Union Pacific Corporation (UNP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome again to our 42nd Annual Industrial Select Conference. I'm Brandon Oglenski, airline and transport analyst, and we're very pleased to have Union Pacific up next and almost the entire management team here. Jim Vena, CEO, Jennifer Hamann, CFO; and Kenny Rocker, Head of Marketing and Sales.

So I know we're going to have a great conversation here. I just want to do the audience response questions very quickly here, one through three. So if we can queue up question one. And Jim, I know you have some things to say, but do you currently own UNP? Yes, overweight, 2, market weight, 3 underweight, or 4, no ownership.

Are those questions for me to answer?

We prefer to keep it as [ unbiased ] Okay. Question number two. What is your general bias towards Union Pacific right now? Positive, negative or neutral? I see Brad in here clicking a few. All right. And then question number three. In your opinion, through-cycle EPS growth for Union Pacific will be above peers, in line with peers or below peers? And we appreciate everyone's participation here because we got some pretty good results out of this conference. Split. All right. Well, Jim, I know you have a couple of points you want to make here.

Yes. Listen, thank you very much, Brandon, for having us. And real quick. Of course, the first one is we're making some forward-looking statements. So I'll refer to the UP, Union Pacific website and make sure if there's any question about it, or get a hold of our excellent team that's sitting in the front row, if you have any questions about what we said and any clarification. So other than that, up here with me is the management team, like Brandon said. Not all of it. I have Eric Gehringer, who's trying to deal with the winter in the beautiful planes in Omaha and North. We decided not to bring him, but he's not here, but I get Jennifer Hamann, our CFO. And I got who Kenny Rocker, the Executive VP of Marketing. So we've got a lot of help up here. So hopefully, we can go through everything. Let me talk a little bit about what we've done. We're executing on our strategy. Our strategy is pretty clear. It's about safety, service and operational excellence. We think if we can deliver on those things, that we end up growing the company faster than what the economy will give us. We've done a great job in improving safety, double-digit improvements in both injuries and excellence, which is real important. Even though as an industry, we're very safe and Union Pacific is very safe, and it's the safest form of transport -- ground transport. But as far as we're concerned, we're nowhere near what's possible, and that's the way we want to look at it and get better. We have -- and if we do those two things, provide the service that we sold to our customers, we're sure that we're going to grow the volumes. And we continue always to look at ways to make the railroad more productive. And I think we ended up in 2024, I don't think about it. I do know that we ended up with industry-leading results across the board, whether it was in some financial metrics or operating metrics for the company. 2025 for us is a focus on what we can control, okay. So we don't get too excited and try to give people a dream about what we think. We give people and our shareholders what is it that we know we can do. And the way we look at it is, if the fundamentals are right in the company, if we're doing the right things, then you build off of those fundamentals, because you're always going to have things throwing at you. There's a whole discussion on tariffs, and I'm sure I won't get into it now because there will be a question about it, but we know it's out there, and we understand it. And we have prepared ourselves to deal with whatever happens, good or bad with the tariffs. If you have a solid product, the service product, then the customers see that they can win in the marketplace and they can grow with us. And for us, that's really important. And we partner, and try to partner, with the best within an industry. And make sure that they have the best chance to win. So far, in 2025, our volumes in the first 7 weeks are up 9%. And what's nice about it is not only in the intermodal piece, which has some strength above last year, but some of the other product segments, and I won't go into it in depth Brandon, because I'm sure Kenny will [ espouse ] on it. But that's a good place to be is as our volumes are up for the first 7 weeks. And -- what do we showing our customers? What we're showing our customers with the level of service is truly what Union Pacific is capable of doing. And that transcends the entire company. It's how the people at the front line are feeling much more comfortable to make decisions. We want them to make decisions. You drive decisions to the people who actually have the best knowledge of what's happening locally. Now you don't let them make any decision. You still have guardrails of how far the decision power is. But to transfer that to the local level on some things as being real smart for us. So we, at our Investor Day last September, we were clear. We think that for the next 3 years, we have a goal of high single-digit to low double-digit EPS growth. And I don't see anything at this point changing or worrying me from being able to deliver that. Always uncertainty. Union Pacific has been around for 162 years. And I'll bet you in the 162 years, if you go back in history, we have run into just about everything that we've had to deal with. And in fact, I'm real proud this year -- this week, we announced -- we rolled out a locomotive that is going to be painted in color and representative of President Lincoln. And we thought it was really important for us to show our history and acknowledge strong people in the railroad, and it's the second locomotive we've ever done that with. Now for any investor that says, wow, Ben, are you just blowing money. You got to paint them anyways. So we took one that we had to paint, but we painted it a little bit different color than that beautiful armor yellow we normally do. So that's who we are. We're a simple company. We're here to deliver for our shareholders, deliver for our employees and deliver for the communities and our customers. And I think we're set up pretty good, Brandon. That's all I have to say.

