking at real-time data, like they haven't got up a whole lot yet.

Well, I think that even that expansion from 15% to 20% is a view into truckload prices beginning to influence that. And certainly, it presents itself with our own data today that really supports stronger pricing from Intermodal.

It strikes me like I try to pitch, hey, this is a great setup for intermodal, rising truck rates, rising fuel, really good rail service, and this is like the perfect time to do Intermodal. Could you argue though, just like thinking out loud, like the fact that rail service and broad Intermodal service is good and you have boxes and you have the capacity to grow, is that a limiting factor to how much price you can get the fact that like you don't have tender rejections or whatever going from 5% to 15% or whatever the right metric is for Intermodal?

I think that's where disciplined growth comes in and our approach to our own inflationary cost pressures. Look, in a market like this, when you start to see truckload rates climb, we're already beginning to see our own driver need begin to grow in our dedicated and Intermodal business and pressure from other carriers recruiting our employees. I believe we're beginning to see signs that driver wages are going to go up. That's just in front of the industry. And so certainly, the opportunity to go get pricing improvements, but also grow share from the highway because intermodal can provide capacity that a difficult driver hiring market doesn't have as many trucks in order to accommodate.

So really, there's a great opportunity to use the stronger service and use real pricing discipline in a way to drive -- still drive growth even though we do have enough capacity to onboard certainly business.

And then how about the competitive dynamic as it relates to the merger? Is that, in your mind, having impact on bid discussions on which IMC do I want to use right now? Is it impacting the pricing environment? Or I think it's more of a '27 discussion?

I think it's pretty muted. I don't have a lot of customers that are talking about that. I don't believe they're decisioning today at all based on the potential for a merger. I think that customers are waiting for -- certainly for J.B. Hunt to have more to say about that merger. And look, we've been pretty intentional in not talking a lot about that. You're not going to bait me into it here today. What I would just say is we're very confident in the programs we operate. Our customers want to hear from us more than they want to dictate to us what that will mean. And so we're anxiously awaiting the application, whether or not it's approved or not is the next phase of the whole program, and we'll watch that. And then as the year goes on, we'll begin to develop more thoughts about how we want to talk about that.

Just before we come to the back, just one more like follow-up on pricing. I just wanted to ask like you didn't mention it yet today, but the last earnings call, the last bunch of calls, I hear more about like headhaul lanes and backhaul lanes. And I guess I don't necessarily recall like so much in prior cycles discussion around that. Like is this -- I just want to say, again, is this just very normal that like headhaul lanes, pricing goes up first and backhaul always lags? Or is this sort of a new phenomenon?

I would say the backhaul pricing world is behaving like it always has. It's ultra competitive. It's very difficult. We probably -- it's really valuable business to anybody that works in our industry would love to have a business that positioned their equipment into headhaul markets like Southern California, for example. So that part of it is very normal. I think what I would consider a little bit more competitive is the pricing packages that we've seen off the West Coast in the headhauls has surprised us at the competitiveness. And it feels like there have been some incentive programs included that are a little bit different than what we've ever seen before. And so I would call that being the thing that's a little unusual.

And we've seen where customers are telling us that UP has offered some incentive programs for volume regardless of which channel brings them the load. So that's kind of new at least. If it isn't new, it's the first time our customers are highlighting it as a reason that they don't like the prices we've offered.

Okay. And there's a question in the back.

Yes. Maybe more of a point of clarification, but I think when you talked about truckload rates and the impact on driver wages, I can see how that would translate through to dedicated, but it sounded like you said Intermodal also experiences quite a bit of inflationary pressure from that. Is it the same labor pool? I would have thought there would be more segmentation, but maybe just sort of a clarification.

No. qualified CDL holders are certainly needed in both dedicated and Intermodal. In a lot of cases, the jobs are -- have some similarity. I don't want to act like they're identical. They're not. The -- but look, almost half of our drivers today are in day cabs. So they come to work in their personal vehicle just like any of us would and they work their shift and then they go home. And so -- and that's for dedicated and Intermodal combined and attracting those drivers is, in some ways, similar. If anything, the dedicated jobs sometimes have characteristics that are even more difficult.

So I would say there's even more wage pressure at dedicated. But in general, a CDL holder, a driver today, it's getting harder and harder to hire them really all over the country, and we're beginning to see that we need to implement sign-on bonuses, and that just is a signal that there's inflationary pressure coming at all aspects of the driver market, no matter what kind of job it is, CDL holders are going to become very hard to find and the market is going to have to adjust and adapt and certainly include some of the pricing improvements will find their way down to -- certainly to the driver.

So maybe I'll do a couple of follow-ups on that question. So what is your exposure to like that cohort of drivers, non-domicile, whatever you want to call it, that you think is at risk? And then I don't know, maybe, Andrew, if you want to take like the broader Montgomery question of what do you -- how much incremental capacity you think this takes out of the market? What does this mean for ICS? What does it mean for the other businesses at Hunt?

Well, quickly on the non-dom drivers. I think that J.B. Hunt, I don't remember exactly how we shared. We have over 22,000 drivers in total, and I think we had around 300 that fell into the non-dom category. And so it's not a significant headwind for us. But certainly, those drivers have been good drivers for us. So we're -- we certainly understand regulatory change, and we're going to follow the regulations just like anybody would expect of us. But I don't anticipate that to be a really big headwind certainly for us.

I think the biggest factor in certainly, the non-dom impact to, call it, maybe as many as 200,000 drivers was certainly as an industry, I think that's significant, and that's finding its way into the market. And then just the role that capacity that originated in Canada or Mexico that might have executed domestic U.S. shipments and they termed the term as cabotage, and that's really taken some capacity out of the market as well. It's just putting pressure on transportation supply in the U.S. for other drivers, and now you're beginning to find that bubble up into our ability to hire more drivers. There have been a number of schools closed. And so the industry is probably not producing newly trained drivers quite as fast. And so there's a lot of potential headwinds coming at the industry on the driver front.

Yes. So the Montgomery case, I know we got a lot of headlines when it got announced last week. I'll tell you, we came to work Friday and nothing changed for us in ICS in terms of how we -- that carriers or onboard carriers. I think our carrier requirements are based on what we know today, above kind of industry average. Carrier has been in service for a year before they -- we will use them. We don't use our tender loads to conditional carriers.

I think the struggle is 90% of the carrier base doesn't have a safety rating from the FMCSA. And so it's tough to know exactly. But based on what we know today, we think our practices are above industry average. What happens immediately I think it's unclear if there's an immediate impact. I think over time, the -- how shippers react to this, will they tender more freight to asset carriers or to large brokers have scale and then have financial security and have more insurance, that could change the industry. Do insurance companies require brokers to have -- carry a higher line of insurance, unknown. So I think over time, medium to long term, this is probably a positive for the industry in terms of rates going up because insurance has to -- costs are going up. But in terms of immediate impact, I don't know that there's much that we see right now that's going to change the way we do business right now.

And like putting your Intermodal hat on, does it get you like, hey, another reason why truck rates are going up even more, I'm even more excited about intermodal now?

Well, certainly, any opportunity that we have to be a supply chain answer for a customer needing truckload capacity, we get excited about that. I think we're cautious on how quickly this will translate into something real in the market and when does a customer begin to decision differently on what -- who they're going to use to source their capacity. But certainly, our -- any kind of tailwind we can find, we're going to certainly appreciate that.

I don't have a ton of time. So maybe just quickly, we were talking earlier what now feels like very old news and maybe not even any news at all, Amazon. What's your quick view on what, if anything, has changed here?

Amazon entered the Intermodal industry during COVID. They bought containers. They've been a supply chain services provider for a number of years. I was -- I don't want to comment on their announcement other than I was surprised that it got all this press and that they've been doing that for a number of years. It didn't -- we've been -- we have competed with them as a service provider in a number of instances and feel very confident that the quality of our service, the quality of our capacity, the consistency in which we operate our business, we're going to outperform any competitor there is out there regardless of what color your container is or whomever. So we feel really confident in our position regardless of what they do.

And then just a longer-term thought question. What do you say to someone that says, I get it, Intermodal makes sense, but what about autonomous trucks?

Autonomous trucks can complement Intermodal. I don't view it as a potential risk. It feels like if the idea is let me buy a bunch of trucks that drive themselves and burn fuel all the way from California into the -- it just doesn't feel like the kind of thing that would be wise. And certainly, the railroads will react and will have something to say about the competitive risk that autonomous trucks might have.

Again, one end of every Intermodal load is a rail yard, and so you can map that facility out, and there's a way to make autonomous trucks at some point be supportive of growing Intermodal business. But we're going to be cautious because we've just -- nobody can actually tell us what an autonomous truck is going to cost to serve the business. We want to understand at some point, what's it going to cost, what are the capabilities? And then does it take people there to hook up containers, hook up air hoses, there's still going to be a lot of coordination involved with making that whole process work.

Andrew, just a quick dedicated one. You made a couple of comments earlier, but like where are we in terms of when do you -- ultimately, when does dedicated start growing again?

Yes. I think we've -- that's one business where we're going to give you guidance, I think we have the most visibility to. And so I think Brad Hicks has said we expect to return to growth this year, 800 to 1,000 net truck sales is our target every year. We had a strong start to the year, 285 in the first quarter, I believe. And so that's a good start, 385 to end last year. So it's a couple of good quarters of sales. I would expect that you should start to see the fleet return to growth again this year, which would lead to, I think we've said modest operating income growth for the full year.

And then, Darren, I don't -- I really don't want to disappoint you. So I will end on a margin question because I know you've been missing it all right. We're getting margin improvement in Intermodal even before price has turned. Does that give you more confidence in sort of getting back to the 10% to 12%? Does it -- should we start to think, hey, there's potential to do better than that 10% to 12%, you used to have an 11% to 13%, right? How should we think about what the momentum in margin you're already seeing even before we get price, what does that mean?

I think it might have been a year ago, I said, ultimately, we need 3 points of margin improvement. A point needs to come from volume, a point needs to come from cost and a point needs to come from price. And I think we've come a long way on the volume and cost side and price is yet to contribute. Certainly, we're in the early stages of seeing pricing begin to be an opportunity to help us improve our margins. Look, I'm going to just say we need to get back inside our long-term targets of 10% to 12%.

Certainly, in the past, we've been at 11% to 13%. Back when we lived in that range. Revenue per load was significantly less. And certainly, that's what I think our ROIC kind of targets required. Today, a 10% to 12% will produce an income line that will produce an ROIC that would be very reinvestable, would make our investors really proud of the business and gets to a point where you're really able to grow and sustain it. I think that when you get in that upper end of that boundary, there's other constituents, whether it's customers or railroads are all going to say, "Hey, that might be a little bit too much for you." And so there's an element of pressure on the top end of that margin range. But certainly, for now, our mission is to as quickly as we can, get back to at least 10%.

Darren and Andrew, we got to wrap there. This is great. Thank you guys so much.

Thanks.

Great. Next up, we've got J.B. Hunt. We welcome Brad Hicks, EVP and President of Dedicated Contract Services; Josh Phelan, SVP of Truckload Operations; and Andrew Hall from Investor Relations. We welcome Brad for his fourth time to our conference. Andrew and Josh to their first BofA event, but this is J.B. Hunt's 18th time attending the conference in the 25 years I've hosted. So glad to have you here with us. Thank you very much for your continued support.

And Brad and Josh, I guess let me just open it to you for your initial thoughts on the state of the market? And maybe what 3 key things you want us to take away from here today?

Ken, thanks again for having us. It's always a pleasure to be here. When we think about the market, clearly, we've seen changes. We saw strength I guess you could call it starting in Q4 that has persisted through. We're seeing a pretty meaningful adjustment from a spot capacity rate standpoint, that's finding its way into contract now, which is typical. We're seeing difficulty in -- more difficulty in the driver market today. We think that 1 of the 3 that I'll just highlight right now is just the category of regulatory. That's definitely influencing because quite frankly, we're not really seeing any demand lift.

Now I wouldn't suggest that we've seen a fall in demand. I think it's been pretty steady for the past -- or year-to-date, let's say. And I think that we've done an excellent job on our strategy as an organization, which we're really focused on disciplined growth through our operational excellence. We've highlighted that to you and everyone through our lowering cost to serve initiatives that we're proud of the progress that we continue to make there because we do feel like we have to continue to repair our margins, which is part of our strategy. But that -- going back to the regulatory environment, as I commented there, that's causing capacity to exit really on the front of a non-domiciled driver situation that really state by state, everybody is kind of approaching that a little differently. So it's not really a hit the eject button and all that capacity exits. It's a slower drip, if you will. But more recently, we've had a state like Indiana that turn them all off. And I think even New York is contemplating what their next move is going to be due to some, I guess, pressure on federal funding to take action.

So non-dom is one category. We have the English language proficiency being enforced. It wasn't a new law. They're just now enforcing it to the standard it was expected to. That's causing capacity to exit. And then we've seen cabotage, which is where we have Mexican and Canadian-based carriers come in and run domestic freight, which is illegal and has been for many years also being enforced. So really, there's not new laws. It's really more around the enforcement, but that's what's causing, I think, the capacity tightening.

Largely, we also have exits -- normal exits at this part of the cycle where carriers just can't endure the current economics any longer and have to close up shop. But beyond that, we continue to see pressure on schools. There's been thousands of driver training schools that have been shut down. There's been a lot of pressure on ELD providers, which really dovetails into today, and I'm sure it's gotten discussed perhaps already, but Roadcheck or the DOT blitz, if you call it that, kicked off today and they're highlighting that ELD is one of their key areas. And so anxious to see. I know it will tighten up, Josh, I don't know if you want to offer any more color on the macro.

Yes, I just think the capacity tightness is real. Again, we started feeling it let's say, early part of Q4. And seasonally, you expected that tightness to moderate a little bit as you start Q1, and I think it just continued on. So the supply side correction for all the reasons Brad talked about, I think is on solid footing at this point. And it's translating its way into the customer market, albeit it was slower inside the bid season. It's half the bid season that was really cooked when really things started to get a little more optimistic around how long that was going to stick. But we see it continuing. It could get worse. I think the only really unknown is the demand side.

Yes. Let me start off with that, Brad, because you just -- you started off by saying almost all regulatory, no demand lift was what I heard from you. I'm surprised. So our truck shipper survey would indicate we're kind of seeing some sort of demand improving outlook from a shipper point of view. But you're just seeing it really all from the supply side coming out in terms of...

I think we saw demand in Q1 be better than what we would have anticipated. And I think our customers did feel optimistic. What I would say is that as we've moved on from that Q1, I would say steady is the word at least for sure in Dedicated. And I think it does largely apply to our other businesses. What I would say though, Ken, is that I think that we've done a fantastic job at taking market share. Josh has had, what, 4 consecutive quarters of double-digit volume growth.

We saw great, really strong Intermodal growth in Q1 and we've seen really double-digit volume growth in our brokerage segment more recently as well. So I feel like we've done the right things at this part of the cycle with us focusing on operational excellence. The work that we've done on lowering our cost to serve has been really exciting. Our entire employee base has rallied around that. And we've had really unique ideas that have contributed. And that manifests itself in a lot of value back for whether it be lowering our cost to our customers that can help us drive more volume in the future, whether that can help us go to the bottom line where we absolutely need recovery in margins in all of our businesses, some more than others in terms of how far they're off just because of all the inflation that we've experienced.

So doing those right things, I think we announced that we're up to $130 million run rate, up from Q4 of last year, where we had noted a $100 million run rate. So we're not satisfied, and we're not necessarily complete. And so maybe we'll continue to keep you apprised of that. And then part 2 of that is we've also signaled kind of transformational work through leveraging of technology, and we're still not quite hitting stride on a lot of those initiatives. And so I do think that beyond the lowering of the cost, there's more into the future that we're going to continue to create value, driving efficiencies.

And with our strategy being really to grow and not having to add. And so it's kind of -- here's our teams and our staff and how can we scale leveraging technology as we grow from here, and we're really excited about the work that's in front of us there.

Ken, on demand, add on to what Brad said. I think if you look at the first quarter, you go back to the fourth quarter, we said supply kind of drove the tightness. First quarter, I think the big change we saw was supply still continue to come out, but we saw demand a little bit better than we thought. We don't give intra-quarter updates. But I think Darren said on the call, based on the forecast and what he was saying in Intermodal, we didn't see demand falling off a cliff or a big pull forward in the first quarter. We kind of felt steady there.

As I look across end markets, I think food continues to be good from a demand standpoint. Obviously, industrial, PMI has been up 4 months in a row. So industrial demand feels okay. I just don't think we'd characterize the overall demand environment as robust by any means, more steady kind of okay. As you know, the big beneficiary for Truckload would be housing, and we haven't seen any real movement there to get us excited about that potential market.

Yes. I think it's marginally better. I think supply is driving the rates though, is how we would see.

So Josh, what 2 to 3 signals would tell you this freight market is actually turning versus just capacity improving aside from our truck shipper survey?

I mean I do think we've seen a rebound in the manufacturing side. So I think you said 4 straight months of expansion. We are seeing quite a bit of bid activity outside the normal cycle. So that's something we look at. That could be supply driven to the churn bids, but we're seeing a lot of opportunity with our customers outside of just the main bid. So it's really probably the biggest key that we focus on. Obviously, rates are an outcome, and it's been -- it's always competitive, but the ability to raise rates exists again for the first time in 3 or 4 years.

Again, the customers we talked to, I think they were a little surprised that the Q1 wasn't strong. A lot of unknowns, obviously, with what's going on with energy prices and whatnot, but they had surprising Q1. They're unsure about Q2. But I would say the difference between '25 and '26, our customers, for the most part, were pretty pessimistic heading into '25. I won't say they're optimistic, but they're not pessimistic heading into '26. So it gives you a little comfort that demand is going to be marginally better.

