J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. (JBHT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good morning. Thank you all for joining us at the Industrials Conference here at JPMorgan. I'm Brian Ossenbeck. I cover transports. We're very happy to be kicking off our transport track here with J.B. Hunt. We have Shelley Simpson, the President of the company, Darren Field, EVP of Intermodal; and Brad Delco, the SVP of Finance. So we should have some mics in the room. If we don't, you can just yell and we'll get the question as we go through. But Shelley is going to start off with some slides, and then we'll jump right into Q&A. So thank you all for being here. We'll pass it over to you, Shelley.

Thanks, Brian. Thanks for being here, just starting with our forward-looking statements as always in our presentation. But I thought we would just give you a little bit of color on how we're viewing the market, our strategy and then our segments to help support our strategy for 2023. Organizationally for us, our mission is to create the most efficient transportation network in North America. If you think about the way J.B. Hunt is structured and set up, we really think about the full supply chain located here. So from really point of induction into the supply chain, all the way to final consumption, including your personal home, all 5 of our segments actually span across all of those different areas for our customers and that allows us to talk to our customers about their full supply chain and really giving them a more consultative service overall. When you think about our 2023 priorities really remaining committed to 3 different areas. Number one, our commitment to disciplined long-term investments in both our people, our technology and our capacity. When we think about that from a people perspective, there's 37,000 of us that are working hard every single day to deliver value for our customers. About 2/3 of those are going to be our professional drivers. About 11,000 of those will be in the office and the remainder will be in our maintenance teams and also our warehouse teams as well. We think about technology really empowering our people. And so allowing our people to really create better answers for our customers, but also the people that do business with us as we have commercialized in the technology space from a digital freight matching platform as well. And then certainly, in capacity, what our customers know us for and expect from us, making sure that we deliver capacity for and on behalf of our customers. We continue to remain very focused on creating more value for our customers. For us, that allows us to get out of being in the middle of bid cycles and talking about price from point A to point B, and we can talk more holistically about how we can create value in an environment like that's happening today, we've talked about being in a freight recession, really in the fourth quarter and even into the first quarter, our customers are very focused on cost because we can be more consultative in creating more value for our customers, we have the best opportunity for -- to help our customers really convert off the highway and to Intermodal, build more efficient and effective fleets and also allow them the flexibility of our 360 technology, utilizing power that is flexible, but also moves from a cost perspective. So that's something we're focused on again this year and then certainly driving long-term compounding returns on behalf of our shareholders. There's something we don't talk enough about. We've just started talking more about is really just our tenured management team. And I want you to think all the way down -- maybe all the way to a director level inside our organization. Fairly typical for people to start in the company, both Darren and I started in the organization right after college, I've been with the organization almost 29 years here this May. And that's not unusual. If you look at our leadership team, we have 342 years combined at J.B. Hunt or an average tenure of about 25 years. Stuart Scott is our newest on our executive team. And for us, we were thinking about commercializing our technology, really looked externally to bring in more innovation and to think about it a little bit differently, but we really are promote from within culture inside our company. Our foundations on people you trust for us for over 61 years of business, we really believe if we take great care of our people, they're going to take great care of our customers, ultimately taking great care of our shareholders. And so that's a continued focus. We do look at our people from a long-term basis. For us, we want our people to start in the company and to be able to think about retirement inside our organization. I talked about technology. We're not only investing in our 360 platform, but we're also investing in safety technology and other areas from an equipment perspective to create more efficiency on the road on behalf of our customers. And then certainly on the capacity side, being 1 of the largest in our space, really in every segment that we do business with. Overall, our customers have known us for the capacity that we can deliver. One thing that's important to us is how we go to market. And so we do have what we call a mode neutral approach with our customers. We really talk to the customers from a consultative view to say how can we solve for your supply chain more comprehensively. And the output of that and how we do business in the segments really depends on how we create the solution for our customers. If you go back 10 years ago, the size of the company was about $5 billion. Over the last decade, we've nearly tripled the size of the company. And for the most part, you can see that the segments are nearly the same, but the pie just got a lot bigger. We did break out final mile from dedicated. And so that's why you see the new segment located here. It actually lived inside DCS in 2012. And if you looked at what happened in our operating income, the exact same thing. JBI, which Darren will talk about our largest segment, also produces the most operating income. But our focus organizationally is on return on invested capital, how we think about that within our 5 segments. Each one has a margin target along with an ROIC target that we really think about organizationally. Our operating income growing from just over $500 million to about $1.3 billion in 2022. And then finally, for us, we are a high-growth company that also really think about what our returns will look like overall. That mode neutral approach and how we're talking to customers has allowed us to grow significantly looking from 2013 and what's happened, direct correlation between our operating income and our revenue growth on behalf of our customers.

