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

Okay. Let's go ahead and get started with the next presentation. So for those of you that don't know me, I'm Tyler Brown. I'm the senior analyst here at Ray Jay. I actually do a myriad of things, cover selected transportation, I do the rock industry, the garbage industry. So we've had a really busy couple of days. But this morning, I'm very excited to have J.B. Hunt joining us. Presenting today is the company's CEO, Ms. Shelley Simpson; Darren Field, the President of Intermodal; and the SVP of Finance over there, Brad Delco. Thank you, guys, so much for coming. You guys have come down numerous times. So we always appreciate you coming down. So I think most of you probably know J.B. Hunt. But look, J.B. Hunt is one of the leading transportation providers across North America, multimodal offering, we'll probably talk a little bit about that. But I think for those that don't know J.B. Hunt, Shelley, maybe we could just go through a couple of slides, give us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and then we'll jump to a Q&A.

Great. Thank you, Tyler, and thank you for having us. Really excited to be here and especially escape our cold weather in Arkansas. So maybe just a 5-minute overview of who we are, and that will help us just started Tyler. As we think about our vision to create the most efficient transportation network in North America, it really does sit with our company foundations. This is really where we invest in our people, in our technology and in our capacity that allows us to think about how we drive our mission, which is really long-term value for our people, our customers and our shareholders. And finally, we do all of that built on our values which is integrity, respect, innovation, safety and excellence. In our 63-year history, we are a growth company, and we like to think of ourselves as entrepreneur as well, founded by an entrepreneur. So a driver really founded us and really pushed the company forward and thinking differently, much beyond trucking and you've seen the company evolve over the last several years being able to do that. We're across all of North America really focused there, but our power is really inside our people, just over 33,000 of our people working hard every day to really make our brand promise come to life. If you think about our priorities, we really rolled this out at the beginning of 2024, been very focused, in particular, on the first priority. Being in an elongated freight recession, the longest and deepest in my 30-year career inside the organization. We really have to think about what can we control and how do we set ourselves up for really great success. And so we have focused on being operationally excellent that would deliver value for our customers. And I will tell you, we have exited 2024 in a best position our company has been in across all 5 of our business units. We had record performance in both our safety metrics and in our service to our customers. That yielded also record performance from an Intermodal perspective in volume, both quarterly and third quarter, fourth quarter and for the full year. We also had one of our best sales years in dedicated contract services even in a freight recession. We had record operating income performance in our Final Mile segment. And then our 2 Truckload segments, really JBT and ICS, really had good improvement in JBT on the operating income side, and I see us really rebalancing setting themselves up for longer-term growth. That really leads us to how we're focused here into this year. So standing on the bedrock of operational excellence and making sure our customers know we are the coal to make, we really now are focused on scaling into our investments. So we're not pleased with where our margins are to our long-term targets and so really moving forward to say, how do we do that? How do we repair our margins? Some of that has to do with scale as we prefunded our growth, particularly on the capacity side. So from a people and capacity perspective, really saving ourselves out for the long term and taking advantage of what the turnaround will look like and how we'll be able to scale with our customers and then remaining focused on driving long-term compounding returns for our shareholders. That's led by our tenured management team. And so this is our Section 16 officers, 14 of us that have 380 years combined at J.B. Hunt. That's an average of 27 years. That's not unusual at just our executive team if you actually went through our different management areas, it's anywhere from 21 years average at J.B Hunt to 14 years average at J.B. Hunt, really from director and above inside the company. And that really allows us to think about this freight recession differently. We've been through this together as a team. We can think about this recession, how we come out from a position of strength. And as we think about our company from a people, technology and capacity, we've got leading positions in our 2 largest segments, both Intermodal and Dedicated. We also are 1 or 2 in the Final Mile space. And so one of the largest there. In the trailing fleet space, that's a part of our company we've really transformed into being full company assets on both tractors and trailers to now being only a trailing fleet in the Truckload segment, largest part of the market. And so that market really has about a fifth position inside that, and our brokerage service is in a top 10 position there. So leading positions across our customer spend in North America and we go across that really from a mode neutral perspective. Our density with our customers really drive our performance overall. It allows us to do things with customers that are unusual or things that others cannot do, and we think that, that really is a great benefit for ourselves. Certainly, our technology and the investments that we've made there has really helped us lean forward overall and then we always say we have best-in-class people and systems and certainly [indiscernible] processes behind that. I talked about what the market looks like. This really puts it in perspective for you. We have 5 distinct business units. And as we think about each one of those with specific margin targets, but also specific growth targets inside their space, and that's because of how large the market is. So if you think about where we're at from a transportation perspective, really the third largest transportation provider here in North America, but a very large addressable market that we can grow for many years. So we are a growth company. It's how we think organizational. and we try to think about things for the long term in total. So we are managing our short-term opportunities around cost but without jeopardizing what our opportunities are over the long term. And if you look about how does our mode neutral portfolio really come to market, you can see that we've grown over the last decade. We've doubled the size of the company. But you can even see we have a new segment over the last decade. So that's in red, that's Final Mile, where we've really added to what our customers have asked us for that used to live inside Dedicated. We've done that as a breakout because see, all the bars are really growing across the organization. That's really the appetite from our customers around what they need from J.B. Hunt and how we should be thinking about the market. And so our long-term revenue and operating income really has been growth. And so you can see we've not had as much change around our revenue as we have had in our operating income in total. And that's one of the reasons that our second priority is very important for us this year, operationally excellent overall and now really focused on scaling into our business and really making sure we start to leverage our costs in total. And then when we think about capital allocation really is a strategy of 1x net debt to EBITDA. Overall, you can see that for the most part, we've had a lot of success outside of '22 and '23, which really was our inability to get new trucks for our growth. And so that was an outsized amount of capital in total, but really advantaged nicely as we think about our capital planning, really want to grow on behalf of our customers. And then certainly, from a dividend and share repurchase as a second and then M&A, really a small part of our strategy in total. And so Tyler, I feel like that's a good overview, and maybe we can go into questions from there.