So the bids outside normal or the ability to raise rates could just be the supply side, doesn't necessarily have to be signals of demand side, which is why you're saying it could still just be flat on the demand side overall. All right. So Brad, let me jump to your -- to Dedicated, right? So moving to your specialty, remind me, the sales target isn't now 800 to 1,000 new tractors?

800 to 1,000 net adds.

Okay, net adds. And the fleet itself was flat, right? So you're working to offset churn.

We had a good Q4 in sales, and there's always timing and we don't publicly disclose the timing of when we sell a deal versus when it implements. But we had pretty decent starts in Q1, so we did have some offsets with some either downsizing at existing accounts, melded in with a couple of losses. But I am optimistic. I think I mentioned this on our Q1 call that we -- our pipeline is sitting at record levels right now.

We added 40 new names last year to the portfolio, and that's always an entry point for us. That's always the hardest sell, is the first one, right, with a shipper or a prospect. And when we get our foot in the door largely, we prove our value proposition and then we look to grow inside their organization in other locations. And that's kind of been the recipe of our success for many years. And so I'm really excited about where we sit today. I think that we've done an outstanding job at managing our profitability, albeit we're not quite at our range, but we're really close. And considering the backdrop of the last 3-plus years, I'm very proud of our team's effort there. And so the fundamentals are there.

We talk about disciplined growth and it's really important when we transact in Dedicated that we have the right components. We have the right economics. We have the right term. We have the right equipment. And that's what enables for that forward view of success inside of Dedicated. So we feel really good about that.

Do you think that then turns '26 into fleet growth? Or is it still a focus on utilization first?

Yes. We're not -- right now, we're looking to grow as much as we possibly can. And so we haven't slowed any growth, although we did see the customer behavior last year and late last year and even earlier this year, be a little bit slower to their decisions. And I think that the macro environment, the tariff environment had just the uncertainty and maybe people were taking longer. Typically, we work a deal it's 12 to 18 months. And so we had deals that were at that juncture in time, say, 6, 9 months ago, and then they stalled out a little bit. And it doesn't mean that they're lost opportunities. They've just been tabled.

The shippers had other priorities that revealed themselves that took their resources in time. And I do think many of them have started to revisit them. We've seen a little bit of a pickup in the timing speed thus far this year. I think the healthier, larger pipeline is an indication that more people are thinking about what the next 6 to 18 months are going to look like on capacity and how can they maybe think about securing in a dedicated solution that will make sense for them, where perhaps maybe have been a combination of dedicated in one way or maybe just one way, but can we craft a solution that creates the right value proposition and for them to consider a longer-term commitment on that business.

Now I do want to say that we're not in the business of doing what I would call capacity fleets in our Dedicated segment. We feel like Josh' segment, JBT and even ICS are better suited for a pure capacity solution. And so we really do want it to look and feel like our version of Dedicated. Is it a private fleet conversion? Does it have the characteristics that Dedicated is going to stick in any cycle? Because the last thing we want to do is just grow really fast when times are good and then immediately when the market shifts back, all that business goes from dedicated back to one way. And so we're very intentional about making sure that we maintain our discipline around that.

The other thing that we're seeing is the driver market is tightening. We're seeing that not across the board, but certain markets and pockets, we're seeing it be more difficult to recruit and hire. We've had to reintroduce some sign-on bonuses. That's always one of the levers when things get tough. If I take you back to kind of the peak of COVID, call it, '22, we probably had sign-on bonuses at 90% of our jobs. As of the last 2 years, it's been 0. And now we're starting to see those find their way back in. We're seeing tightness in markets like Texas, and then also kind of the Rust Belt, I think Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. We think that cabotage is a factor in us seeing the driver tightness in those markets along with the other regulatory things that I mentioned. And so I think that that's just how it starts, right? And Ohio has long been a tough market to hire drivers, but it's tougher today than it was 6 and 12 months ago. And then I think you're just going to see other parts of the country continue to be more demanding.

And what that means is, listen, we're going to need driver wage. And so not only do I need to repair margins, I'm going to have to account for wages that are going to be higher in the future than what they are today. And that's where I think it gets pretty realistic. When you hear Josh talk at least this morning in some of our other sessions, talking about what he thinks the 2-year cycle for what rate needs will be, it starts pushing 20%. We've not been at our return targets for a really long time. And this business takes a significant amount of capital, as you all know, and we deserve a fair return for our shareholders and our risks.

So let me drill that down to understand that 20% then. So you're talking about revenue per tractor at 2% in Dedicated in the first quarter ex fuel. What are you talking about?

Mine is going to be a lot less than his. We do have rate increase and...

Truckload and ICS -- market rates today up 20%.

Well, we think that they're going to go up through this cycle and into next year's bid cycle, we think we'll see them be at or north of 20%.

So a 2-year stack of 20% being and then 1 year half that -- can you get half that level to start?

I don't think you get a run rate of -- you might get a run rate of half by the end of this year, but you're not going to realize half this year. Is that fair to say?

Yes, I think you can get double digits, back half of bid season, but that won't be a full calendar year rate increase.

And in Dedicated, not to -- I guess I was bouncing around from company to my BU. So I apologize for that. Most of our agreements have terms that govern the rate movement. And typically, we see that being in the 2% to 4%, I would expect it to probably be in the 3% to 3.5% if I were going to dial that in a little bit. But when radical changes that...

That's for this year. That's in the bid season, then when you...

No bid season, just our annual...

As you get through the year, we'll be going run rate of about 3%, 3.5%.

Yes. When we have radical shifts in other cost categories like driver pay, there are times where that doesn't keep up and we've seen those. We saw it in the peak of COVID. We saw it in the ELD mandate back in '17. We saw it in the tightening of the market back in 2012, 2013. It will cause us to need to have different types of conversations with our customers because we want to be successful on their behalf, and they want to make sure that their trucks stay full and their freight gets moved. And so there are times when we have to visit with them and evaluate, do I need more than that ECI, CPI. And this could be one of those environments, certainly in some markets, we're having those conversations today.

So if normally you produce about 100 basis points of sequential improvement from 1Q to 2Q. I know you don't forecast, but is there anything on the timing of whether it's surcharges or the pace of rate increases that would make it a stronger or now weaker than seasonal improvement?

You got to think about, well, one, we're not going to give guidance there. But two, fuel, the impact of fuel, it's going to be additive to the top line, dilutive to the gross margin -- or to the margin percentage. No change in operating profit dollars for us though, because it's a pass-through for us.

Yes. I mean it's fundamentally as fuel going back 6 months ago was, call it, $3.50 on the diesel -- on the DOE and now it's [ $5.63 ], I think, even as of today that's all coming through at 100 OR basically. And so it's going to be dilutive to our OR. I don't know if that's something we would publicly convey or not, I think. Did we?

Yes, we talked about fuel.

40 basis points for Q1, I think, is what it was for the quarter, but it really only flipped in March. So 1 of the 3 months was negatively impacted in fuel, and it still translated to a 40 basis point degradation in OR.

I think you can expect normal trends from Dedicated. I don't think there's anything necessarily that would cause it to accelerate or decelerate from our normal Q1 to Q2 progressions other than the fact that, as Andrew mentioned, the impact that fuel has on that view. There's always timing of when we onboard contracts and those type of things, but we've always...

But your comment on starting out to increase driver pay is not offsetting your -- the speed of the rate increase.

Well, it's moving that fast. I mean these are conversations that all have revealed themselves in the last 30 to 45 days. So we're working hard in the spots that we feel like we're going to need to take action. There's times that we've got to do that on behalf of our customer before we get the rate. There's times that it happens simultaneous where we get the rate and pass along to the driver. It will be a little bit of a mixed bag there depending on which customer. And then there's some that we're going to have to wait till the anniversary of that agreed upon rate adjustment and maybe that's July. But if we feel like we need to move now on the driver pay, we'll do that to protect service.

Ken, that's market by market. And then the sign-on bonuses that Brad mentioned, again, that's market by market. We're not talking $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 sign-up bonuses. We're talking small dollars still relative. We've gone 2 years without having to issue a sign-on bonus to attract drivers. It's only in a handful of cities now. And to me, that's a good sign of what is happening in the industry. And so the comment on rate, we were talking about earlier, you go back to the first quarter. Nick Hobbs, who leads Highway for us, was talking about double digits in ICS. So that's not new news. That's what we talked about in the first quarter. That would be the first place you'd see it. Josh would be second is where you would see it just because those are the businesses within our portfolio that move first from a rate standpoint.

And so I think the outlook for rates has certainly gotten better over the past few months. I think that's been echoed by every transport company through earnings season. There's more optimism there. But at the end of the day, it's up to what the market is going to bear from how much we can push rates and how much rate we're able to capture.

I just want to make sure I understand Brad's comment that you're not seeing -- to you, Andrew, that you're not seeing the cost outpace that it would destroy the concept of the normal improvement of operating ratio.

And I think it's consistent with what you expect for Dedicated.

Yes. Okay. All right. So let's switch over to Intermodal. Talk about capacity leaving the market and the benefits of rising fuel costs and the capacity leave creates more demand. Do we have to wait for bid cycles before seeing that volume improvement? I guess revenue per load was down last quarter ex fuel. How quick can that inflect given the backdrop?

Revenue per load, the biggest driver there is going to be mix. So we're growing faster in the Eastern network than we are in the transcon, shorter length of haul. So it's lower revenue per load. You go back to -- we're still living with the results of bid season last year. If you go back to last year, we had modestly positive price in Intermodal. So we're still living with that from a core pricing standpoint, mix being the biggest impact on revenue per load. When does that inflect? I don't know. I mean we'll see what the new -- the third quarter of this year is when we'll kind of get our scorecard of how we did during bid season, and that will be the first time that you guys see the full impact flow through results. But I wouldn't read into a negative or lower revenue per load as anything more than the mix is the biggest driver there.

I think if Darren were here, he'd want to share that we've taken rate on our headhaul lanes. We've had to give rate on our backhaul lanes. And so that's what's kind of keeping us somewhat muted on the macro there, but we have had really good success at moving rate up on headhauls. And I think it will take time. And I wish we could predict better the timing of when the truckload started to shift relative to the timing of bid season.

We're probably not going to get a meaningful chance to move rate until the next bid cycle in Intermodal, whereas we have a lot more here and now opportunities in truckload and in brokerage. There's many bids that constantly come back through. We don't see as much of that in Intermodal, although we are seeing more than we historically do, but it's not a meaningful part of how their customers and that freight goes to bid. But that gives us a chance in JBT and ICS to move the needle a little bit faster.

And let's be honest. I mean, there's still this merger potential. And there's another railroad that whether -- how they're approaching, the economics with their channel partners. And is that putting more of a continued pressure in Intermodal for it to follow a normal course, perhaps. We'll have to wait and see. But I know that UP has publicly stated that they expect to grow as part of the merger and they're out there trying to figure out ways to grow as well. And so maybe that's putting a little lingering pressure on what the normal economics.

Darren talked on the first quarter call about different pricing dynamics between the East and the transcon, the East being more competitive with truck. We're seeing shippers be a little more receptive to price increases because that's their natural competition. You're historically, a 10% to 15% discount Intermodal to Truckload in the East. I'd say right now with fuel, you're pushing 20% to 25% of the discount. So I mean, quite a bit of savings there. I think it's important to point out that go back to last year, absent higher truckload rates and you had low fuel prices, we were still growing in the Eastern network competing against truck. We grew throughout the year. In the first quarter of this year, our 2-year stack was 20% growth in the East. So we're seeing a lot of opportunities for growth. A lot of that is driven by strong rail service. And so having strong rail service adds reliability to that network.

The transcon pricing is a little bit different. As Brad mentioned, there's a different dynamic going on there with the 2 Western railroads. It's just not -- also not as competitive with truckload. And so it's not as influenced by the factors that are playing in the truckload market as the Eastern network would be.

I mean if I'm a shipper and I'm hearing things like 20-plus percent in brokerage and 10-plus percent in truckload and [ $5.65 ] DOE, I would be pushing my team to do everything they possibly could to convert as much freight to Intermodal. That's your greatest value proposition in a way that they can maybe recover what their budget is or overcome the other hurdles they're going to face. But as this market goes, we're hopeful that we're positioned well. We believe that we've invested not only in our people and tech, but we've invested in capacity, and we believe we have a good runway of growth potential before we have to add one more container. And we can do that right here now. We don't have to work a deal and then place an order for that extra capacity and let it take months. We can transact on our customers' needs right now. And so if I were a shipper, I would absolutely be challenging my team to do everything I could to convert to Intermodal.

So not to mention this, let me follow up on that, right, because Intermodal loads were up nearly 3% in the first quarter versus a solid comp, right, over 7.5% last year, but you exited March with 8% growth, right? So you saw some acceleration, but you were conservative on the timing of the benefits to Intermodal, given fuel, your tough comp in April, you noted. Anything that should slow it down or accelerate from that pace?

Nothing that we've talked about. I go back to -- I think there's certain markets and certain customers that are growing faster. And Darren talked about nothing we've heard from customers leads us to believe that there's a material slowdown or everything coming. Are we going to grow 8% each month? No, I'm not going to sign up for that either. But I think that we see optimism from our customers on what the outlook for the year could be.

All right. So maybe just talk about that mix for a second, right? So Eastern network growth of 7%. I guess, are you seeing benefits from switching to CSX from Norfolk, given that the competitive you were talking about the merger? Are you seeing service gains? And then on the transcon was flat, would you expect that to improve once we pass Liberation Day?

We didn't switch from -- we're constantly rationalizing which is the best channel partner to move our freight on behalf of our customers. I would say that if Darren were here, he'd be happy to suggest that both of the Eastern railroads have done a fantastic job at service and they both are motivated to grow Intermodal for their businesses, and they believe that they want and will continue to want J.B. Hunt to be a meaningful part of that growth story. I don't know if you want to add anything else?

No, that's -- I would just say there's -- I know that one switch of freight got a lot of headlines. There's freight that moves back and forth and that one just happened to get all the headlines. So I don't think there's anything. We're getting good service from both Eastern railroads there.

So again, I know on margins, I know you don't forecast, but I guess if we just think about typically flattish 1Q to 2Q performance in Intermodal on your margins. Is there anything on the cost side or a fuel delay or recapture timing that we should think about that would push us in either direction, positive or negative from normal?

Ken, I'd be happy to give you projections and forecast. But that guy will crucify me. So I'll let him answer that.

I would point out, again, fuel surcharge is going to be -- or the timing of fuel and the impact it has on the margin percentage. It will be the same. There will be an impact on Intermodal as well. From the cost side, we're continuing to execute on our lowering cost to serve. We have $100 million target on a $130 million run rate exiting the first quarter. No guidance on what that could be, but expect -- I think there's additional opportunity for continued improvement there. [ Anything ] just on that?

Yes. I think it's important. When we set that out, what about -- it was about this time a year ago when we started to signal that, and we definitely felt it was important that you would be able to see it because I think the worst thing that we could do is stand in front of you all and give lip service. And then we're saying, no, we got it, and you can't really see it. And I'm really proud of all of our 33,000-plus employees and how we've rallied around that initiative. And I think you can see it and it is making a difference, and it will help us on our journey back to repairing our margins without a shadow of a doubt.

I think it gives us an advantage in the marketplace that we've been that successful. And then honestly, we're just kind of scratching the surface on the next iteration of that, which we've signaled, which is kind of our business transformation and leveraging our investments in technology, not entirely AI, but AI is a key component of that to get more better utilization out of our employees to let our data flow easier with less clicks and all those things. And we've got -- we've been spending a lot of time focused on that. We have some early wins. We've made some public statements about investments in companies through UP.Labs.

We've stood up 2 companies that will help us, and it's largely AI-oriented in terms of how it's helping us solve problems. And every area of our company has really defined out where we see the opportunities and we're making decisions routinely on what we want to go invest in. We're also seeing it's kind of cool, but the pace of rate of change has been pretty quick. When we think about how we used to develop technologies that require developers and those type of things, and we're leaning into those AI technologies, and we're able to do it so much faster and more efficient. And so really excited about where we sit right here and now with what the future holds for the next wave of that. And I think that we'll continue to signal that and it will probably contribute to what we've already stated as our kind of run rate of those savings.

Yes. So maybe a good leeway to the next question, which I was going to ask Josh to jump in on ICS and Truckload as an ops guy, maybe talk about how AI is changing? How you manage the matching of freight and brokerage, the trailer pools in truckload? Maybe talk about the different level of bots or LLMs you're using to accomplish the tasks. Is that something we'll see improve margins near term? Or is that longer term?

Yes, I think that's a great question. We've been using, developing and working on either automation, AI bots for quite some time now. I think what's changed recently. It's just the confidence of what AI is capable of doing. And on the brokerage side, we're utilizing AI and still working to develop on AI, just around load prioritization, carrier matching, how do we make that better? If you think about our ability to track and trace, I think we've always had the data, but the data has been used manually, and now with the increased belief in the capability of what we can build around AI, I think it will help productivity for sure. But if it enables our people to work smarter, it will improve margins.

So I think it's both on the brokerage side. And same thing for the asset side and drop trailer. I would say trailer management has been very reactive, right? And there's a lot of data. I mean, we do have a digital twin, if you will, of our trailer network through our tracking. But if we are able to use AI for better demand forecasting, understanding dwell, understanding empty moves, making decisions instantly versus waiting and being reactive, our goal is to dramatically increase our trailer turns, which, again, would be productivity on the office side, on the people side. But if we increase our turns, we can dramatically improve our return on invested capital at the same margins.