So talking about our Intermodal business, we finished last year just over 115,000 containers and 95,000 plus private chassis that only married to our containers. We have the largest dray fleet in North America at 6,600 trucks. It's actually north of 8,000 drivers. Scalable capacity is super important in Intermodal. It's a network business and our ability to solve long-term capacity challenges for our customers we think is a differentiator and is very important to our customers. We equip all our containers with tracking. And certainly, our long-standing relationships with the rail providers are very, very important and crucial, and we have expanded into temperature-controlled Intermodal about 10 years ago, but that's really growing pretty strong today, and we're excited about temp-controlled Intermodal as we move forward. I look back at that same 10-year history certainly, the pandemic was an opportunity for us to solve for our customers and really grow. We actually turn down business over the last 3 years that we didn't have enough capacity to serve. But when you go back earlier in that 10-year look back, PSR and a host of challenges we faced. PSR was a period for a shipper or for an Intermodal provider, railroads were closing down lanes. So what's buried inside these charts is we were growing in lanes while railroads were closing down other lanes. So it kind of kept us on that flat trajectory there for a while. And then we did go through a period of arbitration with our largest rail provider BNSF, that was what I'll call marriage counseling. We've come out on the other side, really in a very strong position in last March, jointly BNSF and J.B. Hunt announced an expansion of our Intermodal capacity to 150,000 containers over a 3- to 5-year window. We're still on track to accomplish that. We believe our customers want more of what we're -- what we do. I'm going to call it, Intermodal at J.B. Hunt as a coiled spring. We have the equipment, we have the people, we have the sales team and the customer experience team, and we're certainly ready to grow.

I though I take a minute to touch on Dedicated probably one of the most misunderstood areas of our business. When you think about our Dedicated Contract Services segment, there's roughly -- there are almost 13,000 trucks in that business, almost 27,000 trailers, don't think about this as a irregular route over-the-road trucking business. This is an outsourced private fleet solution for customers. It's an 18- to 24-month sales process. Average 10-year contracts is about 5 years. There's fixed and variable components to these contracts. But when you think about what the customer is really wanting and needing, they were trying to run or manage their own fleet and their own trucks and hire their own drivers and deploy their own capital into this equipment. This is what J.B. Hunt is good at, and this is what we do very well. And so we're going into and essentially being the outsourced solution for these customers. We live on site with our customer. We're an extension of their business and their operations. And it's really been a very successful growth area for our business. We had $3.5 billion last year. We've sort of earmarked an addressable market of $80 billion. So still a lot of runway to grow here. And you can see the chart here that sort of supports that. We do target growing about, we say, truck sales of $1,000 to $1,200 per year. There's some natural churn that exists there. Most importantly, and I think why we are able to sort of compound growth in this business, we have 98% retention of our customers here. I did want to touch on our other segments. Integrated Capacity Solutions is our brokerage segment. This is combined, and I'm going to flip through here quickly to give Brian some time with our truckload business. Combined, we think about that as highway services. One thing I do want to point out in our truckload business. We don't really own trucks here. What we do is we own trailers. We provide drop trailing capacity for our customers, and we are sourcing third-party equipment, third-party trucks on our J.B. Hunt 360 technology platform to move those trailers for and on behalf of our customers. So if you think about the expertise from our company in particular, Darren's organization, managing the movement of 115,000 containers in the network, utilizing the railroads to move this equipment. We're essentially mimicking or recreating the same thing on the highway leveraging technology to find the best solution, best service, cost and capacity for our customers. And finally, Shelley mentioned earlier, all the way into the home, our Final Mile Services business. Think about big and bulky products being delivered into the home, furniture, exercise equipment and appliances as well as pool distribution into some off-price retail brands in strip malls. And you can see the trend there. Just real quickly, I think this is a beautiful chart. This shows operating cash flow and what we do with our cash flow. I think the biggest takeaway here, the bigger blue bars, we reinvest our cash in our business. We support our dividend and -- or the growth of our dividend over, I think, now 17 consecutive years, and we opportunistically repurchase our shares and there's been a couple of small tuck-in acquisitions here and there. And then finally, what allows us to continue to reinvest in our people and our technology and our capacity is being prudent and disciplined with our cash as well as maintaining a very solid balance sheet. So thank you, Brian, for the time.