Thank you so very much. Okay. So before we get into some deeper things, let's maybe just talk a little bit about the environment. So what are you guys kind of seeing out there? I know we're beginning into the truckload bid season. Can you talk just a little bit about what we're seeing, maybe a little bit on the supply side and on the demand side as well? Maybe that's a question for both you and Darren.

Well, I thought you meant what we're seeing today. Because that's what it feels like right now, is like what's changing and how the world is changing and how we're adapting through that process. We came through the fourth quarter and on our earnings call, we talked a lot about that we thought there would be more typical seasonality for us. And as we've moved here into the first quarter, our plans are pretty much on the right path. And so I would tell you there's been some ups and some downs according to that plan, but feel good in total. I would say, what started as a freight recession really was demand driven, and that's turned into an oversupply in total. And so Tyler, I'm not sure how long it can last. I think we've given up on estimating when we're come out of the freight recession, but certainly, we're much closer today than we have been. If you look at a lot of different data points, those data points suggest that it's not in the healthiest place from a truckload perspective, that's going to be good. And then certainly some of the conversations we're having with customers. A little bit of nervousness from customers on just what will my capacity look like, how should we be thinking about that? They're right in the middle of bid season. So really trying to plan according to that. Darren, might add to that?

Yes. I mean, our customers have been as surprised as we have been at the longevity of this recession and the oversupply of capacity. And so there is a general theme out of our customer base of, I don't know when it's going to change for me, but I think it's pretty soon. And so I've shared with several of our investors over the last few weeks. We're batting 1,000 or 100% of our customer dialogue includes discussion about how do I convert from the highway to Intermodal, I want to get ahead of a tightening in capacity, and I want to get my budget under control before I'm paying increases to highway carriers. So we're certainly encouraged about the dialogue. I'm not saying we're 100% at winning or achieving that business, but it's on the minds of our customers and we really are encouraged by that dialogue.

Tyler, if I could add stuff to this. I think this is really important. If you think about just the environment that we've gone through, and I'm just going to call it the last 5 years, so the up and the down of COVID, and really what our customers had to deal with through that process along with PSR. It was very difficult, in particular, for Intermodal to have a sustainable product that was consistent that our customers could rely on and that has changed. And if you think about really since March of '22, when we made the announcement that we were growing our container fleet to 150,000 containers, that was really a co-investment from the BNSF and J.B. Hunt and really thinking about how can Intermodal be sustainable long term? How can that be a part of the growth story? That was I think the first time we really made that large of an investment and that large of a statement to our customers. And since then, we've had all of the railroads really come to us to say, "You know what, Intermodal is really important to us." And so you've seen this focus happen over the last few years of focusing in not just from J.B. Hunt, but also the rail providers, making sure that their service is good. And so we've had 2 years of great service. We have a long history that we have to try to erase and teach our customers that the service that you didn't like really is in the past, and this is the new future of where we're at. And I think that's why you're starting to see some of what Darren is talking about is our customers now because Intermodal as an industry lost market share to truckers, now customers are saying, "You know what, I need to start thinking about how I can do more in Intermodal and I really want to think about conversion, Darren." And so I think that's important as a backdrop as you think about -- now they have confidence in the service product, we have prefunded our growth in capacity, and now those conversations are really leaning in to say, okay, what part of my supply chain can really move Intermodal that maybe I haven't thought about in the past?