Just to clarify on bid season, I'll come back to you on the bid season discussion you were talking about. I guess that's what 1/3 is done in 1Q, Q3, Q1 on Dedicated and then 10% in the fourth quarter? Or is that -- that's truck, Intermodal is more balanced, maybe just refresh us.

Well, none in Dedicated. So JBT, ICS and Intermodal, I would say typically 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 Qs 1 through 3 with -- not quite 1/3, call it 30%, 30%, 30%, 10%. Dedicated is 100% our pipeline and how we create our pipeline and how we're working with those customers to solve and create a solution that creates value for them. And so it's not any typical annual. Now as we have contracts up for renewal, that's when we go sit down and talk with those clients about how do we extend those and what needs to change and what other value we can bring that perhaps they're not capitalizing on for whatever reason. Maybe it's a good time to do a reoptimized delivery schedule on behalf of that customer to see if we can't remove a truck or drive utilization up. So we're always looking -- we have an internal proprietary program called Customer Value Delivery, CVD, we call it, and that's our continuous improvement program.

That's kind of our commitment to our customers that says, hey, when you buy us, you're not buying us to remain the same. You're buying us and expecting us to work in your best interest to constantly be finding ways to bring value back to you, which is typically through utilization. It always gets back to some form of utilization. Can we share resources with a sister dedicated account? So maybe I don't have to staff your fleet for 20 drivers every day of the week. Maybe I can shift some of your capacity to another one, I'll give you credits when I'm using that at a different either dedicated customer or a different part of our company. And so the larger we've become and the more density we have, we're able to take advantage of those type of opportunities on behalf of our customers better. And everybody wins, right? The driver wins because they stay more utilized, their paycheck remains whole, and therefore, they're going to stay with us.

The customer wins because we're leveraging their fixed cost of the fleet that we operate on their behalf by spreading that fixed cost over more of the variable activity that they have, and so it lowers their landed cost per mile. And so we're motivated and incented and I think it speaks volumes that historically speaking, our customer retention rate in Dedicated has been in excess of 98%. That's, to me, the most important metric is are our customers willing to stay with us after the initial term. And so we renew at a very high level, which I think is a good testimony that we have created value and continue to create value.

So we're over time, I'm going to squeeze 2 real quick ones in. Josh, ICS lost almost $5 million in the first quarter step down from the first 2 quarters. Thoughts on inflection and when the segment should turn profitable? I know you don't give targets, but maybe the path toward profitability.

There's a lot of momentum in ICS. 10% volume growth was good for us in the first quarter. We didn't see much change in our operating expenses. It was really gross margin squeeze from the [ tighter ] Truckload market, as we continue to get more spot opportunities and work through bid season to reprice that contractual freight, I would expect that, that would be helpful for gross margin.

I'll tell you, I'm not going to give you our plan, but we don't plan on ICS to lose money, how our budget was built. And so the expectation is that each business will generate return. And I think there's a lot of momentum in ICS that Nick's created there.

All right. And latest thoughts on the merger proposal, I guess ability for J.B. Hunt to succeed given long-standing partnerships with varied carriers, with Burlington out West and Norfolk out East.

I would just say that we're confident that we are in a leadership position regardless of the outcome. We think that we've done a great job at managing our rail partners and how we work with them. And given the size of the market share that we represent on behalf of the shipping community, they're all motivated to want to continue to participate and so I think that we'll find a way to win regardless. Beyond that, I don't think we have a public comment.

I would just say if the goal is to grow the Intermodal pie overall, as the market leader, I think that's a good thing for J.B. Hunt.

Okay. So if I were to try to sum up real quick, I guess, most of the benefits so far are regulatory driven, not really seeing demand kick in, lower -- you're focused on lowering your cost to serve, the $130 million, up from $100 million, leveraging tech, watch driver pay in Dedicated. You're going to try to outpace it with rate increases, but it certainly can cause a squeeze depending on timing.

The issue is, rates are going up.

Thank you very much for the time, Brad, Josh and Andrew.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the J.B. Hunt Transport First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Hall, Senior Director of Finance. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon. Before I introduce the speakers, I would like to provide some disclosures regarding forward-looking statements. This call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, anticipates, intends, estimates or similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on J.B. Hunt's current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results to be materially different from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

For more information regarding risk factors, please refer to J.B. Hunt's annual report on Form 10-K and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now I would like to introduce the speakers on today's call. This afternoon, I'm joined by our President and CEO, Shelly Simpson; our CFO, Brad Delco; Spencer Frazier, EVP of Sales and Marketing; our COO and President of Highway Services and Final Mile, Nick Hobbs; Brad Hicks, President of Dedicated Contract Services; and Darren Field, President of Intermodal. I'd now like to turn

the call over to our CEO, Ms. Shelley Simpson, for some opening comments. Shelly? .

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon. I want to begin by thanking our teams for the work they continue to do every day for our customers. The year-over-year improvement we delivered both financially and operationally is a direct result of the focus discipline and commitment across this organization. We delivered strong results relative to the market in a still challenging environment, reflecting disciplined execution against the strategy we laid out. .

We are taking share, driven by the strength of our execution and consistent service for our customers. As we moved through the first quarter, the freight environment felt meaningfully different than what we've operated in over the past several years. When we spoke last quarter, I described the truckload market as fragile and that we are testing the elasticity of supply, and that assessment proved accurate. Continued regulatory enforcement to improve safety in our industry has removed noncompliant capacity and when combined with early signs of improved demand, resulted in a tighter truckload market throughout the quarter.

While predicting inflection points is never precise, we believe we are on a path of recovery. We feel confident about how we are positioned. The operational discipline we've established over the past several years is showing up in year-over-year financial improvements and enhanced customer responses, enabling us to shift from a defensive posture to playing offense from a position of strength. This confidence is grounded in results. We have delivered exceptional performance in safety and service surpassed expectations on lowering our cost to serve and maintained very high customer retention.

Our strong execution has earned the company multiple Carrier of the Year awards as customers increasingly choose J.B. Hunt. This opens doors to growth opportunities, and we are approaching them with intentionality and discipline. Let me close by outlining our key priorities for the year and how they position us for success in this dynamic environment. First, we are focused on disciplined growth driven by operational excellence. Customer conversations during this season have become more constructive, though there is still work to do to fully restore pricing and margins to expected levels.

We are pushing where appropriate and remain confident in the value we deliver. We are seeing increased traction in ICS and JBT consistent with early cycle market shifts and there remains opportunity in Intermodal, which Darren will discuss. Second, we will continue to leverage our investments in people, technology and capacity to drive sustainable, competitive advantages in our business. We consistently invest in our people who represent J.B. Hunt to our customers and are central to our operational excellence.

Our technology connects and empowers our people and helps us optimally utilize our capacity. And we are building on our innovative foundation to drive greater automation and productivity. We have prefunded our capacity needs, particularly in intermodal at the bottom of the cycle. These remain core foundations in our business and expect to see future benefit from these investments. Third, we remain focused on repairing margins and driving long-term shareholder value. We are a disciplined growth company and equally disciplined in how we deploy capital. We have momentum in the business, and we'll continue to build on our strong start to the year.

With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Brad. .

Thanks, Shelly, and good afternoon. Let me start with the first quarter results. On a GAAP basis, total revenue was up 5% while operating income improved 16% and diluted earnings per share improved 27% versus the prior year period. We experienced strong demand for our service offerings as a predominantly supply-driven freight recovery continued to gain steam, coupled with some modest improvements in demand. .

During the quarter, we executed well across our service, safety and cost to serve initiatives, which continue to gain momentum. As we discussed during the first quarter conference circuit, this momentum was partially offset by the impact of weather, which negatively impacted incremental margins in the quarter. We also saw volatile fuel prices. Our business and our industry has fuel surcharge programs that protect our operations from fluctuations in fuel markets.

Admittedly, intermodal is a very fuel-efficient solution for our customers, so higher fuel prices enhance the value proposition of our leading intermodal franchise. It's worth reminding our investors, fuel is generally a pass-through expense and typically has a small impact on profit dollars quarter-to-quarter. However, it is dilutive to overall margins.

Let me turn to our lowering our cost to serve initiative. We have given an update each quarter since we announced our $100 million target to remove structural costs from our business. In the first quarter, we continued to make additional progress, eliminating over $30 million during the quarter.

Again, our intent is to make sure these cost initiatives are visible in our results. And despite further investments in our people, higher insurance premiums, medical cost and fuel prices and worse weather, we were able to expand margins 70 basis points year-over-year in the quarter with pricing that still did not cover core inflation.

Going forward, we will continue to challenge ourselves on our structural cost without sacrificing our ability to capitalize on market opportunities to compound our growth ahead. The discipline across our company also extends to our capital deployment. We continue to prioritize reinvestment in the business, and we'll reiterate our guidance of a $600 million to $800 million net CapEx plan for the year.

Success-based growth opportunities in Dedicated will continue to be the main catalyst to influence this range. We retired $700 million of notes that matured on March 1, and ended the quarter with 0.8 turns of debt below our stated target of 1 turn. We repurchased 380,000 shares of stock in the quarter for approximately $80 million. Finally, back in January, the Board authorized a 2% increase in our dividend, which is also the 22nd consecutive year of increasing our quarterly dividend.

Let me close with this. First, we are executing extremely well across the organization on operational excellence in service, safety and lowering our cost to serve. Second, without any meaningful tailwinds from price driven by this recent market inflection, we have already put ourselves on a path to restoring our margins, which we think is a differentiator in the market. Third, we have prefunded a lot of our growth while maintaining a significant amount of flexibility to deploy capital to drive long-term value for our shareholders. We are operating from a position of strength. That concludes my comments, and I'll turn it over to Spencer.

Thank you, Brad, and good afternoon. I want to start with what we're seeing from customers and across our network. Throughout the first quarter, there has been an evolving narrative from customers that tightening in the truckload market would be temporary in nature. Today, most customers understand there has been and continues to be a shift in industry capacity that is impacting the truckload market, and this is a structural change. Customers haven't seen a capacity-led cycle change with the exception of when the industry implemented ELDs or experienced a constrained market since 2022.

What we're seeing is a freight market that has fundamentally less flat than it did in prior cycles. Capacity has been steadily exiting for an extended period, driven by regulatory enforcement, rising costs and financial performance that does not support capital reinvestment. Even if spot rates increase, capacity continues to lead the industry. You can look at most industry KPIs, and they are either at their highest or lowest levels since 2022.

Truckload rates, tender rejections, the ISM PMI and several others are all at their highest levels since 2022, and trucking employment is at the lowest levels since 2022. all proof points of structural change. At the same time, customers' supply chains are leaner, agile and more synchronized than they've ever been while their demand is solid and increasing. This combination matters. It means the system is far more sensitive to even modest changes in volume or disruption. We saw that dynamic clearly late last year as volumes increased around peak, conditions tightened quickly, service became more valuable and customers leaned into partners they trust to execute. Partners who can honor commitments when it matters. This dynamic continued into the first quarter. For J.B. Hunt, that environment plays directly to our strengths. We are seeing strong customer retention, continued share gains across all our services and expanding pipeline and much more disciplined pricing conversations. We're not chasing volume, but we are taking market share.

We're focused on freight that fits our networks, creates value for our customers and at the right rate to generate durable returns. What's also different this time is how customers are behaving. We're seeing far less price-led decision-making and far more focus on execution quality. They're adjusting to capacity challenges with frequent mini bids, they're consolidating freight with fewer, more reliable providers and are prioritizing scale, visibility and execution.

So while we remain mindful about the macro and recognize today's risks, we're confident in our positioning. We built this company for environments like this where operational excellence, reliability and network depth matter. Our focus remains the same, execute at a high level, honor commitments when the market tightens and use our platform to help customers manage volatility. That approach has driven share gains in the past, and we believe it will continue to do so well into the future. I'll now hand it over to Nick.

Thanks, Spencer, and good afternoon. I'm going to start with safety. We are coming off of 3 consecutive years of record safety performance as measured by DOT preventable accidents per million miles. I'm proud to say that we continue to lead the industry and set new records for ourselves, besting last year's first quarter result by 14% despite a materially more challenging weather-impacted quarter versus prior year.

This performance directly reflects the commitment of our drivers and broader teams to operating safe and secure every day. As we continue to grow with customers and take market share, we will bring on drivers and operations-focused employees to maintain our operational excellence our customers expect. In fact, our current driver need is the highest it has been since June of 2022.

As the driver market has tightened, we have begun to execute various strategies that allow us to recruit to meet our needs and support our growth. As these new drivers are onboarded, our emphasis on safety starts day 1 with our more tenured drivers, reinforcing our culture through training and the sharing of best practices.

Moving to the business. I'll start with the final mile. End market demand has shown signs of stabilization across furniture and exercise equipment. With appliance replacement demand remaining solid, we continue to see strength in our fulfillment business, driven primarily by off-price retail channels. Going forward, our focus hasn't changed. We are committed to providing high service levels for customers and being safe and secure while continuing to lead the industry in background verification standards.

Last quarter, we spoke to an expected $90 million revenue headwind this year from some lost business. Since then, we secured new wins and see a strong and developing pipeline as we work to offset as much of that headwind as possible without sacrificing returns for the unique value we provide. Moving on to our highway businesses.

Overall demand was better than normal seasonality with more spot opportunities as tender rejections remain high and routing guides were breaking down. On capacity, the truckload market remained unseasonably tight as market factors continue to pressure capacity. We believe the market tightness was driven primarily by a shortage of supply, but with some positive elements of demand. which is a slight positive development from Q4, which seemed to be mostly supply driven.

In JBT, we reported our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit volume growth as our focus on operational excellence is leading to additional opportunities for growth and market share gains. Execution remains strong as we continue to grow revenue while effectively managing controllable cost. However, the tight truckload market and rapid rise in fuel prices late in the quarter created challenges for independent contractors, leading us to source more third-party capacity to cover loads in the first quarter.

To put this in context, our revenue increased 23% on 19% load growth, but our gross profit declined 5%, primarily due to the higher purchased transportation rates. Going forward, our focus remains on disciplined growth of our trailing network while continuing to improve the utilization of our assets through improved box turns. I'll close with ICS. We have positive momentum in this business that hasn't yet translated to improved financial performance due to continued gross margin pressure from higher purchase transportation costs.

This margin pressure is normal at this point in the cycle as we balance honoring customer commitments and working with customers to reprice freight as needed. So far in bid season, we are winning more volume and securing rate increases. While spot market opportunities have increased, they were not enough to offset the margin pressure on our contractual business. Going forward, we are encouraged by the momentum we have and remain focused on leveraging our costs as we scale the business. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Brad.

Thanks, Nick, and good afternoon, everybody. I'll provide an update on our Dedicated business. Starting with the quarter. At a high level, our first quarter results continue to highlight the resiliency of our dedicated business. Weather did negatively impact our operations during the quarter, particularly in January and February. As a result, we have not seen much of spring surge with our lawn and garden customers across much of the northern half of the country, which could be delayed from the lingering winter weather. .

Regardless of this, the team did a great job managing our costs and continuing to lower our cost to serve while maintaining high service levels and delivering value for customers. The combination of these factors, plus a record safety performance in the first quarter allowed us to grow operating income 9% compared to the prior year on only modestly higher revenue. During the first quarter, we sold approximately 295 trucks and remain confident in our ability to achieve our full year target for net truck sales of 800 to 1,000 new trucks this year. Our sales pipeline is strong and strengthening, while also broad with a lot of diverse fleets from both a customer size and industry perspective.

As the truckload market has tightened over the past several months, we have seen an uptick in interest from customers for a dedicated solution. I commented last quarter that we added a record 40 new customer names to the portfolio in 2025. Historically, once we have been able to get in the door with customers, and prove out the value of our differentiated service. This has led to additional opportunities for growth at new locations for these customers. This has been a large part of what has driven our success, operational excellence on execution and service.

We [ get the customer ] in the door, get our people involved in running and managing the business, get the equipment and drivers in position and stand up our processes and service standards and the majority of the time, customers realize our service truly is differentiated and new growth opportunities present themselves. I spoke last quarter about expecting only modest operating income growth in our dedicated business, in 2026, and I still believe that is the right framework for this year.

I also spoke about needing to see a wave of truck growth for about 6 months before we see material increases in profit performance given the nature of starting up new accounts and incurring expenses there. We are now on 2 consecutive quarters of strong truck sales, and our pipeline has strengthened recently, I'm confident this wave of new business is coming, just the timing was pushed out a little later than we anticipated.

To wrap up, I want to hit on a couple of things that could impact our results for the rest of the year. First, as I mentioned earlier, we are seeing increased interest from customers for a dedicated solution. Actually, during the first quarter, we had our second highest month in the last 5 years of new deals priced. This is encouraging for potential truck growth, but keep in mind, the more successful we are at selling new trucks, the more start-up expense we incur.

Next, we have seen a significant increase in fuel prices over the past several weeks. While fuel is predominantly a pass-through in our business, it is dilutive to operating ratio or margin percent, but not dilutive to margin dollars. Finally, with the capacity rationalization that has taken place in the market, we are experiencing increased challenges in driver hiring that we haven't seen in years. We are well positioned to handle these challenges, but it is a notably different environment.

With that, I'd like to turn it over to Darren.

Thank you, Brad, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. Our intermodal business executed extremely well on our strategy during the first quarter with high service levels to meet elevated customer demand despite some really harsh weather conditions in parts of the country. Our focus on operational excellence is resonating with customers and is leading to market share gains and continued road-to-rail conversion.

I am proud of the team and encouraged by our strong start to the year. During the first quarter, demand for our intermodal service outperformed normal seasonality, and we set a record for first quarter volume. We also set a weekly volume record in March with over 46,000 loads delivered, an unusual occurrence in that first quarter when fall peak season is typically when we break volume records. The strength in demand was broad-based among customers and across the network.