Okay. Well, thanks for setting us up here for some Q&A. So maybe just start with the near term anything on last conference call, I can't characterize the outlook as kind of being fluid, but also cautious with some inventory destocking that's expected. So we're most of the way through the first quarter. How do you think it's played out relative to those expectations?

One of the things, Brian, we talked about was we're listening to our customers, trying to understand what's really going to happen. We did just spend the last 3 weeks with about 100 different customers. So those were 3 different conferences, asking them the same key questions we've been asking what's our outlook on the year? How do they feel about what they've said to us before. I will say I think our customers haven't really changed their tune much. They still have a more optimistic view on the second half. They feel like they're working through some of their inventory that we really called out. I would say, as we progress through the quarter, I'm slightly less optimistic than our customers. It doesn't mean I'm pessimistic, but I'm really trying to discover how much our customers really know. And it's been difficult all the way through the pandemic, it's been difficult on the way up. It's been difficult through the freight recession. And I haven't found a customer yet to say the second half is not going to be what they would categorize as flat to 2022. That would be a lift from where we're at today. They also are speaking of having some kind of peak. Having said that, we went through about 3 years where it was difficult for them to predict as well. I think I also talked about our crystal ball is not very good. But listening to our customers, I don't think we have a lot of change from what we said in the fourth quarter earnings call.

It seems like these are the views you're getting from all the customers. And one of the themes is we will have some seasonality. But I guess the question is, is it back to well, '22 or is it back to 2019? So should we expect at least that to kind of normalize to the extent that we haven't really seen normal in the last couple of years?

I think that's a good characterization. I think being more similar to what it was pre pandemic would make more sense to us. Again, it comes down to timing of when our customers can work through their inventory. And certainly, all the recent news on banks, a little more cautious now just on how our customers react to respond. We haven't heard a lot there yet, but assuming that there's nothing there, I would say it comes down to just inventory correction and then something more normal pre-pandemic.

And when you think about the -- one of the things we always watch is obviously the spot market in truckload, which is exhausting exercise to say at least, but it feels like we're getting closer to floor. I don't know if you would agree with that. And then maybe secondarily, what are you looking for in terms of signs? It seems like capacity is the thing that just will exit the market at some point. Are you seeing any of that because we are getting at a pretty low level, at least from a spot basis and it's been there for some time.

Yes. I'm not totally sure if we reach the bottom yet, I don't know that I can make that call. But certainly, it's slightly above 2019. And again, that would be more historical to what it would look like. Normally, we would see an uptick in the spot market, not seeing that yet, but we do know that we're in the middle of a freight recession, mostly inventory correction, I think. So I'm not sure if spot has reached the bottom, certainly at where it is today, I think the cost of capital, what the small care community has had to purchase. On our best estimates, we think that carriers could operate for about a year at a breakeven period before we would see an exit. That's our historical information that we've seen in the past. So I would say, sometime in third quarter, maybe fourth quarter, we would expect to see a change happening there. Haven't seen a lot of capacity exit as of now, but I would say if it stays at these levels, based on our assumption around cost in total for carriers, I think we would have opportunity happening in third and fourth quarter.