Perfect. We got a near-term stuff out of the way. That's all. I'm very interested really in 3 major themes because I think this is very important as we think about the future of J.B. Hunt and where you are. I want to talk about your service strategy, I want to talk about culture, it's a huge deal. I know it's a big deal for you guys. And #3, I want to talk about your relationship with your suppliers. So let's start with service. Because I think that maybe this has missed a little bit, but you guys are providing great service. I think a lot of the data would indicate that that's the case. Most of your shippers are happy with that service. But that maybe it cost you in the near term. So can you talk about what the customers are seeing today? And I want to talk about that strategy, but first talk about what are the customers seeing today?

Let me try to take a macro view and then Darren, it will be good if you could dig into Intermodal. One of the things that we did as we were thinking about we're in a freight recession, what are the things that we can control, we really looked at our Dedicated Contract Services area, and that business unit has been very resilient during this freight recession, still double-digit margins and continuing in new truck sales. And so one of the foundations for them is something we call customer value delivery which really is a formal process to go to customers and say, how do I understand what your expectations are of me, how do I deliver on that, how do I measure it? And most importantly, how do I communicate that to you and that you acknowledge the value that we're creating so that, that yields us into a long-term relationship. That for us, if you look at just the success and think about the retention of Dedicated during this recession is 90-ish percent. Just think about that. That's very difficult to achieve in this deep of a freight recession. And so that was one of the strategies we put in place across the organization to say, you know what, we're going to take this concept, customer value delivery and take that across the organization. We're not just going to give good service. The biggest part of that is how do we create value which services part of that, how do we create value and they get the customer to acknowledge that, Tyler, so that when we're in the middle of discussion, that they have acknowledged that we've created a level of value that you can't always see in a bid process. And so that's been across the company. When I talk about service, we're at the best position we've been. That's across all 5 of our business units really at the forefront. So here we are coming in and talking to customers, whether that's about a new fleet or mode conversion or their brokerage strategy, every one of those customer conversations were on the offense on now. Now we're saying, okay, they know us for great service, now how do we solve their supply chain? What are the things that we need to do differently? It's not been that way. They just came out of COVID where service in general was not that good across the whole industry. And that's because of the movement of the supply chain and the pockets that were occurring. And so you think about now 2 years, we've been focused on making sure delivering, and that's been a key component so that we can get to, I would say, more strategic ideas with our customers outside of just a bid happening with the customer. So that's kind of the overarching strategy for the organization. Maybe I'll let Darren talk about what that means for Intermodal.

So for my entire 30-year career, our customers buy from us on 3 categories. They're going to buy based on capacity, service and price. And you have to be the leader in 2 of those in our opinion. We don't want to be the leader in price, meaning we don't want to be the cheapest provider out there. We want to win in capacity which we're doing. And then we've got to win in service. We have to differentiate ourselves against our competitors, but we have to differentiate ourselves against sort of a 5- to 10-year, I'll call it, just sort of a cloudy era in the way Intermodal is viewed by our customers. The transportation buyers for our customers can acknowledge the work that we've done. But inside their marketing and sales arms, transportation has to convince their organization that, hey, Intermodal is the right approach. And so I think the last 2 years have been really -- we've done everything we can control for a long period of time. But our rail providers have really all leaned in and will acknowledge that their focus on whether you call it PSR or you call it just margin expansion for them at the cost of servicing capability to the customers like us and on to the BCOs, really, that group, all every railroad is saying, I want growth to be my strategy and Intermodal is the one product I offer that I know I can influence growth on through excellence in service. And so everybody is very committed to it. And we have a different story to tell our customers about our rail providers commitment to that service. And so that's been our focus here recently and continues to be. And I would say, will be our focus for the remainder of certainly my career at J.B. Hunt.