For the quarter, volumes were up 3% year-over-year and by month were down 1% in January, up 1% in February and up 8% in March. Despite facing difficult year-over-year comparisons in our Eastern network, we grew Eastern loads 7% against a 13% comp, while transcon volume was flat. We are seeing road-to-rail conversion continue in the East. Also with elevated truckload spot rates and rising fuel prices, the value proposition of our intermodal offering becomes increasingly more attractive for customers.

We continue to see strong rail service from all of our rail providers, a trend we have seen for several years now. During a winter in which we saw several impactful storms across the country, the rail networks were able to quickly recover their service, a testament to the investments that have been made in their networks and service over the past few years. We and our rail providers know the true test of network resiliency will come once demand strengthens.

As we enter this [ prove it ] time for rail networks, we and the railroads are confident service levels can be maintained even in a period of sustained volume growth. I'll close with some comments on pricing. As we have said previously, but it bears repeating, given the nature of our bid cycle, we are living with the results of last year's bid season in the first half of 2026. Turning to the current bid season. We are in the final stretch. And as is our normal practice, we aren't going to provide any updates on overall results or expectations until we wrap up this bid season. That said, I will give a few high-level thoughts and observations.

Early in bid season, we saw westbound backhaul freight repriced down year-over-year as the market for this freight was competitive as it is every year. In the rest of our network, the emphasis on operational excellence has positioned us well to have conversations with customers in the bid season, leaning into the value we create with our differentiated service.

In the Eastern network where we compete more directly with truck, our ability to push price and the reception from customers to price increases is different than the transcon market. So far in the transcon network, we have seen a more competitive bid season, particularly outbound off the West Coast than we had expected. Our strategy is to remain disciplined in our growth and our pricing, expecting the value we create for customers when we leverage our network to be realized in the returns we generate.

My confidence in the strength of our intermodal franchise and the opportunities for growth that are ahead of us remains high. We have prefunded our capacity needs and are ready to meet our customer growth demand with our unmatched scale and density. Our focus on operational excellence and industry-leading service are competitive advantages that further differentiate us for customers. As we have stated before, we have long-term intermodal solutions for our customers in any operating environment and provide seamless coast-to-coast intermodal service today as we have for years. With that, I'd like to turn it back over to the operator to open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question will come from Jonathan Chappell with Evercore ISI.

Questions for Spencer, but anyone can answer it. One of the big takeaways, I think, from the January call was a reluctance to call the inflection so much. And the [ one quote ] that really stood out was you're hesitant to suggest there's some big pricing opportunity this year. It sounds like a lot has changed in the last 3 months, up to and including customers' willingness to kind of acknowledge the durability of this.

So Darren kind of talked on intermodal bid season, I know you're not going to get into any more detail there, but just broadly speaking for the business, does it feel today that there is a better pricing opportunity, whether it be for second half of '26 or '27, than you maybe anticipated back in January?

Yes. John, thanks for the question. I do think it feels quite a bit different today than it did in January. But as you mentioned, when we talked in January, we referenced -- we started to see some tightening both in demand and then also really tightening of capacity that took place really around Thanksgiving and through the end of Q4. And that just continued through this quarter. Capacity, I'll just say this, has inverted. And it's changed rapidly as regulatory enforcement continues to be implemented. And we believe that enforcement is going to continue to accelerate.

Also, there's multiple shipper and other surveys out there done by several of you that indicate that their perspective of capacity is going down and pricing is going up with solid demand. And one other thing I just want to mention, and I mentioned it earlier in my comments today, really talking about how this cycle is a little bit different than in the past, but a little bit similar to the prior 2 cycles, the prior 2 up cycles, specifically the capacity led one in '17 and '18 with ELDs and then also the demand cycle and shock associated with '20 through '22.

And here's the things that really kind of are illustrated in our results, but also match the patterns of those 2 cycles. Number one, spot price always is our real-time indicator of change, and it changed rapidly in both of those up cycles first. Well, what's happening today, spot pricing has changed first. Then you typically see, say, a 3- to 6-month window of contract pricing changing on the highway, and then maybe even a 6- to 12-month window of contract pricing changing.

We'll look at our revenue per load that we just shared. ICS, up 9%, JBT up 3%, and our intermodal changing just a little bit slower. But I can tell you, things are structurally different. Capacity is continuing to exit the industry. Customer demand is solid. And therefore, I think we're in this structural change and the first part of an up cycle.

Jon, this is Nick. I'll just add from the highway segment. We've clearly seen a big shift from the first half to the second half of the bid season and customers more willing and coming back with different opportunities with a lot of mini bids and rate increases. So it's moving quicker on the [ brokerage ] side, but it's also following quickly just on the pure truckload side as well.

Yes. This is Darren. I'll chime in on intermodal. I just want to highlight that. It's behaving a lot like we've seen in the past in that where we compete most directly with highway we're going to see new opportunities for road-to-rail conversion, and that is happening in a 7% growth on top of 13% growth in our Easter network a year ago is proof that those opportunities are presenting themselves.

And so again, as the season goes on, we'll continue to look for additional pricing improvement opportunities as the market certainly makes that available. Look, customers are under a lot of pressure, and our customers are fighting the [ path up ] and that's not new. We've dealt with that for decades. We'll continue to compete, and we'll continue to be disciplined with our approach on how we bring on volume.

The next question will come from Brandon Oglenski with Barclays.

Brad, maybe I'll direct this one at you because. I think you made a prepared comment about being on track to restored margins, even though you haven't really seen any material tailwinds from price yet? And I guess it fits in with the conversation on the last question, but can you talk about your cost-to-serve programs here, maybe the confidence you're seeing on the cost side as well?

Yes, sure. Thanks, Brandon. So the announcement for this quarter was we're sort of running at a pace north of $30 million a quarter, we targeted $100 million. I think we're closer to running somewhere close to -- or just north of $130 million. So I think we're outperforming. That was also included in Shelley's comments. But I think the important point that I really want to make sure is when you look at the year-over-year change in margin performance, and I know you guys like looking at incremental margins in our business. We still have some pretty meaningful year-over-year headwinds and inflationary costs.

And I think I called out insurance premiums, medical cost, we continuously invest in our people, I think we've called out weather being more material in this first quarter than the prior first quarter. And so despite all of those what I'd say sort of above trend inflationary cost pressures, combined with the fact that I don't think if you aggregated our pricing performance over the last 12 months, it would even exceed what I would consider core inflation. It sort of speaks to, okay, you've executed really well on you're lowering our cost to serve, but we've also executed extremely well on all the productivity we've seen in ICS and JBT and DCS, in FMS and in intermodal.

And particularly, the callouts to me, and I'll just point out, we did add a little bit of incremental financial color on JBT and introduced the concept of gross profit dollars, right, think of revenue and then purchase transportation cost. So with that sort of revenue growth, both in ICS and JBT, our gross profit dollars were actually lower year-over-year, but you saw our operating expenses in each of those business units lower also year-over-year despite meaningfully more volume.

And I think that's been the story across really all of our segments other than maybe Final Mile who is dealing with the customer loss that we disclosed last quarter. So without maybe giving a new number on cost to serve, I think it's probably really good for you and everyone else to think about how much productivity we've driven in our business combined with the structural cost removal to really put up what I think is meaningful improvements year-over-year with really without much tailwind yet from what we're seeing play out thus far in the market.

The next question will come from Chris Wetherbee with Wells Fargo.

We've talked a lot about capacity, but maybe I wanted to ask a little bit about demand. It does seem like you guys are getting more constructive about the demand environment that we're in right now and I think intermodal sounds like it accelerated a bit as you went through the quarter. So I was wondering, if you think about the March improvement, how much is that related to the increase that we saw in fuel? I guess, how do you think about broadly the demand environment? And then maybe as a second piece, how we should you think about the knock-on effect of fuel driving volume to intermodal as we look forward?

Yes, Chris, I'll take that. Just a couple of things. I think even associated with some of the comments around the consumer in your earnings release and several other banks, I think the consumer remains resilient, and that's been proven time and time again. I think that there's strength there. And then again, our customers continue to compete and drive value for their customers in unique ways.

And as we meet with them at conferences throughout the first quarter and had multiple conversations with our customer and sales teams on a daily basis, they're confident in their demand outlook. And I would just call it as solid. And to your point on fuel, I think fuel definitely is potentially a watch out there. That's what we talked about, there's some risks that we're aware of. But also definitely a big opportunity for customers when they look at optimization of their networks, which they consistently do.

They're trying to optimize orders, shipments modes and fleets. And that really plays into the strength of our opportunity for mode conversion as well as fleet expansion. And I think that kind of one other thing, I think, Brad, you mentioned this in your dedicated remarks talking about really a strengthening pipeline inside DCS. I would also say that's across the board in all of our services.

Our pipelines are strong and growing that really kind of goes to the value proposition that we put out there related to some fuel nuances, but also mostly related to operational excellence and the value we create for our customers.

So I just want to comment real quick. This is Darren on intermodal. I think that while the fuel certainly is a major headline and has been for a few weeks now, largely in the first quarter, that wasn't present yet. And so a lot of success we were having in our Eastern network growth, I would not characterize our results in the first quarter as being very driven from fuel. It has certainly elevated the opportunity for discussions with our customers. And we've got some anecdotal examples where maybe a customer split a lane between intermodal and highway and they ran a little bit more intermodal or we'll continue to do that as the year goes on. But I know that our operational excellence as proven by 13% growth in the Eastern network a year ago in the first quarter without any fuel tailwinds is driving the majority of our opportunity to continue to grow in the East.

Chris, this is Shelley. I would just add also that if you think about what's happened here in the first quarter, really January and February played with weather. And then fuel prices here in March, our customers routing guys and their budgets have not really gone as they had planned. And so any time that, that happens, for whatever reason, our customers become more interested in our ideas around creating a more efficient way of transportation.

And so I think our pipelines are up as they're thinking about who can I go to? Who do I trust? I think we're one of those names that come to the forefront of their mind with things like that are happening. And as Spencer talked about, the structural change happening on the supply side, we continue to see customers leaning more into us to say, okay, let me think about you more from a conversion perspective. Let me help -- get help building a dedicated fleet. Let's think about technology and the platform and 360 with [ mix area ] and certainly Final Mile and we differentiate the way we're going into home. So I think that those conversations are having more today than they were at the first part of the year, and it's because of all of those things I've just mentioned.

The next question will come from Scott Group with Wolfe Research.

Darren, we've always seen intermodal price lag, truckload price, that's very normal. I just want to get a little perspective about some of your comments, like when intermodal pricing does start to turn. Do you typically see it first in the east and TransCon lags? And so what you're saying right now is very normal? Or is this abnormal where East price is starting to turn positive, but Transcon is lag. I just don't know if this is normal or not. And then maybe just if I can broaden it out just a little bit, Brad, your comment at the beginning of the call that price not covering inflation yet, like do you ultimately have visibility that we get there over the next couple of quarters?

Well, first of all, Scott, I'll say that I think Easter network pricing improving faster than Transcon, I would consider very normal. That's just -- it's more closely related to highway rates and the customer buying patterns, shorter length of haul, cost to serve in those markets are more impacted by certainly driver wages, that sort of thing can really push challenges in the East.

So historically speaking, Easter network would move faster than transcon. The transcon network is not competing head up against the highway to the degree that you do in the East. And so historically speaking, it certainly would lag a little bit longer.

Yes. And maybe, Scott, just make sure the context of my comment was taken correctly. I would actually say, yes, based on what we're seeing, the change in price, I think, will exceed core inflation. When I say core inflation, I'm thinking ECI CPI. I think the challenging part if you want me to add a layer to that would say, I don't know when the cost of purchase transportation might settle.

And so as you know, in JBT and ICS, even with what I think are some pretty meaningful increases in rates, a lot of those rates are being passed to carriers to cover loads. And so I think you've seen that with margin compression in those 2 areas. And so if we wanted to say, hey, is pricing going to exceed core inflation? I would feel pretty confident the answer is going to be yes. The industry needs margin recovery, industry needs better financial performance to support reinvestment. And so I think that's probably the direction the industry is going to be heading. I just don't know at what point securing third-party capacity may settle because obviously, the direction has been up and to the right. I don't know, Nick, if you wanted to add anything in terms of what you're seeing on...

I would just say what we've seen so far is that it was really, really tight early on and March was very tight when I look at month over month. So it was kind of building. And then April was very typical just kind of settle there, and that's what we're seeing just typical, I would say, on rate and on the carrier side as well, particularly when you get in flatbed and [ temp ], it's still really, really tight there...

But -- and I think, Nick, you were talking about double-digit rate increases.

in brokerage, where we're clearly seeing double digits. And that's on some contract stuff as well as spots even higher than that. So it's driving higher.

Hope that helps, Scott.

The next question will come from Jordan Alliger with Goldman Sachs.

I just wanted to come back a little bit to the brokerage side. It's good to hear on the pricing front. Obviously, still a squeeze. Still an impact on overall profitability. Can you maybe talk a little bit to how you're thinking about that profit profile for brokerage as you think ahead, given the puts and takes with PT versus selling price and maybe getting back to the black.

Yes. I would just say, I feel very good about where we're at. If we look at the volume that we've had up 10% growth in ICS, very excited about that. The market was typically down, let's say, 3% to 5%, and our direct expense was down 1%. So we think we're lining up very well from a cost and being able to leverage our platform, our technology and our people. And we've got a great retention rate going on there. So our customers love our brand, love our operational excellence. And we've got the capacity with the carriers. We're safe and secure. So it's lining up very well for us. We're excited about where we're going in the future.

The next question will come from [indiscernible] with Stephens Inc.

Brad, I wanted to ask about the dedicated and specifically the impact of the administration's regulatory actions. You mentioned in your remarks, a tighter market, more difficulty hiring drivers. Do you think this supply-driven nature of the tighter market could translate to a faster dedicated sales time line in this cycle? And maybe on the other hand, do you expect any margin impact from the increased challenges hiring drivers and the subsequent potential increase to driver wages?

Yes. Thanks, Brady. Nick touched upon it in his prepared remarks, kind of what we're seeing on the driver front. I made a reference. We've definitely seen it tighten certainly in some geographies more than others. But we absolutely do believe that the regulatory changes are playing through with respect to driver availability. Not so much in terms of how we've been directly impacted because our programs largely provisioned us to not have as much exposure, but we do see the overall market tightening.

In particular, I might add, we've seen abnormalities in states like Texas, Ohio, Michigan, those that are close to the borders. We think that cabotage is a factor in those particular geographies. And then obviously, the English language proficiency as well as [ non-dom ] is really more generally across the entire United States. We've seen our total needs climb for driver needs. But we feel and are very confident in the investments and the strategy that we have in our corporate driver personnel strategy.

And so we believe that we're positioned better than anybody to overcome those market obstacles. To the second part of your question, yes, we've already seen the acceleration, and that was part of the reason why I wanted to highlight the comment on the volume of pricing that we've seen come through and really pricing after we do engineering work. And so we call that an engineered design request and those were record volumes for us in the month of March, in particular. And so we see our pipeline building, we feel great about how that looks, both from diversity. It's really not getting propped up by big, big deals.

Sometimes, our pipeline, we could get some mega fleets that come through that will kind of artificially prop up our pipelines, but this is really with the volume of deals that are helping the overall health of our pipeline. So all those things add up to huge optimism from my perspective for dedicated opportunities. Now the trick for us is, we've seen this play out before, and we want to make sure that we stay disciplined to not grow our dedicated business unit with what we would call capacity fleets.

Those that only want to have a guaranteed capacity at a guaranteed rate in these environments. We've got great businesses like ICS and JBT that can help provide customers solutions there. But we do see the acceleration. We do think that the combination of inflation the risks that Brad referenced earlier when you think about health care and insurance premiums, those are what will drive private fleets towards us and those private fleets have particularly more difficult time sourcing drivers than the success that we have. So we think that, that recipe lines up nicely for us to have a really healthy growth year.

The next question will come from Richa Harnain with Deutsche Bank.

So maybe a more longer-term oriented one for Shelley. Shelley, you commented on how you still have work to do to fully restore pricing and margins even on the back of the third consecutive quarter of margin expansion despite what Brad keeps reminding us, there is limited help from price thus far so pretty impressive. Just maybe talk to us about your line of sight on margins longer term. In the past, you've indicated 10% to 12% as a potential for your Intermodal business. Is that still what you're targeting? Or given the structural changes Spencer spoke about, coupled with the efficiencies you're uncovering with all your technology and such. Could it be higher? And what do you think is a reasonable time frame to achieve that?

Yes. Thank you for that question, Richa. And I will tell you we talked a lot about our internal goals and the things that we want to get accomplished. We've not changed any of our margin targets externally. But I'll tell you, I think we've got a few opportunities. One, is really around the work we're doing in our transformation work that I've talked about now here for the last several quarters. So I'm using our technology and our investments and that being a core foundation for us and really how we're using the disciplined ROS-driven investment to lower cost to serve, how we think about AI and that really being a force multiplier across our entire organization.

And so we're early on in that. We have -- we do believe that there is good opportunity for us to think about that differently. But part of our ability to get margins back in our margin target, we're going to have to have more help from a demand perspective. So there's a lot happening from a supply side. The recovery is happening from that perspective. But we just need a more normalized environment from demand overall.

Certainly, we've all been here a really long time. We've seen recoveries happen very quickly. Those tend to not work at all for us over the long term. And so if we can recover over the next 1 to 2 years, that's going to be healthier for our business over the next 4 to 5 years. If it's a huge inflection with pricing changing significantly, very quickly in Darren's business or really in any of our businesses, then when that settles back down, customers wanted to do something different, they are also -- and it also means there's probably more inflationary costs that stick over the long term.