And just given the time of the year we're at, we are getting closer to the first round of bid season being completed. I think what we're looking at is down high single digits, low double digits on a contract basis. Obviously, there's some comps in there that makes it a little bit challenging to figure out exactly where the market is. But is that something that you would generally agree with directionally? I know you probably don't want to give specific commentary, but how are you seeing the bids roll in, at least maybe not in absolute terms, but maybe relative to your expectations going into that?

Well, I did mention that our customers are very focused on costs. So let me try to break it up a bit, and I'll let Darren make comments on Intermodal, certainly, in our dedicated contract services, we don't really deal with bids. So that business is going to be more locked up into long-term agreements with escalators in our contracts. But when our customers have cost pressure, they're talking to us about how we can create more value there. Same thing in Final Mile, a little more long term, but totally susceptible to them wanting us to reduce cost in total. I don't know that I can make a comment as to what price is doing. But I will say this, there is a difference between what's happening in the brokerage market versus what's happening mostly from an asset-based market. I think customers are leaning more into people that have assets that are more predictable. Let me let Darren comment on Intermodal and I'll try to wrap up with what I think maybe the rest of the market is doing.

Sure. I think coming into the year, we certainly anticipated a competitive marketplace. I don't think anything has surprised us. I think it's behaved results so far are about what we had expected. So that part of it is good news. I think we shared often that our system with lack of velocity really had some cost buildup that can be released with some growth and improving services from our rail providers. All of that is happening. So there's -- there is the opportunity to take cost out of our system as we layer on growth loads into our network. And so customer behavior, rail velocity, bid season kind of operating more or less as we would have anticipated.

And then I would say contract pricing typically will follow what's happening in the spot market maybe not to the same degree because it went up much faster in a larger magnitude. When it went up this last time and what contract prices did. But I would say brokerage has the most pressure on pricing followed by truckload and Intermodal is a little different than even those 2.

So I'll come back to intermodal in a second. But just from a big picture perspective, Shelley, is this the time where customers shippers are really looking at J.B. Hunt is like, you're the mode agnostic or mode neutral. And is this sort of 1 of the big proof points that you're looking to tie into that and to add that value at this point? And to that extent, are they reaching longer-term agreements because we typically have talked about these annual ones, I think John Robert's calls it the jump ball freight like every year. I don't know if that's going to change. It doesn't seem like it ever really does, but maybe some perspective on that would be helpful.

Brian, I have a long pricing background. So does Darren. And my very first management job was in pricing in 1996. I think we've had jump ball since 1996. So it's hard for me to say that things are going to change dramatically. Having said that, I do think that the pandemic we thrived because when in the time of crisis, our customers really lean into us from a capacity perspective. And we were able to bring on capacity on behalf of our customers. It's 1 of the reasons that we flourished so much during that time. And so I think our customers leaned into us. Certainly during this time, we're focused, and we've been talking about this on our earnings for probably the last year or so that we want to help our customer -- that supply chains completely and efficient, we want to help our customers save money. And I think the way we go to market and talk to our customers that we can do that. We can take shipments off the highway. We can build more efficient fleets. We can give them the advantages of J.B. Hunt 360 and give a better home delivery experience on behalf of our customers. I think you'll see that play out over the next 1 to 2 years for our customers. It's a great time for our customers to be talking to us. So I would tell you that in crisis, on the upside, it was capacity driven. Right now, it's cost driven. And there are millions of shipments on the highway today that need to convert into Intermodal. They know that. They're interested in that. It's -- for the last probably 2 or 3 years, we had people asking us about service and what needs to happen for Intermodal to return. One of the things we talked about is when customers get pressured on their budgets, Intermodal will become something that they look at even in an environment that maybe doesn't have optimal service. Having said that, our service is significantly better. And so our customers are really leaning into how can I move off the highway and into Intermodal, great opportunity to have a good conversation with our customers.