Yes, it comes back to controlling what you can control, right? You're putting great service out on the street. And the hope is, and I think if I kind of condense it down, the idea is on the other side of the cycle, either they're going to offer you more volume or maybe that price conversation is a little bit easier. I think that's ultimately what we're looking for on the other side?

100%, and the reality is, it is both. We want more volume, and we want more price, and it needs to be both. And our customers are -- the dialogue is I'm encouraged by it. I'm not saying that we're getting everything we need, we're not. This is difficult. Our customers are under tremendous cost pressures. So nobody is handing out rate increases easily. You have to go earn those and you have to earn those every single day with your product.

Tyler, I'll just add real quick, just so I can say one thing during this discussion. Hard to keep an [indiscernible] quiet for too long. Shelley leads a management meeting. We have a management meeting every week. She actually has 2 different management meetings. We focus on really 3 things consistently every week at that meeting. Number one is service, safety and then also cargo security. So we review each of those each and every week, and those are all things within our control to make sure service and customer experience is a top priority while being safe also plays into that.

Yes. And I know that there's a lot of talk, a lot of hand ringing, if you will, about Intermodal margins. But at the end of the day, as you giggle. But at the end of the day, I think ultimately, it costs something to provide that service, right? And I think that your P&L is wearing that a little bit. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, Darren?

Well, so agree, the hand ringing starts with me. I bring my hands every day. We're not satisfied with our margin. We're frustrated with the duration of, what we'll call, this freight recession in 2 consecutive years of downward pressure on pricing at a time when inflationary costs were really, really a burden for the industry for everybody. But we leaned in and said, hey, if we're providing excellence in service and we have proven to our customers that we're prepared for their growth and their demands in the future, that will pay dividends to us in the future. I called it our prove-it moment. And last year, I would say, we did prove it to our customers. We were exceptional at our service product. Now 2025 is a little bit more of a prove it to our shareholders that we can generate value for that investment in service.

Yes. Understood. Okay, Shelley. So we've kind of established service is good. Let's talk a little bit about culture. I live in Northwest Arkansas. You know that. I know a lot of people who have worked at J.B. Hunt who do. It seems -- I think this has missed a lot. I think that the culture at J.B. Hunt is really good from everything that I can tell. So talk about -- I know it's a huge thing for you. So can you talk a little bit about the culture? And maybe more importantly, where does that show up on the P&L over time? I know it's fluffy and hard to quantify, but maybe you can talk a little bit about that?

Yes. Well, that's one of my favorite things to talk about because that is our people. And when we think about being a growth company, it is in our culture. It's in our DNA to be a growth-oriented organization that is excellent in our performance. That's kind of the way we think. And if you think about our people staying in an organization over the long term, Tyler, we like to think about like this. We want to be the biggest small company anyone does business with or comes to work for. So how do we create an environment where you feel cared for in a way that you may never have been cared for before in your career? We believe that drives the highest level of effort from our people that ultimately generates it for our shareholders because we're going to have the best relationships with customers. And maybe I'd give you this, there's a study that was done, and there's this index that was produced, and we're not -- we weren't super familiar with it. I think it's the third time they've done it. It's called the American Opportunity Index. And it's Harvard's Schultz Foundation that really puts us out and it talks about companies and the strength of companies, particularly around culture. And can you actually start in our organization and build a career and be successful in that career. And they measure things like hiring and promotion rates and what is culture overall and we received a 6th place ranking in the U.S. in that index. Now we didn't sign up and we don't even know when that's coming out. But I think that's important, when you can walk into people -- Darren and I have not been here 30 years because we haven't had opportunity, so has everyone else inside the company. And when you can get an organization to really care deeply about each other, they care a lot about our customers. Our customers come back to us over and over and over because of the great work of our people. We can have the best systems, we can have the best contracts, we can have the best capacity, but it is our people that make that difference. And we tie our earnings performance and our growth story directly to our people and that's why culture is core to who we are.

Yes. The longer I do this, the more I realize it is a huge aspect. I cover a lot of really great companies across a lot of industries and culture is a huge common tie. Okay. So let's talk -- we've talked a little bit about that as well. I know it's hard to put in a spreadsheet, but it's a good thing. Long term, it's going to help. But in -- can we talk a little bit about the relationships with some of your suppliers? So you obviously have some very important suppliers. You also have some really important customers and it seems like there's been a lot of -- those relationships broadly speaking, both at the customer level, Darren, maybe you can talk about that, as well as the supplier level, I'm thinking the railroad specifically, maybe those relationships have never been better. I don't know. Maybe -- what do you think?