So for us, we've been patient, we've [ grown impatient ], we're really trying to help our customers understand where we're at. And I think that they're hearing us on that. But I can't really speak to if our margins would change. I'll tell you, we wouldn't get first inside the margin targets, but that's not a stopping point for us. We'll evaluate those as we get there.

The next question will come from Ken Hoexter with Bank of America.

So you noted in the past about 30% excess capacity in Intermodal. I don't know where that -- maybe an update on where that stands now. But given that backdrop and how do you balance pulling out the capacity and your ability to get pricing. Does that maybe delay the ramp in pricing as you move here? And then given the contrasting rising driver pay, given the tighter market, I think you mentioned you're hiring drivers and ops teammates. Does that eat up the incremental margins? I guess that's a margin question going back to Shelley's last answer, but maybe just how you think about the pace of it in this recovery.

Well, Ken, this is Darren. Let me just highlight. We haven't added any capacity in some time now. And certainly, we have highlighted, we think our network can support up to 20% more volume, I think, is what we've said in previous earnings calls. I don't know what I would call the industry excess capacity, but certainly most of the public competitors we fight with, I'll talk about having similar excess capacity.

And so I don't think we're necessarily talking about taking capacity out as much as we're talking about growing into our prefunded capacity investments that we've made. And so that's how -- that's been our approach for some time now. I think the discipline that we apply to not just using a reduction in pricing to add volume at weaker margins is where we really would draw the line, and that has -- and we've maintained that discipline certainly over the last couple of years have been very focused on improving our balance, looking at cost areas that we can attack in order to reduce our cost to serve and in some ways to allow us to be even more competitive on our price and get volume growth.

And I think that's our approach as we move on. I don't know. There's not a capacity exit in the intermodal space like there is in the highway space, given the intermodal capacity is largely containers. And certainly, the drivers and the drayage community used to operate intermodal is impacted by higher driver wages, but certainly, it's a lower percentage of the total cost. And so everybody as we look for ways to grow, that's our plan in J.B. Hunt is grow into our excess capacity.

The next question will come from Brian Ossenbeck with JPMorgan.

Two kind of follow-ups here. Just the first, Darren, coming back to your comment on Transcon competition was a little bit tougher than you expected at least to start. I don't know if you have a sense as to why that is given -- seeing everybody else is facing similar inflationary impacts, maybe more so than you all? And then just maybe a quick update as we get into the spring and summer here, what's the most impactful in your perspective from the regulatory perspective as it comes to maybe even increasingly squeezing out more of the truckload capacity? Are there any other step changes you're looking for? Or is it more of just increasing compliance and enforcement on a more gradual basis

Yes, I think -- appreciate it, Brian. When we think about the Transcon pricing, I mean, you highlighted what is a surprise to us is that certainly, what appears to be depressed margins in the industry, but yet a competitive environment out that or at least what our customers are telling us and what they're willing to do in terms of put capacity at risk for their business based on pricing discussion. I don't know -- I want to be cautious and not over highlight that issue. It's just we have grown were flat in our Transcon business as we highlighted.

We're being very disciplined with our price so that we can achieve appropriate margin levels on that business and in doing so this year, I mean, that's been harder than what we would have anticipated given the environment that we're in. I also want to highlight that, look, we're pricing backhaul business. It's very competitive. That book of business actually repriced negative.

Every head haul segment we operate in is positive. Again, I think that it's not covering our inflationary costs. But certainly, we are getting price increases, but we're not getting to the level of price increases that would cover our inflation at this point in the cycle. And as we continue to go through the summer, we'll be looking for opportunities to grow with customers at returns that justify reinvestment in our business. I'll hand the driver question off to Nick.

Yes, Brian. I would just sense that, I would say, continued enforcement you're seeing states like Indiana that just made an announcement took 18,000 non-dom out -- 1,800, sorry, drivers out. You're seeing the same thing in California. So you see a lot of states starting to enforce that. So I just think there'll be continued enforcement and it may got road check, I think that will be a big test there to see what supply looks like.

They're going to really focus on ELDs and load securement. So it will be interesting to see what they do there. but I just see this administration with [indiscernible] carriers and authorization. They're going to continue to tighten the enforcement around that, they really won't CDLs to mean something and have the right folks behind the wheels that are trained and certified. And so I think that's going to continue for some time.

I would just add to, Brian. This is Brad Hicks. The volume of truck driving schools that have been shut down, the ELD providers that have been shut off, all of those are going to create a more challenging pathway for us to have growing capacity or new entrants into the marketplace. And then we have an administration that's looking to put more, I guess, controls in place for carrier to even come into the industry. And so all those things, I think, are going to continue to add. It's hard to pinpoint which one is going to put more pressure on, but it's the collective that really is going to reveal itself.

The last question will come from Tom Wadewitz with UBS.

So I wanted to ask you, go back to intermodal, the monthly progression was pretty notably favorable. I'm guessing that January or February is an impact on the year-over-year volume, but update in March is pretty strong. How do you think about the way we should interpret that for the go-forward intermodal volume growth [ relative to 3% ] for the full quarter, is it reasonable to expect some nice acceleration given that 8%? Or was there something quirky about that? And then I guess another component of just how we think about intermodal volume growth it's less driver intensive, which is great for the environment. But have you seen environments in the past where the driver market is so tight that you had squeezed on drayage and that's a constraint on your intermodal volume growth

Well, thanks for the question, Tom. I just want to -- I'm going to hit the driver question first. Look, driver wages, in a tight driver market, it impacts every part of the transportation market that involves a truck driver. And so certainly higher wages is a challenge for intermodal. Do I think that drayage capacity has been a bottleneck for intermodal volumes in the past, not to the extent that it shows up on the highway.

I do think that one driver in a local environment in intermodal can certainly execute multiple loads in a day. And so that ends up being the ability to add capacity in intermodal drayage, in the intermodal drayage market certainly offers an opportunity. And it's a career path for a lot of highway capacity as intermodal demand climbs and more of those jobs grow. We have a very attractive job to go and recruit to. And so that certainly helps the industry.

And so in terms of the volume, look, you know us, Tom, I can't give you guidance on that. Certainly, March was very strong. We set a single week volume record during the month of March that I'm very, very proud of my team for their execution on, and we continue to see a strong pipeline and look forward to the remainder of the bid season. And as we head forward, we think the value of our business unit and the way that we provide our service to customers really gives us a strong opportunity to keep growing in the future.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ms. Shelley Simpson for any closing remarks.

So thanks again for the discussion today. It was a strong quarter for us, and our people delivered that through great operational excellence. We've been focused on that the last 2 years. I think you're seeing that really come forward and show in our results and not being reliant on the environment. And so we've had reliable service, strong safety performance, our customer retention is excellent, and we continue to make great share gains with our customers.

But we know there's more work to do, particularly as we want to continue to improve our returns to performance across the portfolio. But -- having said that, we like the progress that we're making, the investments that we've made in our people and our technology and capacity. I think that's clearly moving our business in the right direction. I am proud of the team in how they delivered this quarter. I am confident in our momentum and we are focused on continuing to build long-term value. Thanks for your time. Look forward to our discussion next fall.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Okay. We're going to go ahead and get started here with our next presentation. We have J.B. Hunt. So with us today, we've got Brad Delco, CFO; Darren Field, President of Intermodal; and Greer Woodruff, who's EVP of Safety, Sustainability and Maintenance. Got it. All right. Thanks, gentlemen, for joining us here today. Really appreciate it. Maybe we'll just start off a little bit with the short term here.

I think, Darren, you made some comments earlier that demand was a little bit better than expected sort of before the winter storms hit. I don't know which storm we're talking about. There's been a few of them. But -- so what -- what was positive about that? And is there potential for that to come back when we get finally into what hopefully is the spring?

Sure. Well, I mean, when we came into January, I think that in general, our customers were experiencing -- or we experienced slightly stronger volumes than what those same customers had communicated to us to expect in mid-December. And so those were good signs. I don't know that I would call that anything other than they were doing some inventory moves. I don't think that has translated to customers saying, "Oh, man, my sales were so much better than what I expected."

I do think we've had puts and takes with customers where some have actually increased their forecast for the year. And we've had some customers that have said, no, I was dead on. The good news is I don't have a lot of customers that have taken their forecast down. I would highlight the storm that we referenced really at the end of January, it's -- I don't know what the name of the storm was, but really, when you take out the southern tier of the U.S., Texas, all the way through Georgia even into Florida. That and then dump 20 degrees on top of that for a week, you're going to really break down the transportation supply chain a little bit.

And that was, I would say, is the worst event I've experienced in the last decade. It was really material in terms of the impact on our ability to move our equipment. And so it was a significant event. And yes, we have winter every single year. So I don't want to act like winter is a new subject. That particular storm was really unusual.

Usually, we don't have Arkansas kids out of school longer than Connecticut. That certainly happened in this case. We might have talked about that, Brad. I think my kids didn't go to school for an entire week. Yes, we had one day. Well, in that case, though, I mean, how much of an impact are we talking about here, Brad or Darren, can you put some numbers around it? I imagine drayage drivers disrupted network out of balance. Like what sort of magnitude are we talking about above what typically is a normally tougher time to operate?

Yes. I don't know that we -- we talked about that in this kind of setting. I just want to be careful. We follow the rules.

Brian, we typically don't -- I mean we don't want to make excuses. We're focused on creating the most value for our customers, focusing on operational excellence, leveraging our investments, repairing our margins, like our entire management team is hyper focused on doing all the things, executing on our cost-to-serve initiatives. Yes, we've had weather. And to the extent we feel like it's material and we want to call it out in Q1, we will do it.

But head has been down, how do we provide excellent service, -- how do we really get momentum going into this bid season where it does feel like the relationship between supply and demand feels a little bit different, what sort of additional opportunities does that create for us. I think that's been the focus versus everyone go make up a number and tell me what you think weather impacted your business by. So we spend more time focusing on the former versus the latter.

Understood. Well, how was rail service then in terms of getting through this dynamic? I mean it's we might hear some numbers from those folks, but like what were you experiencing on the ground and on the street?

Yes. So rail service during my career has never been better really across the board even through this period of time. Look, the railroads are fighting. It's an outdoor sport we all play. They were caught up in some of the same challenges we were, and I would call their recovery. And this would be the entire industry. Every railroad we do business with was exceptional in their recovery from the winter events and feel really confident about both the commitment, the resource planning, the investment in their people and their teams you can really see an industry that is very focused on sustaining resiliency through the current environment that they're in.

We ask them every day, are you prepared for an uptick in demand? Are you resourced appropriately? And naturally, they're all very confident in their plans. Look, we're experiencing it. And again, best rail service I've experienced in 30-plus years.

Okay. Well, it does seem like -- I think Brad you alluded to that the market feels like it's changing, and it's not just like, well, we'll see how much and when. It's just like another -- it's getting more clear to shippers, in particular, that is starting to move in that direction. So...

I think it was about 3 months ago, I forget who it was, but a company described the market as being fragile. And I think there were some chuckles and laughs at the use of that word. But in hindsight, we were seeing it, right? We felt like if there was any hiccup in one direction or the other, whether it be storm driven, whether it be demand-driven, whether supply continues to sort of come out of the market, it just didn't feel like there was a lot of elasticity.

And we've had a couple of bumps or elements that have disrupted supply or disrupted the supply chain. And then we've seen. Obviously, the market is tracking what's happening with spot rates, and that's a real-time indicator of the relationship between supply and demand. So I will go back and reiterate that we continue to believe that the market is in a fragile state.

After we define what fragile meant, we could move on from that. But it certainly feels that way. In terms of like the commercial strategy, though, Darren, like how do you position the business because so much is getting done and figured out like right now, it's always path dependent. So I don't want to say it's any too much different now, but it certainly feels like there's a bit of more uncertainty, but also our shippers trying to get ahead of that right now.

Yes. I think that our sales organization is doing a great job of highlighting a combination for our customers of, okay, what is your greatest challenge today? What are you most concerned about? And then often, one of our fastest responses is have you maximized your highway to rail conversion strategy? How can we convert business from the highway back to Intermodal or to Intermodal for the first time hopefully save you a little money at the same time as a way to prepare your budget for maybe a year where truckload capacity and prices could get difficult for you.

So how can you hedge against the potential for a cost increase coming at your budget as a shipper by utilizing more Intermodal and capitalizing on the service quality that I believe we have built as a brand. I think the industry is doing better than ever, but I think our brand is really strong, and we're confident in the service quality. So really, the strategy is to highlight the ways that Intermodal can solve for our customers and prepare them for -- give them a little extra capacity so that they can optimize the truckload capacity that they need in whatever way is best for them.

So really a lot of focus on that.

And now in an environment when fuel prices are increasing, it only enhances that conversation even more. So we're not reacting to the current fuel environment as if it's structural, but certainly, we're going to talk about Intermodal's ability to save dollars against a rising fuel environment...

So in that case, are customers really bringing that up in conversations in terms of fuel savings? Obviously, higher energy prices could have an impact on demand and a bunch of other things. But clearly, it would be a net benefit for conversion. And then maybe you can just remind us on how the surcharges work from your perspective, more of a pass-through really see too much...

Typically, an Intermodal fuel surcharge is roughly half of what a truckload fuel surcharge is. And every week on a Monday, the Department of Energy issues a national average cost of fuel, and that sets our fuel surcharges. This is very industry standard on anything published where you're going to go a full week at a time. And so really, fuel tends to lag by, call it, a week, but it's not -- we feel confident that largely our fuel surcharge programs balance out our experience with cost.

We're not -- you can be hurt a little bit on the lag as fuel costs are climbing, and you can be barely helped a little bit on the downward move in fuel prices. But over a long period of time, the carriers aren't winning or necessarily losing on higher cost of fuel. I just think customers aren't yet in the current environment, what we're seeing with fuel over the last 3 weeks, it's a discussion topic, but it's not yet driving strategy discussions.

I think the overarching theory is that nobody knows how long this will last. And so there's a lot of caution on that. We just will constantly highlight that Intermodal can be a mitigating factor on rising fuel cost, so...

What's sort of your sense on inventories heading into the spring? We've had the pull-forward conversation for a while now. We've had EPA tariffs get thrown out, but we've got new ones put on. It doesn't seem, at least in our conversations that a lot of additional pull forward is happening, but are there any that you have examples of or inventory is in pretty good shape right now?

I think inventories are comfortable for shippers given the way that the supply chain has functioned and the high quality of service available. So our customers are largely more confident in running with maybe what would be historically slightly lower levels of inventory, but the ability for the supply chain to replenish those inventories has been very good. And so customers seem to be trying to take advantage of that.

Look, the interest rates are higher than what they were back when inventories might have been higher. So I think our customers are more sophisticated in the way that they plan that than ever and that the supply chain, they're still confident that they can recover and they're not at all afraid that they're going to have a lost sale over inventory. It will be interesting to see if a fragile supply-demand equation comes into play.

And if demand ticks up, does the fragility of the supply create an environment where customers begin to experience a lost sale because they didn't have enough inventory where they needed it, when they need it. And that's probably what we reference when we talk about fragile. It just feels like it wouldn't take a lot of new demand to create an environment where customer inventory wasn't quite what -- where they wanted it, when they wanted it.

Just on the topic of supply, Greer, I want to ask you a couple of questions on just how quickly things are changing and there's the intensity of the focus from administration on new regulations and enforcement. Maybe you can give us some high-level thoughts in terms of like how quickly this can really be impactful? Are we in the early innings of this? Because it's still, I think, only a couple of months ago when we first started really talking about non-domiciled drivers and what that could have, and it's only grown from there. You got an interesting white paper in terms of the amount of capacity that could come out. So maybe you can walk us through what you're seeing and how quickly this could take shape.

Yes. I think this is this interesting time on the supply because what we're seeing with the administration is that they're really enforcing rules that already have existed that just have been poorly enforced in the past. So we're not having to go through this 60- or 90-day kind of rule-making process. They were able to come in very quickly and identify rules that they could enforce now.

And so I think we've seen it be applied pretty quickly with English language proficiency first being brought up and enforced starting in April of last year. I think the administrator yesterday said about 17,000 drivers had been placed out of service so far. So that's in 10 or 11 months. It looks like that's probably about 20,000 a year is what we had estimated, and it looks like that's pretty well on track for that.

And then if you look at the non-domicile issue, which I believe started in about September, the estimate is, and I think a pretty safe estimate is there's about 194,000 drivers with non-domicile CDLs that will not be renewed. A lot of those have come out already because their employment authorization documentation did not match the expiration of their CDL. Their CDL expiration date went beyond their authorization to work in the United States.

And so state DMVs have been requiring them to come in and produce that paperwork, and they've not been renewing. So I think it's fair to say that about 214,000 is a good floor of what we could expect to go out over the next 2 to 3 years. That's about 5% of the CDL holders. And then if you take into consideration the cabotage enforcement and perhaps others that have been operating maybe even without a CDL, I think you could see an upside of maybe 12% that could go.

And we've already seen the cabotage. We've seen a lot of the drivers south of the border that were operating in the United States, hauling domestic freight. A lot of them have already returned back into Mexico, and we're seeing a loosened capacity in Mexico as a result of them returning. So I would estimate we'll probably see 5% to 12% of CDL holders exit from last April through about a 3- to 4-year cycle.

And Greer, what about the CDL mills?