I appreciate that, Jim. And I want to keep this focused on the long term, but Jennifer and Kenny, how is the first quarter track, I guess, from a financial perspective? And also your volumes are looking very strong through mid-February here. Is that a comp issue? Or are you seeing core acceleration in some of your segments?

Yes, I'll start it, and then you join in. Clearly, you look at some of the markets like our international intermodal business. It's been strong. We have seen some of the pull ahead impact during the first, call it, 6 to 7 weeks. We'll see how the quarter plays out. Maybe there will be a little bit of softening. Obviously, we've got some back half comps we have to deal with. But then you look at other pieces of our business like our coal business, kind of a surprising story where -- last year, we had some pretty significant degradation, call it, 22% roughly. As we look at the quarter so far, it's looking to be a little bit of flattish, and we'll see how that plays out. We talked about a win on our coal business. So we're expecting that to be a positive. And then on our grain business, our grain has started off solid. We had some weather that's come up. That's impacting our customers' ability to load and some of our ability, but the demand is there, which is encouraging for us. And then on domestic intermodal, that's holding up pretty well. We'll see where the contract rates play out. We expect that to be slightly a bit of a positive, at least if you look at the forecast that we're seeing. And then finally, on our automotive business, we've got a great franchise, meaning not just the infrastructure, but also the portfolio of customers we have. We're seeing some curtailments there, but we're poised to grow win that market and [ win ] the SAAR turns around.

And in terms of the quarter, we didn't -- we don't give quarterly guidance usually. We had a great fourth quarter. 2024 closed the year out really strong. And what we're looking at is how do we continue that momentum and continue to just improve quarter-over-quarter. We want to continually be improving whether that's driving a better service product, driving better cost control, continuing to grow the business and support what Kenny and team are doing. So I think we feel really good about that. We're going to have some weather in the first quarter. As Jim mentioned, it's pretty darn cold in Omaha right now, and that slows things down for us and for our customers. So I think you see that reflected in some of the metrics. You'll probably see that reflected in carloads. But none of those things are the fundamentals that Jim is talking about. The fundamentals are strong. We feel very encouraged by that. And I think one sign of that encouragement, hopefully, everyone saw, we did a $1.5 billion accelerated share repurchase program that we announced on Tuesday. So I think that's a good step forward to our commitment to buy back between $4 billion and $4.5 billion worth of shares in 2025, a real strong indicator of how we feel about the business.

And I guess normally though, in the first quarter, there's always weather, right? And is there usually seasonal degradation in profitability across your network?

I would say if you think about seasonality, usually the first quarter is one of our toughest quarters. It's usually when you have your lightest car loadings, you have some of those beginning of the year expenses and you generally have your worst weather. And so that's why there is seasonality in our business. Is this quarter's seasonality going to look different than others? I don't know that it will, but we are seeing, what I'll call, at least normal seasonality right now.

Okay. I appreciate that. And Jim, maybe longer term, given those targets that you provided at Investor Day, what's changed in the organization since you've taken over? Because I -- and maybe just if I were to paraphrase because I've covered your company a long time, it felt like maybe there wasn't a lot of risk taking occurring in Omaha. And now maybe are you allowing the team to go out there and take a little bit more risk?

Well, you got to be careful with the word risk, okay? Financially...

Commercially.