Let me start with railroads because I think it ties into where we go with customers really nicely. And that's just -- we talked in 2022 when we came out with that announcement of growing to 150,000 containers. BNSF's logo was on that announcement. We had an arbitration or an argument or marriage counseling, however you want to think about it with BNSF in 2018. By '22, we had been through some wars with each other, and yet we were still solving during the pandemic on behalf of customers, but we needed to break the ice and get a longer-term future vision in front of each other. And I'll never forget Katie Farmer sitting in our board room with John Roberts and Shelley and I and talking about I can't be successful unless you're successful, and that's a really core element to our relationship with BNSF. Look, we live and die together in terms of the product we produce and how we communicate. We have employees that go to work every day at their corporate office. They've given us access into real operations planning ability where we're influencing how they do that. So our relationship with BNSF has never been better. And then I'm going to go both Norfolk Southern and CSX. We have long-term agreements with both Eastern railroads. We were really unsatisfied with NS' service for a good bit, and they have corrected that. And throughout last year, we have never received better service from them. I'll even -- the hurricanes that came through Florida in maybe September, I don't know exactly when, history would tell me that would have taken both Eastern railroads a couple of months to recover from something like that. And NS was back really, really healthy in a matter of days. I mean, their resiliency, the way they planned their resources, the way that they have ingrained what our service expectation is of them to their entire employee base has changed the way they have treated us and it's changed our ability to go out and grow Intermodal and really be successful with them. And CSX is really the same thing. In 2024, we launched a new relationship with Ferromex in Mexico. They weren't probably a dominant Intermodal railroad and really had to convert their operating plan and their -- the way they plan resources and the way they think about Intermodal, and they had to make really significant capital investments in a short window of time, and they did all of that, and now we're experiencing really excellent service in connection with BNSF for Mexico. And certainly, CN has been to our office and talks about how can we grow together, how do we strategize together on behalf of -- and I think that the way I would describe it is, for the first time in a decade, I think every railroad we talk to is listening to our BCO feedback. So it's not just ours, they're listening to our customers. And so that gives us tremendous confidence to develop even deeper relationships with the customers so that we're learning, okay, what are your challenges? How can Intermodal be the right answer for your long-term answer? And I think, hey, Walmart is a good example. We announced the acquisition of their Intermodal assets. They had gone to BNSF and other railroads and launched their own Intermodal program and recognized pretty early on that, hey, maybe J.B. Hunt and Walmart together can just solve this rather than noise that gets created with their product, and yet we were still handling a lot of their business. So that gave us a really good opportunity to go deeper long term. And so that's our approach to really all of our customers. Some of our customers have to run a bid every year and they have to prove to their finance department that their economics, and that's okay. We recognize different customers are going to buy, different customers are going to give us a different level of strategy relationship, and we're fine with that. But we're certainly going to offer long-term answers to all of our customers. Not all of them will buy that way. But we certainly want to make sure it's available and they understand our commitment to service and capacity for the long term.

Perfect. Okay. So as we kind of land this plane and we think about the big picture, you guys are offering great service. You got a good culture. You've got great relationships. It seems like -- and Brad, maybe you can even talk at the very end here. I mean, the balance sheet is in good shape. You've already kind of -- you're kind of like Kevin Costner, you kind of have already built the field of dreams, right? You've already spent the money in a way. And so at the end of the day, I mean, it seems like you guys have the capacity in place, you've got the service in place. And on the other side of this cycle, whenever that may come, I assume it will eventually or whenever that comes, it seems like you guys are in a pretty good spot.

From a balance sheet perspective, yes, our trailing 12 months net debt to EBITDA was 0.9x as Shelley alluded to on our capital allocation slide, which is my favorite. Our target is to be at 1. So Darren, on our last earnings call, we can't call when the inflection will occur, but we -- I think we said we were at or near the inflection. We have record Intermodal volumes, we have great service, we have capacity to grow, and we know we've created more value for our customers. We do feel very optimistic and confident about how we position the business so that when we're not facing like gale force headwinds and just give us a little bit of tailwind, I think you'll see a lot of the great work that's been done over the last couple of years. And these conversations and these investor conferences will be a lot more fun, at least for the IR guy.

Totally get it. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.