Brian, the 1 thing I might want to add just too, just for the audience, to the extent you're not extremely familiar with J.B. Hunt. When you think about pricing background and how we typically go to market and being very returns driven, you've seen pivots in our businesses where we needed to make pivots because of the structure of the industry. Take truckload, for example. And running a truckload business, and you could see over long periods of time is deemphasized at J.B. Hunt, where we were really pulling down our fleet and deemphasizing owning that truck. But here we are today, really focused on managing the utilization of a trailer by utilizing third-party capacity because several things that allows us to be more fluent and competitive with our customer, but also allows us to generate the right and appropriate return that we need in order to continue to support and invest. So when you think about dedicated, I think Shelley alluded to the fact long-term contracts, there's fixed and variable components to it. There's built-in annual price escalators, very purposeful, very intentional in terms of how we price those businesses based upon what capital we have to invest to serve the customer. And every single location has its own P&L underwritten to an ROIC target. You see how the truckload business has evolved over time, really focused on how do we get the most out of what investments we've made and generate the right return. I think everyone sort of understands there is a strong competitive moat around our size and our scale in Intermodal and again, our willingness to invest capital there. But to your pricing question, when you think about where the vulnerabilities are, we will see the greatest volatility, and we'll see the most cyclicality in our highway businesses, where we have the least amount of assets. And again, all that is done and strategically thought through with purpose.

So maybe shifting to intermodal then. Darren, you mentioned it's a coiled spring, so I'd love to get more context in terms of what you're seeing to get to that. I know you're looking to grow volume revenue and EBIT this year, which is probably the goal for every year. So which 1 of those 3 do you think you have better visibility into growing or maybe you can get 2 out of 3, rail service seems to be the key. Is that really what you're counting on to unleash that coiled spring in this business?

Well, I think, like you said, coming into the year, expectation to grow our business based on customer feedback was really strong. Every year, it's our plan. This year, as we got into the year, I think that we anticipated strength in volumes as the year went on. And that -- it's still a wait and see. I think Shelley highlighted that. We've talked to a host of customers and everybody continues to remain optimistic. We're probably just a touch tampered from where we started the year. Import volumes, everybody can see that. It's not where you necessarily thought, maybe it could be starting to see some movement there and a little bit of lag, our customer communication around inventory flush that they're going through and reorganizing their inventory and creating the need for long length of haul moves is a big part of our business and we just kind of got to keep an eye on it. In terms of which one do we have the best site to, I guess I don't really have a good answer for you on that. We're carefully watching and communicating with our customers about their needs as we get into the summer months and look forward to getting some inventory reset so that we can get back started with the engine. The coiled spring is we have all the equipment, we have the drivers. We're ready to go. And we spent 2 or 3 years telling customers that we weren't able to start new business. It's important to us to return and regain confidence from our customers and our capacity answer, which is coming from better velocity from our system and our rail providers are all performing much better. And so the opportunity to convert business off the highway is front and center for us, and we're working on it every day.

And we've been talking about rail service for a long time, not enough flattering way. But do you think have they turned the corner? Have they made the investments in the people? I know volumes aren't that great, so that's probably helping the fluidity a little bit. So I'd be curious to see what your confidence is in that? And maybe just a quick nuance question, when we think about potential regulations coming out of East Palestine and maybe I don't know something on the brakes that could affect the manifest train that might have Intermodal on it. Is that something that you're watching in terms of like how the network potentially be changed by some sort of regulation?

Well, let me -- I'll finish with that topic on just rail service in general and the railroads investments in their people, I think they were started on that process in 2021, and it took them real time to get any kind of momentum at onboarding, the magnitude of the employee base that they really needed to get trained and certified and ready to go from the day an employee starts at the railroad until they're operating independently, it's almost 6 months' time. And so the rail industry I think for the first time, probably in the kind of more modern history, I mean, they had to really compete for labor. And that wasn't something that I think that they were used to. And so that probably lagged their ability to onboard those employees as fast as they wanted. I think the operating plans that our providers put in front of us, had real execution benefits that were coming even at a heightened demand environment. Certainly, today's demand environment, volumes are down. That is clearly assisting in a service improvement. But I do believe there are equal parts, process and onboarding of people and their investment in their infrastructure is really allowing services to improve. As far as regulatory elements that might impact our business. I think that we're keeping an eye on that. I don't really know how to comment on do I think it will slow the system down. I think if there's any kind of regulatory elements that slow the trains down, it becomes a bit of a just a market event, and everybody will adjust to that and I don't believe that it changes the value proposition to our customers. And that's important because consistency in service is what they care most about. They actually talk to us regularly about that compared to speed. Sometimes they do want speed, but far greater of an importance area is just be consistent with it. And so if there's regulatory elements that maybe change something about the industry, I really feel like that will be a -- we'll all adapt to that, and I don't anticipate it to really be influential. We would certainly encourage. We invest in safety technologies ourselves in a significant way. So if something can be done to make the railroads perform safer, then albeit they should do that.