Yes. That was mentioned as well as truck driving schools are self-certified right now. And there's been audits being done of those schools so far, 7,000 of the 16,000 registered programs have been removed from the registry and can no longer provide entry-level driver training. So I believe we'll probably see some new rules emerge related to what's required to be a training school and to have good quality training where we could find safe drivers, new entrants into the industry receiving a CDL. So that's being tightened up now, and I think we'll probably see some more tightening of that and some higher standards expected.

I would assume similar for ELDs and the enforcement self certification on that.

Yes. I would say I don't know how much ELDs really affect capacity. There could be a short-term impact if a device no longer is certified and a carrier is operating with those devices and they have to park their truck while they remove that device and install another one that does meet the requirements. But there is an effect there, and they are now screening any new ELDs that want to be certified. They are establishing some screening processes for that.

And then they're going to have to determine how they're going to handle those that are already in the registry that haven't been vetted as thoroughly as they would expect them. But I think we'll see kind of some of these things that have been the honor system, self-certifications are going to have more stringent vetting and oversight over those in the future.

Have you seen a lot of support for the Dalilah Law as is talked about in the state of the union. It seems like some of those things would be overlapping, but some would also be perhaps more onerous or a little more conservative if they were to be put in place. Is that sort of additive to what we're talking about here in terms of the regulations.

I think there's a little bit of additive. A lot of that law would codify things that are currently happening, but there will be some things that will be added to that. I would expect that we may see that show up within the Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill, which is under development now. More than likely, it's going to -- the transportation bill will be a continuing resolution as we get closer to midterms, and that's something that will be taken up after the midterms later this year or early next year. But I would expect that will probably show up in that bigger transportation bill.

One more for you, Greer. I don't know how closely you're following the brokerage liability, but clearly, a case before the Supreme Court in terms of how that could be extended into the brokerage arm. What do you see that impacting -- if it's extended and brokers are found more liable like a carrier, how could that impact the industry and rates and just how you perceive risk in this market?

That's -- man, that's a big unknown, really. I think it's obviously if C.H. Robinson doesn't prevail, that could really change the whole risk profile of the brokerage business and brokers are going to have to figure out how they're going to ensure that the motor carrier, in many cases, the driver because such a large population is an independent driver with his own authority, how do we screen those drivers.

And the truth is a lot of those drivers have not had an inspection in the last 24 months. If you look at carriers that have 1 to 11 trucks, which is a very large percent of the population, 63% of them had no roadside inspection in 2025. So what data is available to look at to determine whether or not they're safe kind of pushes you into probably having to look at motor vehicle records and things like that of an individual. And so that complicates, I think, that brokerage risk profile and somebody is going to have to try to figure that out.

Okay. Well, we'll see what happens in the middle of the year then, I guess, but when that's supposed to be ruled upon. Brad, just another question on ICS, though. If spot rates obviously elevated, margin squeeze is kind of typical for this business, but there seems like there's some more spot volume that could be offsetting here in the first quarter. So should this be a similar sort of margin profile quarter-to-quarter, maybe a little bit worse? Like how are you thinking about ICS here in this environment?

Yes. When we go back to fourth quarter, we were talking about kind of what we saw play out. We did see the market tighten. It wasn't necessarily a function of demand exceeding what we were expecting, more a surprise as to how tight the market was really supply driven. However, that didn't really translate into a lot of spot opportunities. And I think we commented on the call really until late in the fourth quarter. I believe in the first quarter, we have seen more spot opportunities. Obviously, that helps to alleviate some of the pressure you're seeing on your contractual business.

But I would say I believe that contractual margins actually have compressed further in Q1. And so you're really sort of fighting with that spot to even overcome that additional pressure you're seeing on your contractual business. So still time to go here in March, but I don't know that we've necessarily seen the relationship between supply and demand get any looser. And so I think that team has done a really good job executing on diversifying our business, really getting into more difficult types of freight, things that are a little bit more specialized.

Obviously, we're executing pretty well on our cost initiatives in that area. You can see our costs are really sort of back to where we were in 2018. I think we talked about that on our last call. And so setting the business up really, so when we do start seeing incremental gross margin dollars, how do we get as many of those -- how much -- how do we get as much of that dollar to really flow through and down to the EBIT line. And I think that remains the focus of that team.

So Darren, in this sort of environment where things are changing quickly, but clearly, the SKU seems to be more favorable on the positive side for rates now. Is this a type of market that intermodal contracts can go up as much as truckload? Are they going to lag in magnitude? They usually lag in terms of timing, but maybe we can dissect the 2 lags here and what we should expect in terms of when the market does turn, how that would be tracking relative to truck?

Well, I think it's clear all parties, the railroads, the Intermodal providers, the draymen, all different entities that are engaged in the Intermodal supply chain, everyone would like a stronger revenue quality. So there's no lack of desire to accomplish that. I think that historically speaking, Intermodal has lagged truckload and brokerage pricing. I don't know to what degree, but it typically lags. Now in the current environment we're in, you kind of -- I don't know if it's related to sort of a different mindset about Intermodal across the industry at the railroads, but the competitive environment so that I don't lose any share is, look, it's pretty -- it's significant.

And I think that this idea that in the environment we're in today, there's potential merger out there trying to go on. So how do the players all react in this current set of conditions is a little unusual. And so we'll see what that means. But I know this. There's not a single entity out there that has a margin that makes them happy. So I'd like to believe that everybody is encouraged to try to recover revenue that everybody needs to repair margins and that's -- there's no lack of desire for that. But you are certainly seeing a competitive environment out there that's everybody wants to grow and everybody wants to repair margins at the same time.

Is that because we were in sort of the -- I guess, the backhaul environment for a little while for...

The early part of the bid cycle is largely backhaul driven. There's a lot of westbound business that bids in the early part of the cycle. So that's certainly a factor. And none of us can afford for -- none of us will repair our margins with pricing on the backhauls. That's not where that work gets done. You have to do that work in the head hauls and -- and certainly, as the pricing cycle goes on, we're all going to be anxious to watch what happens.

We think the quality of our service has been proven out for our customers, and we know that the capacity we offer is valuable, and we're going to really test our customers to help us identify ways to either take cost out or improve the quality of the revenue that we have coming in.

So one of the...

Both parts are important. When we enter into a discussion with the customer around pricing, if that customer can bring forward margin repair initiatives from cost takeout, we're engaged in that. So I know the pricing often it can be a scorecard metric because it's real visible, but there's lots -- there's more than one way to repair margins.

So maybe you can elaborate a little bit on that from a cost takeout perspective. So if I'm a shipper, am I giving you better volume, different volume in different areas? Like what are some of the dynamics that play out?

Yes. I mean, really, it comes down to -- it can be better volume. It can be more. Certainly, more volume is -- helps. We are all about growth in what we do, and we have capacity to bring on growth. So there's fixed costs that get covered with that. At the same time, customers can give us flexibility on the service front. That can be a pickup flexibility or a delivery flexibility. And what that means is, hey, if this load needs to deliver today by 5:00 p.m., and I don't have a pickup within 5 miles of that delivery this afternoon, but I do tomorrow, can I delay the delivery until tomorrow and where I can tour it and I just create a much more efficient drayage answer on that particular shipment.

This is happening thousands of times a day in our network where we're evaluating, okay, what's the drayage system perspective on empty miles? What costs will I incur in order to meet this level of service. And so then the customer can challenge themselves around that same inventory question. Am I waiting on this product? Is it going to get unloaded tonight? Will it go into use in my supply chain somewhere else tomorrow? Or can I just wait and receive it tomorrow. And so there's a lot of work in that area.

I'm oversimplifying it for the context here, but that's a big part of the work that we did really last year, and I'm really encouraged by the way our customers have reacted to that conversation. I think that it was important to get out of this a winner and a loser all the time on pricing and how do we find a way to help each other eliminate cost for both of us. And I think that, that's been very successful for us, and we're encouraged by where we're at.

It's pretty interesting in terms of how it's been a zero-sum game for as long as I remember. Are these productivity initiatives, efficiency, are these in the things that you guys are delivering on the $100 million? Or is this separate?

Yes. No, it's largely -- it's all inside our cost -- lowering our cost to serve initiatives. And largely what became more visible in the third and fourth quarter last year is really that work. And as last -- as we came out of the '24 peak season cycle, it created a new environment for us to discuss this topic with customers. And I think the reaction really did change a year ago.

We were able to implement technology last summer that gave our full team better visibility of how and when they had that flexibility option that they could use. And so it was really in the third quarter when it became far more visible because that work went on through the first half of last year and continues today.

So the rail network service levels have really -- they've been faster in the past, but they've not been more consistent and more reliable and the ability to plan around the transit times. And so that's given our customers more confidence to give us some flexibility back is how I would describe that.

Okay. Well, the productivity gains have been substantial, say, at least in the last couple of quarters. So Brad, maybe you can remind us like what were the major building blocks to get to the first $100 million? And as this is a continual process for the next $100 million, are they different? Are they more the same? Like how should we be thinking about that?

First off, have we announced the next $100 million yet? Or is that just a little add and slip on your part?

Maybe a little bit.

So I mean, Darren described an example in his org, but you think about same really intense focus on our cost on the corporate overhead side, but also direct overhead in each of the businesses. And really just the constant challenge of, hey, let's remain focused on our cost metrics. What is the right cost metric? How do we improve upon those? We know that we're going to be facing inflationary costs each and every year. How do we combat that inflationary cost with some level of productivity so that when we do go to customers when we are in an environment where, hey, we can at least get pricing in line with inflation, heck it could be nice to get inflation plus pricing like some others in the industry, how do we really drive a quicker repair of our margins. I mean that's one of our major priorities, right?

We got to repair our margins, make sure we're creating value for our shareholders. So -- as we've talked about numerous times, there's over 100 different line items. Andrew Hall, who leads our IR efforts and FP&A efforts is really granular with teams in terms of how we're tracking that progress. We've committed to keep our investors updated each and every quarter. We'll have another update for you guys, obviously, after Q1.

But in terms of what we're seeing, and Darren, you can speak for your business because I know each and every time we review our financials, your team is talking about how much leverage they're seeing in corporate overheads. And so I know that area has really performed extremely well. There's been a tremendous amount of discipline. And so this is setting us up well. We think, obviously, to compete in the market to accelerate our growth. That was the whole purpose behind our cost to serve initiative. Regards to the next leg of the story, and I think what you were maybe alluding to, Brian, is this business transformation process.

So go back last year at the same time, we had really rolled up our sleeves and dug into the different areas of our business and looking at removing structural costs. We had engineers in our business looking at our processes and asking the question, how can we accelerate, expedite, drive better efficiencies through some introduction of technology to speed the process or drive that productivity.

We're in the early innings of that now. We're obviously -- what's different about that process is we are scoping these projects. There is a cost element to them. We're looking at what sort of return we would expect from these initiatives. We'll prioritize those projects. And so that's something we're hoping to deliver on and see more tangible evidence of later this year and probably into next year.

But I would say, I mean, in terms of an update, I think our company has seen and has momentum, and I think there's a lot of really great work that's been going on. And our goal has been not to get up on stage and throw out a number and tell you guys what we've been doing on the cost side. It's -- we want to make sure you see it in how we're reporting. And oh, by the way, we have really not been in a super positive pricing environment.

So seeing the turn in our business in Q3 and Q4, where margins were expanding, while let's just say pricing was basically flat while also incurring a lot of inflationary cost pressures, and we've talked about insurance and wages and all the other line items. We have done way more on productivity, efficiency, cost takeout than probably what we've given ourselves credit for.

Well, just to wrap up on the transformation, is that really focused on technology, the incubations, the up labs, like those sorts of things.

Well, when you think about our company foundations, right, it's people, technology and capacity. We will always say our people come first. I mean, J.B. Hunt, 64 years. We have a very strong culture that really has survived from the founding, Mr., Mrs. Hunt. Technology is in the center. So we think about technology as being an enabler to allow our people and our capacity to be used more efficiently. And obviously, our capacity, our containers, our trailers, our trucks. And so those are the foundations of our business. Certainly, yes, technology is going to be an enabler for us in order to better utilize the resources of both our people and our capacity.

Okay. Well, we are out of time. Thanks very much, guys, for the update today. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Brian. Had great time.

Thank you.

Let's go ahead and get started with the next presentation. So for those of you that do not know me, I am Tyler Brown. I'm the senior analyst here at Ray Jay. I cover transportation, garbage industry. I do some heavy construction materials. I do quite a few things. But I'm very excited, it's still morning, still morning, to have J.B. Hunt with us.

So actually, you guys are my first transports. So I'm kind of excited to kind of get going on transports. But presenting today the company's CEO, Shelley Simpson; COO, President of also Highway and Final Mile, Nick Hobbs; Senior Director of Finance, Mr. Andrew Hall.

So I think, Shelley, this is a generalist conference. So I think that you've got a couple of slides. I think, we've got a couple of slides. But maybe I was hoping that you could kind of just give us a little bit about who you are, what you do because at the end of the day, you're a whole lot more than a one-way truckload company. You guys have a lot of -- there's a huge offering here.

So Shelley, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you, and then we'll just jump into Q&A. Will that work?

Sounds great. Yes. Thank you, Tyler. Thanks for having us. Excited to be here. We'll see if we've got slides that we can make work and -- maybe not. So I thought I'd just give you a 5-minute overview, and then we can dig into any questions that you have from there.

For us, we want to create the most efficient transportation network. And one of the ways that we do that is really in our company foundation. This is where we invest and where our brand really comes to life. For us, we really think about our people and the differentiation our people have within the organization. And they really are the team that creates that change for our customers' mindset and how they could think about buying across multiple services.

We then connect to our technology and where we've invested in technology through our J.B. Hunt 360 platform that really helps empower our people, but it also helps connect what's happening from a capacity perspective. And certainly, we're known as one of the largest capacity providers in North America.

Our mission is to drive long-term value for our people, our customers and shareholders, and we do that through our 5 core values: integrity, respect, innovation, safety and always focused around excellence.

We'll be celebrating our 65th year this August, excited to do that. We're located all through North America with 400 different locations. And you see about 31,000 of our people that are performing that work on behalf of our customers every day. About 2/3 of those are professional drivers, about 2,000 is in our maintenance team, and the remainder will be in our office team helping support on about $12 billion in revenue.

We are a growth company, and we're really excited about the opportunity that presents itself in front of us because although we are large in our space, it is a $600 billion addressable market and all 5 of our business units have a great opportunity for growth on behalf of our customers.

If you think about what our segments really look like in total. For Intermodal, we are the largest inside that segment with about 31% market share. However, the market overall, we do about 2 million shipments. We estimate 7 million to 11 million shipments around the nation's highways that can be converted into Intermodal.

In Dedicated Contract Services, that part of our business also is in the #1 leading position in the market. However, that's a very large addressable market at about $90 billion that we've really identified.

And then our trucking-based solutions, really in both truckload and brokerage, that business really leverages our technology that we've invested into and helps procure capacity on behalf of our customers in either a pure brokerage model or brokered power with company assets. And finally, in the supply chain, we have our Final Mile services, and that's going to do business inside our home.

We think about that through our senior management team with over 350 years of experience, average tenure at J.B. Hunt at 27 years. That's very common inside our organization. Our VPs and senior VPs have 20 and 21 years. Our directors at 14. Our managers -- senior managers at 9 years. So we are a growth company, but also people tend to come in the company and stay a really long time. We think that's a differentiator for the organization as well.

And when we think about our priorities this year, we do think about them in kind of 3 key areas. But if we take care of #1, it really helps solidify our #2 and #3 priority. So we're focused on disciplined growth this year through operational excellence, making sure that we perform with the highest expectation of our customer. We want to be best-in-class across all 5 of our business segments. And then we want to have that rigor and discipline that we've executed on over this last year around our costs and make sure that our growth is accretive for both our customers, our people and our shareholders.

And then finally, on lowering our cost to serve, how we think about the company, really positioning the organization in any environment. It's been a long, long 4 years of a freight recession, but really set the company to think about how do we reposition the company to take out $100 million in structural costs that doesn't limit our potential upside really in a much improved market overall. Very pleased, in the fourth quarter, we reached greater than $25 million, reaching a $100 million target that we've set out in midyear.

We've not announced any further targets past that, but we have talked a lot about the transformation work that we're doing, particularly around technology and how we're going to use that to transform our work and how we serve our customers.

And then finally, we're not just disciplined in how we grow. We're also disciplined in our capital allocation. Our #1 area that we always want to deploy capital is growth on behalf of our customers. We have prefunded a lot of our growth, so not as much is needed in our capital planning for this year. Last year, we -- part of our strategy is to be opportunistic in the stock buyback and dividend, and we did a nice job in 2025, buying a record $923 million of our stock, retiring 6% of our stock overall, good use of cash in total for us.

So with that, Tyler, I think I'll turn it back over to you.

Yes, perfect. That was very, very helpful. Okay. So actually, it segues -- I think it segues pretty well. But maybe we can start with culture. So I actually have the opportunity. I live in Northwest Arkansas. So I know a lot about J.B. Hunt. I met a lot of J.B. Hunt people over the years. So can we start with culture because I think this is something that time to time gets missed. I think it's super important for you. And maybe just talk a little bit more about your culture, how it sets you apart and quite frankly, your willingness to invest despite the fact that the market has been very, very tough over the last few years.

Yes. I think it started with our founders, Mr. and Mrs. Hunt, 64 years ago. Mr. Hunt was a driver, founded the organization. Mr. Hunt and Mrs. Hunt is kind of the backbone of making sure that we execute flawlessly and at that operational excellence that we expect today. But the one big foundation they have is taking great care of people, so much that Mrs. Hunt used to have drivers and technicians over to her home for Thanksgiving meals.

And so it was just thinking about our people from a family-oriented perspective. And Nick and I have both been with the company for a long time. I have been with the company for 31 years. Nick, you're at 42 now?