Yes, I got. I understand. But for me, financially, we need to have a company that has a strong balance sheet, make sure that we understand where the revenue is coming from, how the revenue is coming from and that we're sustainable for the long term. And I think we're excellent at that. And that's just -- we never take risk on that, okay. If we were worried about it, there's no way we would have purchased $1.5 billion worth of shares. We would have stopped it. So that's just the way we are. I would just come out and tell people why, but that's the piece. What we've changed and we have, it's a whole team effort is, we changed the culture at UP to be, first of all, clear on what a win is. And the win is right safety, service and operational excellence. It truly is that. And I think if you went and asked most employees, I can't say all, because some of them, of course, like anything else, like my kids, they don't ever listen to me perfectly. But bottom line is that's our strategy. And if you're doing something that does not impact to improve safety, then what are you doing? If you're not there to provide service and providing the service to the level we've committed to our customers, that's a problem, okay. And operational excellence is making sure that we do all the things. And that is tough at times. But so what? That's what we get paid for. And as a whole team, we're aligned. I mentioned about driving decision-making to the right level. It's not telling the person at the front line in El Paso, that person is going to decide what my salary is. The Board does that, okay. But [ we have to say ] locally, what's the best way to run trains across the border? How do you handle that? And they know what's going on. They're talking to U.S. customs, all that. So that's the thing. The other thing too is we're probably, Brandon, I think you're trying to take me is, we're willing to take a risk on some things and try things new. And I tell people this all the time. You can make a mistake, within your parameters of what you have the authority to make decisions on, you make a mistake or you try something. It doesn't work. You want to realign your assignments, how they are. Go ahead and do that. Don't do it again, right. I'm not into making a mistake. And I mentioned my kids once, I'll tell you, I gave my kids half a chance, but I give everybody a work a full chance they can make a full mistake. So at the end of the day, that's really important, and that's how we are. And we -- people talk about what the culture is at the senior executive level at the company? We don't have 1,000 meetings a week. We're very clear on what we have to do, and we target specific decision-making groups when we need it. That's the change in culture at Union Pacific. And unless you two want to say anything different.

Just a sense of urgency and the decisiveness that Jim talked about. And the way I look at risk as it relates to the commercial team is the risk to go out there and build new products. So build a Phoenix facility, expand the Inland Empire facility, build on a Twin City facility. On the pricing side, taking a little bit more risk that, hey, we might lose some business, but we can make an adjustment in the next month as we see more business come on. So clearly, a very offensive posture.

On the marketing sales, and I should have said this earlier on, I think we were a little bit not cognizant of the value of the product that we provide customers and understand what their full supply chain is and what our value is to that. And we pushed that in 2024, and we're pushing it again in 2025. And of course, listen, any of you that have ever worked with the marketing and sales group, the competitor always is cutting prices. Like have you ever heard a marketing salesperson come to you and say, "oh, yes, yes, they're smart. They're moving their price up, so it will make it easy for us." No, they're always cutting prices. And internally, they're always saying, "oh, you're trying to get a 5%, I don't know." We give -- charge them any more than 3%, we're going to lose all the customers. Well, we didn't do that last year. We pushed the envelope because and we did a lot of work to get there. And you know how many customers we lost? It's so small that it would be insignificant, okay, in the total scheme of things and what we gained. And the reason we can do that is that proper service. So that kind of stuff, Brandon, we are pushing that. And I expect it to be pushed. It's the value of what we provide for the customers. And so far, I think Kenny and his whole team have done a great job on that.

Well, I think a big topic for this conference, not just for railroads, but every industrial company is tariffs, global trade, policy changes that seem pretty volatile. How are you guys managing through this? And Kenny, is there any insight from your customer base? Are people delaying projects? Or is freight moving now in advance? What can you tell us?

So we saw this a little bit ago -- several years ago with Canadian lumber and eventually gets locked into the overall total cost or price. No, we are not seeing any of our customers pause, or pull back on some of the projects. We feel good about our pipeline of industrial projects that are out there, but we haven't seen that. I'd say, if anything, you're getting a few more phone calls with customers trying to mobilize to see what opportunities are there. The way we look at the tariffs is, clearly, we need to be prepared, and that's the best way to handle that business. That overall consumer, the demand should still be there. Maybe it comes in from -- into a different port. Maybe instead of coming in from Canada, it comes in through Mexico. We have a strong franchise. We have to have a strong service network. It's all about preparedness. We got a much bigger issue if the customer says they don't want to buy anything. But from our supply chain perspective, I feel good about what we have.