Thanks for that context. I think the 1 thing we get a lot of questions on is just pricing, you mentioned competition. You expect it to be tough. Everybody bought a lot of boxes. The rails are trending faster. Most of those boxes ended up in Southern California, right when the freight didn't. So maybe you can talk about how you manage through that and the level of competition. I would assume from a returns perspective, Shelley, you're fine with making those investments because you can just lay them up for a little while and wait out the cycle. But it does seem like things are a bit weaker. So I don't know if there is more of a concern that things get more competitive as folks try to fill up their networks?

I used to laugh when John Roberts would talk about the pricing department's knowledge of how much equipment we had in storage. And the truth is those 2 things are completely [ unyielded ]. There's not a team of people saying, "Oh my gosh, we have too much equipment, you better cut the rate more", that doesn't occur. We buy those assets for long, long term. They're at least a 20-year life. When we have in the past stopped our supply chain of new equipment that was painful for us to restart it. So we're committed to the onboarding of equipment. We're committed to having capacity for growth. And we're so convinced that our customers want more. Certainly, their economy right now may not be as strong as they want it to be from the customer perspective. But we know that our past sort of golden years of Intermodal were built around, we onboarded equipment, we had customer growth coming at us, and it was just a repeat, repeat, repeat onboard new business and always own enough equipment, be the go to, be the easy answer to a capacity challenge. And that sometimes means you may need to own a little bit of extra capacity in an effort to support your customers' needs. And I think that we're back in that mode. PSR was just a difficult window in time when we really were trying to manage the utilization of the equipment, trying to manage a competitive pricing environment and just trying to manage costs. And I think we feel like we've come out of the other side of that today in a really good position to just go solve for our customers.

Darren, maybe talk about the supply chain and containers?

Yes. So containers forever, we utilized ocean liner service to bring that equipment over and during the pandemic. I mean they really didn't want to do that, and we were able to secure some long-term solutions there that have helped us. It was kind of a unique solution. But I think moving back into the future, maintaining consistency is the best, lowest-cost answer to do that. And that's another area that's important to us as we think about the next decade. Hey, we announced 150,000 over 3 to 5 years, nobody should assume that's where it ends, mean we want to keep growing. Now that's the only announcement we've made, and we'll see where we go in 2028 and beyond. But for now, we're on -- we're growing up to 150,000, and then we would anticipate the need to keep growing from there.

And I think a big part of what has changed is just the -- I guess you call it the marriage counseling with BNSF, so maybe you've rekindled a new fire with them perhaps after this is all done. But they made some big announcements in terms of investments at San Bernardino and Barstow and more transloading, it seems like as well. So maybe you can tie that into the confidence in terms of growth and how far this runway is when it comes to delivering on this promise that we've heard about industry-wide for a while of converting off the highway and keeping it there.