42.

42 years. And we've seen the company over the last 15 years or so, really doubled down on our commitment to our people. And the greatest time that you see that, you hear a lot of people talk about our people are everything, our people are our culture, and we think our people do create the culture that our customers know us for, which is our say-do culture, making sure that we uphold the values and integrity of the organization.

And so during this downturn, Tyler, this is really important. We did it in 2009. We did it during COVID. But in this case, we said we're not going to have any mass layoffs. But we still have to have -- we have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders to really focus on cost. And so we're very proud of the fact that we didn't do any mass layoffs during this 4-year turn -- downturn, but our people became creative and thought of different ways. And especially when we did the $100 million cost takeout, that was without doing mass layoffs again.

And so we believe our people, they really are what bring it to the forefront on behalf of our customers. I think that's why our tenure is so long, why our turnover has been so good. You have to think about that people have choice. And even in this downturn, our turnover has been really great across the organization. But I don't think it just shows up with our people. I think it shows up in our financial results as well. And I think that's why our performance here at the back half of last year, being able to execute on that, I think a large result of that is our people.

Yes. We're all nonunion. I'll just add to that and say that we have a great relationship with our drivers. We've got 1 million mile drivers. We've got 4 million, 5 million mile drivers. It takes 35, 36, 37 years to get to that without accidents. So our culture, you see that in our safety results. It's just permeated throughout our technicians. And so for us to take care of our customers, it's really easy.

Our people want to take care of our customers. And when we do that, we take care of our people, they take care of our customers. That's just been a culture in there since '84. That's a culture from day 1, and it continues to be there. And our customers really lean into us a lot and trust us a lot.

Perfect. So a very idiosyncratic story at J.B. Hunt. There's a lot going on. We're going to get into some of that. But we've got to start with the market because there's, quite frankly, a lot going on in the market, non-domiciled CDLs. We've got trucking school crackdowns, ELD crack down. So can you just talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the market? There's a lot of talk about tightness in the market, just what you're seeing day-to-day, and talk a little bit about some of those supply constraints and if they're really having a real impact on supply.

So Tyler, let me kick it off, and I want to turn it to Nick to talk more about what we're seeing from a capacity perspective. But after our fourth quarter earnings call, I talked about the market feels fragile, specifically from what's happening from a supply side perspective. I would tell you, from a demand side, it's been slightly better than what we expected from a customer perspective. I don't think any customers are expecting a real boom in business. And so we're not expecting a big pickup from a demand side, but we're very focused on just making sure that we take market share and what we can control from a growth perspective overall. But a lot of things are changing from a supply side of what we talked about.

Nick, I'll let you...

Yes, I would just say, you've read about this, a lot of this, but there's real capacity exiting now. We've really not had a supply market shrinkage since probably '17 or '18 with ELDs. And so there's just numerous factors that's going in to that. Probably, the most talked about is non-dom. That's legit. We've had some non-domiciled drivers. We're working through some issues, very small amount. But we know that, that's real serious and being enforced a couple of hundred thousand drivers out of over-the-road market. So that's pretty significant. It's a matter of how much time that will be, whether it's law or just enforcement, that's happening.

We're also seeing driver schools shut down. But also, we're seeing a lot of enforcement around [ chameleon ] carriers and multiple operating authorities and moving around, a lot of enforcement on that. We're also seeing -- I think one of the bigger things is cabotage and there's no real good way to measure that. But where we're seeing that is in the Texas market before it started being enforced, there was lots of trucks there. Now that it's been enforced, we saw our rates intra-Mexico drop dramatically because a lot of the carriers went back to Mexico to run that's not up here running legally. Same thing in Canada, and we saw it in the Rust Belt. So we're seeing cabotage be a really legit source of capacity leaving.

So we're seeing a lot of things. We're also seeing on our bids. I would just say, in our bids coming back, we're seeing that when some carriers get award from their bid that they priced 6 weeks ago, some carriers are saying those rates are no longer good. So we're getting an opportunity to reprice on some of that. So that activity is moving up. Many bids were routing guides are falling down, carriers falling out. We're seeing more mini bids. So we're seeing all the different signs that capacity is really tightening up in many different areas. Not just 1 or 2 things, it's really 6 or 7 different areas that's all kind of coming in at the same town.

Interesting. So if we go back a week ago, it was the State of the Union address. I think you -- maybe did you go?

I did go.

I saw that on LinkedIn.

I did.

So that's interesting. So unfortunately, there was the story about Dalilah Coleman, a very tragic event. But the President effectively implored Congress to move on what's being called the Dalilah Law. And this is going to have a lot more, it seems like, teeth around who can ultimately receive a CDL. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because I believe last week, it was also introduced by a Senator from Indiana, if I'm not mistaken. And just talk about what's different between what you just talked about, which is driven a lot by, call it, FMCSA or DOT guidance, whereas this would actually be a piece of legislation.

Yes. So I think it's going to happen. They're going to enforce it through regulation or through legislation. And so to me, it's just the timing of how fast rest of that capacity comes out. I think a good chunk of non-dom, which this is just talking about, has come out, but it might speed it up if this legislation passes. It will just speed it up instead of being 2 years or 3 years to win their EAD, their visa and their CDL expires, that would pull it all forward and say, "You're not legal today," whatever day that is of that law. That's our speculation on the law. We got to see what actually comes through when they pass the law. But to me, it's just the timing is all that's talking about. It's still the same amount of drivers. It's just -- is it over a few weeks or a couple of years.

Okay. So that's a million dollar question, number of drivers. So you guys actually have a really interesting white paper, highly recommend you take a look, on the J.B. Hunt website. I think there is a lot of talk about the 200,000 non-domiciled. But then I think, Noel Perry, you guys did -- he is a consultant in the industry, there was as much talk about as much as 600,000. So do you think that this pushes that number up? Or how should we think about that?

Well, I think there's a number of things that could put that number up. And that's English language proficiency would be there. It's also cabotage of drivers. It's visa violations of just operating in the border as opposed to coming on up further in the states. So there's numerous things that can get up to potentially 600,000. So that's really talking about a lot of those different things coming in.

And it's also talking about more strict enforcement of new entrants entering truck driving schools and certifications. It's also talking about certifying ELDs because today, in the United States, there's 300-something different suppliers, ELDs, they're all self-certified. So that means you can manipulate them, run extra hours. In Canada, there's like 30-something or 40-something that's certified by the government. That's getting ready to change here in a few months so that it will be government certified. So there's just all these different initiatives that's all kind of coming in to really taking some capacity.

Yes. So to put it in perspective, because I think perspective is key here, there's probably, what, 3.5 million, 4 million drivers across the space, let's say. So I mean, we could be talking about a material amount of capacity that could be exiting. Would that be fair to say?

Potentially, yes.

So this is where it gets interesting in J.B. Hunt. So maybe the industry gets into a bit of a capacity crunch. You have multiple solutions. And one of the things -- and Shelley, you talked about it, you've prefunded some of that growth. So you guys invested during the downturn. So could J.B. Hunt be an outsized winner? If that market got really tight, you have some other solutions that may be just maybe you might be a winner in.

Well, I mean, we certainly think so. It's the reason we really thought about when we started the downturn, we said, how do we use the strength of our balance sheet to really push forward during this downturn. So on the other end, we could come out a much bigger winner and really reap the benefit of all of that. And so Tyler, we didn't realize it'd be 4 years. But that was definitely our strategy.

And so if you think about the difficulty our customers had during COVID to get capacity that was so difficult, really when they come out of this with a position of strength. I think if you think about the whole organization in total, we now -- we didn't do mass layoffs. So we don't have to teach any new people, our culture, how we take care of our customers, how to take care of each other. So we're ready to go from a people perspective. Our technology is on a modern platform. We're really leaning in, thinking about transforming our work, and can also be an accelerator for us in the upturn. Technology could really push us forward there. And then certainly, the amount of capacity that we have is significant.

But I think one thing that we've done that's been really important that we should just share more of is our focus on operational excellence. And so we've really called for that over the last 3 years. Nick really helped lead this. The most resilient part of our business is our Dedicated Contract Services business. And if you look at that business, it's within about 130 basis points of its margin target. Really, throughout this recession, it's been very resilient, not just for the company, but I would say even in this industry overall. So we've taken that concept through the organization.

And if you look across all 5 of our business units, it is the strongest position from a brand perspective with our customers we've ever had. And I could say that internally, we've been measuring it internally, but there's an external data source. We issued a press release on it. Journal of Commerce does an external survey about intermodal service. And inside that intermodal service, they ask for who's the best intermodal provider, and they rate you on technology and pickup and delivery and in customer servicing capacity. And for the sixth time, we rated first. But I think what's more important was our Net Promoter Score was at 58. That's comparable to like a Chick-fil-A or Google. Our next closest asset-based providers were both negative on their Net Promoter Score. And that's the differentiation we've really tried to focus on during this downturn is making sure our customers. So that's reflective. We get that external source that tells us that. But I would tell you, if we were to do that across the company, we could get an outside source to do that for us. I think you would see our scores across the board be reflective very much as to how the Journal of Commerce really -- how that came through from our customers.

So I guess going back to intermodal. I think you showed a slide of 125,000-ish containers, but the goal had been to get to around 150,000. Maybe there's some that are kind of not in the account. But could you give us a sense of how much slack capacity you have in that? You do 2 million loads, again, squiggle squiggle, 2 million loads a year. I mean, could you have as much as 30%, maybe even 50% capacity -- slack capacity in that segment?

Yes, I would say a couple of things. First, what our box turns do, which will be very important. If you look at our box turns right now, we're historically low. And so that really shares how much can we have. So if we're 1.4 turns a month today, can we get back to 1.8? Can we stretch it more than that? So that would be slacking capacity. And on top of that, we do have some containers that we've purchased. In 2023, we entered into a long-term agreement to purchase 100% of Walmart's private intermodal fleet. And so that long-term agreement and those boxes, not all of those are actually counted in our capacity yet because we still need to retrofit all of those.

So certainly, we think there's plenty of room for growth inside our intermodal business. That's very exciting for us. As we think about this upturn in our business, we think, great opportunity for us to seize.

Right. So forget the rates, which potentially have upside potential. And when we think about incremental margins, at the EBIT line, it will be good. But Andrew, maybe this is for you, but at the free cash flow line, so if you think about it like an incremental return on free cash, that should be, I would think, very incremental because a lot of this investment has frankly already been made. You guys have already invested in that to the downturn.

No, I think that's a thing that's a fair way to characterize it. Yes, we have prefunded that growth. We don't need to go out and secure additional capacity. We are paying some expense to store some of that capacity today. So to the extent those boxes get in service, that is cost that we're able to take out, plus you're able to generate revenue on those boxes, which would lead to higher incrementals and more free cash flow.

Okay. I do want to talk a little bit because Shelley, you brought it up about technology. So again, you guys have been very technology forward. There's no doubt. If you look at J.B. Hunt 360, et cetera, et cetera. So can you talk about how -- I mean there's a lot of talk about AI and how it's going to impact the transportation markets. Good, bad and the ugly, I suppose. But could you talk about your strategy there? And just talk about how you see AI playing out for you at least over the next few years?

You want me to take that?

You're the new tech guy.

I'm the new tech guy. All right. The old operator is the new tech guy. Well, we have a very modern platform. And so that really makes it easy for us to really attach things. And so we've done a lot. If you think about our process, we're really engineer oriented. We've done a lot of design for efficiency. That's how we did 360 platform. So that's really set us up.

Now as we kind of come in and think about automation, we've been doing bots and automations and all that for a few years. And now you kind of layer in AI, the new buzzword. We're excited about that. We're using a lot of AI and a lot of areas around our customer experience area and also on our payment side. And just to kind of put an emphasis in it, we really -- we've made a public announcement that we've partnered with UP.Partners and UP.Labs to really invest in AI. And so we've launched 2 new companies that's just getting started. And the first is really tracking and tracing in automation, also appointment setting. And so really doing some neat things. And this is across our entire organization, not just brokerage, but it's across all sides of the company.

And then on the back end, we have another company called GroundTruth, that is AI-based that will help us on our billing and receivables and really going to help us drive efficiency through that process. As we grow, we may not have to grow people at the same amount. So that's just a couple of areas. But outside of that, there's a lot of other areas that we're looking at on some automation with some outside AI companies that's helping us maybe negotiate brokerage rates with carriers and certain things. And so we're looking at all those areas, and we've got a list of things we're doing, and we're just being very methodical about that and really going to put a lot of emphasis on that.

But the one thing I want to say is we're fully supportive of technology. We did the digital platform early. AI fully supporting of that. But the key is we still have to maintain contact with our customers and our carriers and our drivers, and it's how efficiently we do that and then how do we drive efficiency in other places. But we still have to maintain those relationships. People buy from people, but it's how efficient you do that. So that's kind of our philosophy of how we kind of drive that. So we're all about efficiency, really leaning into it. I think we're in a really good spot.

And Tyler, I might add, too. If you think about the organization, we're taking the biggest opportunities and really leading that from a corporate view kind of coming across the organization. But we also have efficiency that we're working on at an individual view. So really trying to fuel the organization, giving them tools around the AI that allows them to think about how can I use AI in my day to day.

And I really believe when you have a culture that people know that we're going to take great care of them, and we haven't done mass layoffs when we financially could have really talked through that, it's starting to bring the best ideas forward from our people. And so that's one of the things we went through during budget season this year. We had people come in with two things: one, how do you create more value for customers; and two, how we use technology to transform your business. We saw some of the coolest ideas from that coming directly out of our frontline people saying, "Here's how we're going to do that," because they know we're going to reskill and redeploy them into a new role and not necessarily be worried about the role that they have today.

And Tyler, that business transformation we talked about, remember, we announced the $100 million cost plan, right? We, at the same time, ran a separate cost track focused on transformation. We have a value that we think we can achieve through that. So our engineers went into the business, looked at the way we execute a load, the different steps take -- required to go from point A to point B and thought about how can we use technology to automate some of this, make our people more efficient, remove those mundane tasks. That work will require some investment on our part. And so we're at the point right now where we're scoping those costs and making sure that we know how much it's going to cost. Is it something we can develop internally? Do we need to partner with someone like UP.Labs to achieve it? Or is it an off-the-shelf product we can buy. So that will be kind of the next phase of our cost work is and that will probably be later this year and the next year kind of we execute on some of that.

Perfect. It's interesting. I actually had the exact same thing. One of my garbage companies actually said similar, some of the best ideas come out of the field on the AI implementation. So that's interesting. So let's talk about the cost program. We've got a couple of minutes here. So I think you announced the $100 million, no mass layoffs. So what is it? What are a couple of the things that we're talking about there? Is it really about network efficiency? Maybe just talk a little bit about that. And I know you've kind of alluded to it, but does it feel like maybe there's some more and maybe AI is part of that story.

Yes. Great question. So one of the things that Darren did in Intermodal was really implemented new technology as we started thinking about what our customers need from an operational excellence perspective, what's their expectation, we really went from having a mass program around service to being very dynamic by customer, by type of work. And so that technology implemented for us in the third quarter, really allowing us to take costs out of our system over the long term.

And so a great example would be if a customer has business and let's say, the pickup is 200 miles away from the origin ramp, we know that business doesn't actually have to go in that moment. We actually can hold that, not deadhead for it and actually tour the driver from that perspective, removing hundreds of dollars of costs from that perspective. So that was a really great win overall.

We've also looked at things from a maintenance perspective. How do we think about efficiency in total? How should we be doing things differently? It took the executive team to really engage because we'd already worked on all the cost side. So it really was thinking about it's okay if we've done it for 20 years this way, what's a new way that we can do that. And that's just one of the big examples that we had, and I think we had really great success as a result.

Perfect. Okay. We've got 30 seconds. We've got to talk about capital allocation because at the end of the day, you guys should be a very cash-generative business. It's a very good place to be. The leverage on the balance sheet is very manageable. So what -- how should we think about capital allocation over the next couple of years? And just a few comments.

I think our first priority is always to invest in the business. As Shelley alluded to, we prefunded a lot of our growth on the Intermodal side. Dedicated is our most capital-intensive business. Those are 5-year contracts we'll sign with a customer, ECI, CPI-linked price escalators, fixed and variable components, all underwritten to margin and return targets. So we feel very good about deploying capital for that business for growth. We'll maintain our leverage around 1x. And then outside of that, we'll be opportunistic with how we think about share repurchases and taking advantage where we see value.

Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Right at time. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Tyler.

Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Brandon Oglenski, airline and transport analyst. Again, welcome to Barclays' 43rd Annual Industrial Select Conference. Very excited here on the freight track to have J.B. Hunt up next.

I appreciate you guys coming down to warm Miami. But as we're going to do throughout all these fireside chats, I know this is only the second one, but if it's your first, there's a little keypad thing in front of you there. We're going to do some audience response questions. So if we could queue up question one.

Do you currently own J.B. Hunt? Yes, overweight, market weight, underweight or no? We can go ahead and vote, please. And Brad, I'm sorry, we didn't get you a keypad up here.

Okay. Question number two. What is your general bias towards J.B. Hunt right now, positive, negative or neutral? We can vote.

And then question number. If we can get question #3. In your opinion, through-cycle EPS growth for J.B. Hunt will be above peers, in line with peers or below peers.

And gentlemen, while we await that, I'm just very happy you guys are here. We're joined today by Brad Delco, Chief Financial Officer; Brad Hicks, President of Dedicated and Contract Services; and Andrew here, Head of IR. So gentlemen, thank you very much for coming down. I think you guys obviously had a pretty solid fourth quarter to end the year. You guys got some costs out. Margins are finally moving in the right direction. And I think I might have even heard a hint of optimism when the first -- on the fourth quarter call talking about demand maybe being a little bit better in the first quarter.