Yes. And listen, I love what Kenny said, that's exactly the way we look at it. I've spoken to a lot of -- just because we handle the products, whether it's automotive, finished products or parts across the whole spectrum of the 100-plus big products that we move. And I have a cadence of CEOs. And they're in the same position as us. Now they took action when the President said there was going to be tariffs put on in a few days, and they continue to produce in Mexico. And to see what was going to happen because they thought it was going to be a short term. They have the same questions as us. Short term, there could be some impact. And especially if you impact the consumer. If the consumer sees a big -- a large price increase than it could be. In the long run, supply chain chains move, right. And supply chains move. And that helps us in that, like Kenny said, maybe we'll get it from somewhere else. So it's interesting times. So I went back -- I was thinking about this last night, I went back and said, out of the 48 years you've been railroading, have you ever had a year where you wake up and there's no winter, there's no government doing something that you might think doesn't help the company. And are the employees all happy? Does the management team believe in you 100%? And are your shareholders all happy? Well, I couldn't find 1 year. There's always something, okay, going on. And that's our job to get through it. And we are ready at Union Pacific. I am not worried about it at all. And I think in time of crisis you want to be set up so you can win. You can win more market share, you can move more customers over to your railroad, you can do everything you can to win. And with our network and our access even into Mexico and the way we tie in with the Canadian National Railways, I think we've got a great product. So short term might be a little bit of pain, but hang on, we're here to win.

Jennifer, how much flexibility is built into your 2025 guide from a tariff perspective and potential volatility?

Yes. I think we talked about it. We really don't have anything baked in from a tariff perspective into how we talked about 2025. There's just too many unknowns. And to this point, as Kenny said, we really haven't seen an impact. But hopefully, that's how it continues. If there does, then that's where we will focus on cost structure, how we're set up and do we need to make some changes. I think critical in that, though, will be really staying connected to the customer, understand their plans so that we can pivot and support whatever their needs are because in the long term, that's going to be what's really important for us.

Okay. And if there's audience questions, just raise your hand, we'll get you a mic. Kenny, what are some of the most exciting growth opportunities or where you have new customer wins coming on the network this year that you can point to people to?

Yes. So I'll talk markets, and then I'll just talk a few wins. But if you look at the markets like our grain products markets, the renewable diesel, the oils that go into the renewable diesel. Also, we don't talk about it, there's a byproduct on the soybean meal that has to be moved out, we work with our customers to create a network there. We've talked about the petrochem business. It's a very attractive business to us. We've got a great network in the Gulf that helps support a lot of that business. Couple of years ago, a few years ago, we had wins that are now showing themselves in terms of plant expansions and more production coming online, and we have more opportunities that are...

New plants coming in, right?

Exactly. Yes, exactly. Again, over the road, we've had a really great win that we've had out there with Uber Freightn over-the-road business. Those are trucks coming off the highway. That's a strong service product. We've had really great showing with our parcel customers and been able to retain some business that normally would have gone back off due to seasonality. And then you look at Mexico, I mean, we really are excited about the service we have there and the future growth that's come in and the investments in the Mexico. So some really strong markets for us.

Intermodal investments.

Intermodal investments. And again, I talked a little bit about the product development, but I didn't talk about, to your point, Jim, places like Kansas City, where we're growing, and we're expecting later, which is in Northern California, which we're excited about the products that we have, services coming out of the Gulf in Houston that we're seeing more international carriers interested in. So I'm excited about all of that. What you just heard me say is we're growing on the unit train network, on the carload network and our intermodal network.

Well, let me just build on that unit train network because you hear us talk about service and that supports growth. But a real tangible example is we've taken 1.5 days out of our cycle times related to some of our ethanol and renewable programs. And that's enabling growth for those customers, and we're gaining further market share. So that's a great example of where service is directly translating into more carloads on a daily and weekly basis.

Okay. And I think an issue that rail investors have had the last couple of years, not specific to UNP, but pricing or realized yields that we can measure haven't been all that great. And obviously, cost inflation has been higher. Where are we on a pricing perspective looking in '25?