I think that certainly, highway conversion, there's kind of 3 growth channels for intermodal, there's highway conversion. That's always going to be top of mind for us and that it's an immediate value impact for our customers. There's organic growth as the customers grow, we want to grow. But the growth in transloading and taking away international intact Intermodal movements and converting those into a domestic move is a significant event for the railroads. The way I'd think about that is there's a 15,000-foot train now moving across the desert with 20s and 40s on it maybe there's 450 of those units on that train. They arrive at the destination in. It takes 450 crane lifts. It takes 450 hostile moves. It takes 450 chassis, and then those boxes sit and wait for drayage activity in order to go deliver them out to the customers. And we feel like we can make the railroads investments in their infrastructure more efficient in the domestic market. That same 15,000-foot train with 53s only has 300 containers. So now it's 300 crane lifts, 300 hostile moves and then our drayage engine is going to respond much faster to get that equipment out of the rail terminal to free that capacity up for the next 300 container train coming in. So it's an important part of our future. Certainly, BNSF's announcement about an acquisition of real estate in Barstow, California in a future. Growth in their capacity for transload is exciting to us as we're the dominant provider of domestic capacity on their rail system. So it would make sense that, that's a real significant growth opportunity for J.B. Hunt and BNSF together. And we're confident that we can provide real value to the customer base by giving a better answer even in times of higher demand than what they experienced over the last 3 years. I think that's core and what we're trying to do there is arm the customers with more confidence about a future of imports flowing through Southern California.

And just on that point with the share shift to me, it's not new. We've seen West Coast migrate to East Coast and Gulf Coast. We still want to have an ILW agreement. So I'm assuming that's going to continue and probably some of that move is staying there. So how does that affect I mean there's still a lot of freight in that area, of course, but how does it affect how you think about network balance? And does that impact the margin profile? If you have a shorter length of haul? Like what are you planning on when it comes to that shaft because it seems like it's not going to reverse.

So as imports do come through the East Coast, I mean, unless that cargo is going out west, it's probably the transload opportunity there is different than what it is in the West. Certainly, our highway solutions and other aspects of our business can generate real revenue growth with executing on drayage of that activity. And so -- we're okay with imports flowing through the East Coast. It frees up new capacity for growth on the West Coast. This has gone on for decades where the East Coast is gaining share and then the West Coast refills up and then maybe it happens again. I do anticipate there will be an ILW response, hopefully soon. I'm not involved in that, but I don't anticipate that to drag out forever. And I know that everybody wants that resolved as soon as possible. We know that our customer experience through the Southern California gateway at the height of the pandemic was difficult and frustrating. I also believe that it was unprecedented what was being asked of those port complexes. And so as we move forward, we still believe the best value proposition for Asia imports is to flow through the West Coast. It's the fastest route. It should be the most efficient, and that's always going to be our effort is to provide a response on how to serve that market.

So it sounds like if it shows up on the East Coast, you have different solutions across the portfolio, maybe not as much Intermodal or transload because it's just a shorter length...

Well, maybe a transload occurs, but it moves into a 360box. I mean there's still transload activity but the back end of the building may not be intermodal moves and that's okay. We're happy to participate in the customer supply chain wherever we can.

So we're just about out of time, but Shelley, maybe we can finish out, just mentioned 360. It's been, what, 5 years since that journey began. Maybe you can just give us a quick where we are now and what you think we should expect in the next couple of years. Obviously, a lot of scale investment has been implemented here, but what's next when you think about 360?

Yes. I think for us, for 360, we think about it comprehensively across the organization. Although it's been 5 years, I still feel like there's so much opportunity across all 5 of our segments in total. One of the outcomes that happened from 360 just the adiation we did with our customers was the invention of 360 box that actually was something that our customers talk to us about really early on, and it took us about 3 years to finish developing the product and take that to market. I think it's 1 of the reasons that we've grown so much from a full highway perspective. And now we can talk to our customers really about all of their business from a full load perspective. I think that's been a really great positive that you'll continue to see us lean in to 360box, complementing that with brokerage, making sure that we have a comprehensive answer in total. But also, we look at other opportunities like what can we do in Intermodal and how should we be thinking about that? The larger we get our highway portion of the business, the more we can convert it in Intermodal, we also can build the most efficient fleet on behalf of our customers. So it's an important part of our strategy. We'll continue to lean in where we can create value. But I would say across all 5 of our segments will continue to take market share at appropriate return on invested capital, and that will be our focus with 360 really empowering our teams and the people who do business with us.

Okay. Well, thanks for squeezing that in there. We are unfortunately out of time. But please join me in thanking J.B. Hunt for participating today. We appreciate it guys. Thank you.