Schneider National, Inc. (NYSE:SNDR) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Bruce Chan : Okay. Great. That’s very helpful. And then just as a follow-up. Maybe can you just talk about some of the puts and takes between the inflationary costs and the yield headwinds and then some of the ability of lower rail cost and dray costs to kind of offset those on the Intermodal side? And I guess what I’m asking here is do you feel that as costs kind of adjust lower, you can get back down to below a sort of 90 OR in that Intermodal section — segment later this year. Do you think that we’re going to kind of stay at these levels?

Mark Rourke : I’ll let Jim offer some additional context. But certainly, we have a great deal of capability with our box count and our rail partners and what we can do from a performance standpoint. And so the biggest opportunity that we believe is in volume and intermodal more so than cost and price and what we’re just — we haven’t really seen as the recovery yet, particularly through the port activity that drives so much of our Intermodal business. And so I would comment that more towards volume going forward as our best remedy.

James Filter : Yes, and I believe that we’ve taken a number of cost actions early on in this freight cycle to get ahead of this. And that’s what’s enabled us to maintain the margin performance we’ve had. But certainly, there’s — the big opportunity here is volume, as Mark stated. In terms of our rail deals, those are long term, they’re market-driven, so they do adjust with the market. And so there’ll be some adjustments as we go through this remainder of this cycle.

Operator: Next question comes from Brian Ossenbeck with JPMorgan.

Brian Ossenbeck : Maybe just to circle back, I think, Mark, on your comments you mentioned not really wanting to chase some of the pricing in Intermodal. So maybe I didn’t hear that right, but if you can just expand more broadly on competition within that segment. Are you still stacking your containers? Do you feel like others are doing the same? And do you have some visibility to getting some Truckload conversion? Are the spreads getting to the point where you can actually pull some of that stuff off the highway?

James Filter : Yes, you have a lot of questions there. I’ll try to put all those in together and make sure I hit all of these. So we do have boxes stacked. It’s right now at this point, it’s less than 15% of our boxes. As Mark shared, we’re not adding to that fleet. So we think that leaves a lot of opportunity for us to continue to grow. In terms of market and some of our competitors, we see some competitors that are going in with pricing that would be at extremely low contribution or no contribution, which might be accretive in the short term. But those really are not sustainable levels. And in the past, when we’ve gone through these cycles, we’ve seen different carriers have to go and make adjustments very soon after those bids implement.

And that leads to a really strong visceral reaction from our customers that often last for years. And many of our large customer relationships were born out of those types of interactions and we’ve been able to build on top of those. In terms of competition relative to truck, we’re within the range of when we see that we’re able to do over the road to intermodal conversions, a discount ranging about 10% to 15%. We’re a little bit on the low edge of that. The other impact there is fuel cost. Fuel is down $1 a gallon year-over-year. But over the last couple of weeks, it has been picking up. So we’d expect that will be another opportunity for Intermodal to gain share.