So can we just talk to what we're seeing in markets right now, if you don't mind?

Well, certainly, thanks for having us, Brandon. I appreciate you having us and being here. I think that as we discussed on our earnings call that the fourth quarter played out as we expected. We work closely with our customers. We see that their forecasts were more accurate than they had been over the last several years.

And so they've continued to refine and invest in their accuracy. And -- but we saw it play out as expected, which was healthy for us. It wasn't above. It didn't surprise us or anything. But what we did comment on our earnings call was that thus far in Q1, we'd also continued to see strength from a demand standpoint. Now I'll caveat that. That was right before the big winter storm that hit most of the United States minus the West.

And so we've all been digging through that. And so I do think that it's hard to tell sitting here in the middle of February when we know we've had some weather events. But we did see better-than-expected strength coming out of the first of the year. We're probably going to have to wait until mid-March, late March to really know.

I think shippers are of the mindset that now -- yes, there was a little tightness. We see what spot markets are doing. We see what falloffs are doing, routing guide data. But a lot of that is disruption because of the storm. And so the farther we can get from the storms, if we continue to see that strength, then it's going to feel a little bit different than it's felt the last few years.

And I may double-click on that a little bit, and this will go all the way back to our third quarter earnings call. And I remember Spencer Frazier on that call said, "Hey, from our vantage point, our communications with our customers, like no one's canceled Christmas, and we expect to see a modest peak season." I think Brad Hicks did a good job of describing it.

Peak season played out exactly like we expected to from a demand perspective, meaning there was no positive surprise on the demand side. What was a surprise to us, though, was really the relationship between supply and demand, particularly from that Thanksgiving to the end of year time period. And so the market was tight. Obviously, now that the fourth quarter is in the rearview mirror, where we would really see that is in our brokerage margins, both in ICS, but we also procure third-party capacity in our trucking business, right? We don't own or we don't have company drivers or company trucks in our JBT business. It's purely drop trailer network.

And so those 2 businesses saw margin squeeze because of the tighter capacity. To me, that only supports this idea or notion that we have seen a pretty considerable amount of supply attrition in the market. Now that we've, I think, rolled into the first quarter, and we very rarely do comment on trends we're seeing intra-quarter. But out of the gate, yes, demand seemed to be a little bit more positive than what we were expecting early January.

Brad did a good job of, hey, winter storms have hit us. Everyone's looked at the data, spot rates are still elevated. Tender rejections are still high. The market does seem dislocated. How much of that is weather-driven versus how much of that is this continuation of the supply attrition, coupled with maybe a little bit better demand? Maybe too early to tell. Obviously, we'll have more time in the quarter before we give you guys another update, April 15, tax day.

I do think that we continue to get confidence that what we see on the regulatory environment is truly having an impact. You think about ELP, non-Dom, cabotage, all those things, the compliance to that and actually enforcement. To Brad's point, there's no doubt that, that's contributing.

Now how fast is it going to go and how steep are those steps going to be? That's hard to tell or predict, but it's definitely being felt. We see that in driver hiring. There are certain geographies that have gotten more difficult and without much on the demand side, right? And so clearly, we're seeing some capacity exit the market.

Okay. And not to make this really short-term focus, but last week, a lot of volatility in the market, especially with freight brokerage stocks supposedly getting disrupted. How do you guys see AI impacting the competitive landscape? Or is it?

I mean I would say, I mean, we're early in our journey here, but go back to -- Andrew, help me, second quarter when we announced our lowering the cost to serve initiative. As we sort of laid out, that was a cross-functional exercise where our executives looked at 14 different areas of our company, and we set out to eliminate $100 million of structural cost from our business.

I think we've been very successful thus far on that journey. But what we also announced at that time was we were simultaneously running a track of business transformation. And this is where we had engineering and technology folks in our org, engineers going into the business, going into those same 14 areas, thinking about how can we reinvent the process, how can we look at our processes and drive out waste.

And the difference between our cost-to-serve initiative versus business transformation is we do have to scope the work. We do need to think about how we're going to go attack that. We have a multipronged strategy here. We're either going to build it, we're going to buy it or we're going to partner with somebody to do it. And we've put out some announcements with UP.Labs in terms of entities, businesses that we're creating that we think can help us and our industry solve some of the toughest problems for our company as well as for our industry using AI.

So I think AI will have a large impact on driving efficiency and productivity. Do I think it's going to completely disintermediate various transportation providers? I'm probably not on that end of the spectrum. But I do know that our customers ask us to do a lot of work for them. Some of that work is very monotonous but repetitive, and we absolutely can deploy different technologies to help create efficiencies and automate that.

And so we could also make better decisions about how we utilize our assets. That's some of our work we're doing with UP.Labs, how do we improve our billing and our entire process from quote to cash. That's some of the work we're partnering with UP.Labs. And so I think there are areas across all businesses where we think AI or automation can help. And I think transportation is no different.

We have 2 top priorities that we often talk about. One is operational excellence and the other is disciplined growth. And so if you think about operational excellence, you can unpack that and we could spend hours talking about all of the areas, but how do we leverage this technology to just drive efficiencies? How do we leverage that technology on our equipment so that it helps us be safer.

And so that's really how we're thinking about AI is how can we continue to be operationally excellent. And that means that we have to be the most efficient that we can possibly be. And that should translate back to value creation for our customers. So I thought I'd add that. Or we could karaoke with Andrew based on last year.

We'll be doing karaoke later. Can we -- I know we want to talk about dedicated for sure, but on the intermodal side because there's so much going on with potential M&A between UP and Norfolk and already volumes are shifting between the roads. So how is M&A going to play out for you guys from a service and a commercial perspective?

Yes. I mean I think we've stated publicly, it's -- one, it's not very clear, but we don't know why there's an expectation that anything has to change. We have a very unique relationship with our Western rail provider. I think that's well known. We've worked very closely with BNSF going back to late '80s or early '90s. And we have utilized multiple railroads in the East, CSX and Norfolk Southern. And we don't know why that would have to change if a merger is completed. And so that's kind of been our message since day 1.

Has there been some shift to freight? There has. There's been one that has been more public, and then there's been others that haven't been public. And we've shifted freight from one railroad to the other and from the other railroad back to the other. And so that's just part of doing business. You make decisions that you think serve your customers best. We do that each and every day in intermodal. We want them to have a seamless experience. And so yes, some of that stuff plays out.

But at the end of the day, I think our customers trust J.B. Hunt to provide them industry-leading intermodal service and what different origin destination pairs and railroads we use to create that service, I don't know why that will have to change going forward.

And how is rail service right now?

Rail service has been good consistently now. We're probably -- I wish Darren was here to keep me honest. Definitely more than 2 years, we're probably going on 3 years of excellent rail service. And I think you're seeing that. I've called this out in a couple of meetings, and I think it's worth repeating for the online audience as well as those here, if you look at a 2-year stack of our Eastern volume growth throughout 2025, we are -- Andrew, help me here, plus 6%, plus 8%, plus 9%, plus 11%. That's pretty meaningful growth considering truck rates are at very depressed levels, and I think fuel prices are relatively low.

It should be no secret that generally higher truck rates and higher fuel prices only enhance the value proposition of Intermodal. And I would say we don't have either of those tailwinds right now, and we're seeing that type of growth in a market where we compete more directly with trucks. And so very pleased. I think we're all very pleased with the service we're getting from the railroads at this point.

And I guess from a volume and price perspective, how is bid season playing out right now because we're further into it than we were on the conference call.

Still early. But I mean, I would say, I know we've talked about the supply dynamic. I know we've talked about maybe demand being a little bit touch better. We have had a lot of disruption from winter weather. We've had a lot of customer meetings over the last several weeks.

And I would say it should be no surprise that no customers raising their hands saying, can't wait to pay you more, and we think what we're seeing in the market is structural. They'll believe that, hey, this is more weather-induced. And so the market is going to dictate where pricing settles, but too early for us to give an update just yet. I think as we get later in bid season, we usually give you guys an update sometime over the summer in terms of how we think bid season has ended up.

Okay. I appreciate that. And then Brad, on the dedicated side, I know growth has been difficult there as well, especially last year, I think the fleet was, what, flat or maybe even down a little bit. What's the outlook for 2026 in that business?

Yes. I guess probably we signaled about 2.5 years ago that we had some visibility to known losses. And those losses were certainly larger than what our historical loss rate was, which is part of the reason we signaled that. And we talked last year about we concluded that. It did leak into the third quarter a little bit.

And so our goal is to get back to net tractor growth. We talked about that at 800 to 1,000 tractors per year of net growth. And if you think about our historical retention performance that we communicate, typically go back a couple of years, 98% or better. We saw that go all the way down to 89%, I think, in the third quarter of '24. We climbed that back out up throughout '25. We ended '25 right around 94%, and we believe that we'll get back to that 98%.

And so we sold just over 1,200 tractors of new business last year, which is on the lower side of our expectation. That did not meet our expectation. However, given the backdrop of the market, I was proud of the team and still being able to deliver that. And so the farther we get away from those larger losses that we had visibility to, we're going to get back to that net tractor growth.

Now what we did signal in the fourth quarter earnings call is that, that will likely translate to pretty moderate income growth for Dedicated in 2026. Our model really is about getting that new business, onboarding that new business. And typically, we lose money in the first 3 months, so we're negative. The next 3 months, we get back to breakeven essentially. And then we're on model for what that desired opportunity is.

What that means is anything that we onboard really after June of this year is a net drag to the year. But what it does do is it sets us up nicely heading into '27. And so as we progress through, I think the measuring -- the metric that I would want you to focus on is what is our tractor count doing, less on the income side for '26, more on what is the tracker count doing.

And if we accomplish our goals, we'll have that wave of new business that comes in, in '27, and that's when we'll have an income step. more material. It's not to say that we can't -- we're not focused on improving our margins as they are. But the base business we have has a targeted performance run rate. And that can be slightly moved. But in terms of bigger steps on our income growth, it's going to require us to get back to that track record.

I'm optimistic we had our best year -- sorry, our best quarter of sales in the fourth quarter -- of all 4 quarters of last year. And so that gives us a little momentum heading into '26 and feel good about where our pipeline sits. We have a lot of business that we believe that we'll close and look to onboard in Q2 as we sit here today that will give us greater confidence heading into the back half of the year. So feel good about where we sit in dedicated. Really proud of our margin performance.

I know we're not quite at our targeted margins of 12% to 14%. But if you really think about all the inflation that we've had to deal with, most notably in our insurance I think it's up 5x in the last 5, 6 years on premiums. And yes, we have indices that give us rate increases. The pace and rate of change on some of our costs have been more accelerated than what those rate increases get us. And so we'll dig out of that over time and have high confidence that we'll get back to our range.

And Brad, you talked about 1,200 trucks sold last year. I think within that, you had a record number of new customers you sold as well.

We did. We sold 41 new names into our portfolio. And what's critical about that is we also sell with existing customers. So that's most of our growth story historically in dedicated has been organic growth with existing customers. But when we bring that new name in and we get that new first account, maybe it's a 5-truck deal, maybe it's a 20-tuck deal. It doesn't really matter. But what it does matter is that's our first entry point with that client. And they usually have a broader ecosystem, some of them national in scope.

And so to the extent that we can prove our value in location 1, usually, that opens up new opportunities to not only grow at that existing site, but grow other sites with that customer. And that's really been our story. We have several customers that we have 20 and 30 locations with. They all started with one. And if we didn't do a great job and weren't excellent at that first one, we might not have got the opportunity to get to 2, 3, 5, 20, 25, 30. And that's what gets me excited about bringing in 41 new names even in the really tough market that we see.

And I guess along those lines, I mean, it seems like a lot of your public trucking competitors have shifted more heavily into "dedicated services". or contracts, however they want to state it. But your business is a little bit different than what you target in the market, right?

Yes. So we predominantly focus on private fleet conversion. I think there's -- dedicated can mean a lot of things. But for us, it's essentially being a private fleet for that customer and that shipper on-site premise with fixed resources that are assigned to that account.

Some of our secret sauce, quite frankly, has been our size and our growth. It gives us really the ability to be creative on behalf of our customers and how we can ebb and flow dedicated capacity when they surge or when they're lighter on any given day or week, we can source that capacity to other dedicated customers. Dedicated, there's a high expectation.

Our on-time performance is like 99.5% or better. And so having that dedicated experienced driver, especially a lot of times, there's post-delivery services, meaning it's not just bumping the dock, the drivers are a part of the unload process, part of the load process. And so those are things that are sometimes a little bit different than our competition. We're not afraid of any type of specialized or technical equipment. We're not afraid of any type of technical service that the driver has to be skilled for. And so we've had great success there.

Has your retention rate come up from that low point about 1.5 years ago?

Yes. So hit that bottom, recent bottom at 89%. And as of the end of fourth quarter, we were sitting about 94%. So not quite back to our 98% yet, but do believe that our operating plan this year will get us back in that range.

Okay. I think we see one question here. But if anyone has a question, just raise your hand, we'll get you a mic. David.

Brad, just on the customer defections, could you maybe give a little color on how much your assessment is going to competitors versus in-sourcing the fleet versus accessing the truckload market additionally? And then your assessment on how the additional tightness in the market might drive maybe customers to come back to you?

Yes. There's really kind of 3 layers there, right? First is the true private fleet. Second is where a shipper has already outsourced their private fleet and has a dedicated fleet and perhaps those come up for bid on contract terms. Typically, we have contracts that are 3 to 5 years, in some cases, even longer.

And so at certain points and intervals, even our existing business comes up for renewal. We work really hard with our customers and really believe our customer value delivery process, CVD, we call it. If we're proving value, then in many instances, we can talk with and work with our customers to renew and extend our agreements without it going to bid. There are times that the customer does take the business to bid, and we've got to fight for it just like in the transactional world when they do one-way truckload bids or intermodal bids. And we've seen that throughout the cycle.

And certainly, the longer the cycle is, the more customers are likely willing to want to at least test the market. But when you think about the -- again, the technical services, Dedicated doesn't want to just switch providers willy-nilly. They want to be very measured and calculated on that.

Just as when they make that first decision to outsource their private fleet. That is an extremely emotional and sensitive decision. That's their fleet, that's their employees. They believe that in many cases that, that's an extension of their enterprise. And usually, that's the last employee that they had that touches their end consumer. And so they don't make that outsourced decision lightly.

And I would tell you that when it comes to renewing existing business with J.B. Hunt or with any dedicated provider, they take that very seriously as well. But there's a little bit of churn that happens in the market. Certainly, when times are most difficult in the environment we've been in, in the cycle, it's more prevalent than not.

And then the third bucket is really fleet creation. And I do think that, that's where we're kind of at that cusp where this is where shippers want to talk about establishing dedicated capacity fleets for this environment to fend off what they anticipate is likely to happen in the one-way market. We try our best to not really play in that in dedicated.

We've got 2 business units, really 3 that do a fabulous job of creating service offerings there in our brokerage, our Truckload segment as well as even Intermodal can be part of those solutions at times. We think they're best suited for that type of work. We want to really make sure that we're partnering with -- I mean, we're buying 5-year assets. And so to do that on the idea that it could be an extremely short-term business need, that's not very prudent with our capital and our ROIC expectations.

And so we're going to let some of our non-asset businesses try and support those capacity type fleets. We do see many of our competitors, I call that higher ground, right? That's higher ground than the fight of the one-way market in today's -- in the last 3 years. And certainly, people nip at our heels, so to speak, on trying to find that higher ground. But at the end of the day, if we're operationally excellent and do a great job for our customer, we believe that we'll have high success in not only retaining.

And then the last thing I'll mention is that we've talked about the losses of business. And sometimes we lose business by losing a full customer, but we also have times when our customers' business is also just a little bit softer. And so maybe what used to be a 20- tractor fleet has found its way and settled down to a 16-truck fleet.

We've seen a lot of that over the last 3 years. We've seen it in other cycles as well. But what typically happens is, at some point, it rebounds and it recovers. And so we believe we have a lot of pent-up capability of growth on organic growth by just going back from a 16 to a 20 tractor fleet as our customers' business becomes more healthy.

In the last big freight recession we saw in '08, '09, that absolutely played out. And we didn't just get back to the 20 tractor fleet with that customer. It actually -- we saw, in many cases, we went north of that. And so you marry that with our new sales cycle of new business and new entrants as we get deeper into this upturn, we're likely to have some really, really good years ahead.

Brandon, let me just clean up a couple of things. You can tell we got Brad Hicks really wound up. So he's very...

I'm excited, man. I'm excited.

Very passionate about the business. So David, to your question, if you thought about what drove some of the drop in our retention, I'd say more recently, bankruptcies one, that customer downsizing, number two, I would say customer changing how they want to source or manage their supply chain three. And then if I were to say a customer defection, I would put that a distant fourth. Is that fair?

Yes. That was you answering his question?

That was me answering his question, but I loved all that passion about how great our dedicated business is.

We've lost some business to competitors throughout the last couple of years. Usually, it comes down to rate. And usually, it gets to a point where I mentioned one of our top priorities is operational excellence, but also disciplined growth.

And at points in time, it just gets to a point where we can't make sense of that. And again, we're proud of the returns we have. And you look at some of our competitors and their returns and to make decisions to operate even less -- with less margin, just can't make sense all the time when you talk about how much we have to reinvest in our equipment.

All right. Appreciate that. Maybe that's a good point for question #4 for the audience. Just a few minutes left here. In your opinion, what should J.B. Hunt do with excess cash, bolt-on M&A, larger M&A, share repurchases, dividends, debt paydown or internal investment? We can vote.

What do you think it's going to be?

6.