Yes. So I think we talked about that quite a bit at our Investor Day, but when inflation really ran up on us in '22 and 2023, although we were still yielding price dollars on an absolute basis that we exceeded our inflation dollars, it wasn't giving us the bonus on the margins that we had normally been getting. Pricing had been very positive to our margins over the last many years. And so what you saw was a little bit of a step back, that degradation that you talked about. What we're seeing now, and we started to see in the fourth quarter is that, that pricing is not only above inflation dollars, but it's accretive. And that's where we said not only was it in the fourth quarter of 2024, it's going to be there in 2025, and we see that going forward. We probably weren't as aggressive on price in some of those early years of inflation as we should have been. So there's probably a little catch up there. And then we continue to access parts of our book. We touch 50% of our book every year, and then there's parts that are in multiyear contracts. So those are the parts that we need to go back to as they're rolling off. And just be more assertive about value that we're delivering and with the pricing that we should get for that.

Well, I think there's been competitive pressure in places like intermodal and coal, is that right? Is that still the case?

Well, I'll let Kenny talk on the competitive side. I think part of what you're referring to, though, is we do have on the coal side, some of our natural -- some of them are tied to natural gas prices. And so you saw an impact in some of our coal yields from that. Now that's reversing itself and looking a little bit better here to start 2025. And the same with on the truckload side. Some of those new contracts that we won have a little bit more flexible pricing structure. And so at the time that, that business came on is when you not only saw some of the business absolute volume levels be depressed, you saw some of the pricing be depressed. And so that's another area. And Kenny kind of alluded to, we see hopefully that picking up in the back half of the year. That's a great win for us because I don't think you ever saw -- we ever saw the full benefit of those contract wins. And as the market comes back, I think that's an underappreciated opportunity that we're going to have.

And the only thing I'll add is we've always had competitive pressures in some of those rail-centric areas. And what you're hearing us say is that yes, we are being more aggressive. We are appreciating the value of our service when we're talking to our customers. And then you take the other side of it, the more truck-centric side as you look at intermodal. Yes, I feel really optimistic about where I believe the pricing will go. I feel more optimistic with the fact that we've got a stable of private asset owners out there that can win in the marketplace so you get the volume and then we'll let the truck markets play out to see where that pricing is indexed.

Okay. I think we only have a minute or 2 left, but if we can queue up question number four. In your opinion, what should Union Pacific do with excess cash? First to M&A, then share repurchase dividends, debt paydown and internal investment. Okay. And then question number 5, please. In your opinion, what multiple of 2025 earnings should Union Pacific? You need to hit the vote button, please?

Brad hit the number -- I know which number you're...

All right. And then question number 6, please. What do you see as the most significant headwind facing Union Pacific core growth, margin performance, capital deployment or execution? And I guess as we wrap up here and get the results, Jim, I think you've committed to having an industry-leading operating ratio or operating margin, but that's not necessarily what you're driving towards, right? That's the output of year-end results.

Listen, there's nothing wrong with like -- anybody who knows me what am I going to do come out and say, I want to be in second place? So let me say, yes, I think I want to have the second best operating ratio in the industry. I don't think so. And we're a complicated railroad. I think there's other railroads if they did everything right, we would be chasing them. But at the end of the day, we're going to do everything we can to be the best. And it is a result of precipitation of everything that we do. So yes, and I think in 2024, get rid of all the noise and numbers that some people add things in and other people don't, but the fundamental numbers for Union Pacific, I'm very comfortable where we ended up 2024. And I think 2025. Now will the rest of the railroads, I see Keith in the back here. Is he going to do everything he can to beat us? He doesn't want to be #2 or 3 or wherever he ended up, I'm not sure last year. But I know we ended up at #1. So that's what it's all about. But let's look at this for a second. So who are we? We have a franchise that was built that serves the 5 fastest-growing cities, or population, in the U.S. last year. And for us, we need to leverage our network. We don't have a line that goes just between L.A. and Seattle. We go L.A. to Seattle, we go L.A., Las Vegas, okay, Salt Lake City, Denver, and across. We also have a line that goes through the southern part of the U.S. So there are markets, if we don't make a mistake and we're smart about how we do it, we can price in the right way and gain business and we can leverage that network to be able to bring more business on the railroad. Let me finish with this because I love doing this. And I'll take a look at Kenny when I say this. If he doesn't do that, then why do I need a marketing department, okay. The bottom line is, you got to deliver.

All right. Thank you guys very much. I appreciate being here. Thank you very much.