XPO Logistics, Inc. (NYSE:XPO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Scott Group: Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys. I want to dig into the pricing opportunity a little bit. So I think you said contract renewal is up 9%. Is that a number that you view as sustainable over the next few quarters? Help us think about — I don’t know if you guys announced a GRI or what you’re planning on the GRI. And then maybe touch on the accessorial value-added opportunity. Are we seeing any of that benefit yet? Or is that still all incremental?

Kyle Wismans: Hey, Scott, it’s Kyle. So getting about the contract renewal rates that you said, 9% is what we’re seeing in Q3. And relative to GRI, just one clarification, too, is that the contract renewals will impact most of the business. So we’ll go through annual cycle increase. So we expect those to be in the high single-digit range. And then when you think about the GRI for us, we’re going to go through our annual process and we’ll follow our normal time line. So we communicate to customers here in the fourth quarter and then go live with increases in Q1. And then I think your second question was on accessorial, Scott. Accessorials are one of many yield initiatives we’re excited about. Currently, that accessorials are about 10% of our revenue.

We’re targeting to get close to 15%. That’s a combination of offerings we have today as well as some new service offerings. And then in Q2, we did begin rolling out new tools. That helped us really capture more location-based and time-based accessorials. We started seeing impact from that in Q3. We also have a team that’s working on growing our premium service offering. So those should help us really drive that high single-digit impact in Q4 as well as positive yield in 2024.

Scott Group: Okay. Thanks. And then you guys are talking a lot about the claims, seeing some nice improvement. Is there any way to help us think about what does lower claims actually mean for the model? Does it mean lower cost? Does it mean better price? And how quickly do we see any sort of benefit of lower claims showing up in the model?

Mario Harik: Thanks, Scott. This is Mario. When you look at claims, it’s one of our core areas of focus as a company is improving service for the customers. And in our industry, whenever we provide better service and we keep on that trajectory, and eventually, our goal is to be the best-in-class and to get to 8.1% claims ratio. Customers are willing to pay a higher premium for the value that we would offer there. So what you would see is an impact on pricing. And we already are seeing that here in the third quarter. As Kyle just mentioned, our contract renewals are up to 9%, and most of that was driven by these improvements in service. And to keep in mind, Scott, also when we started LTL 2.0, our damage claims were at 1.2%. And we’ve been able to take this here in the third quarter to accompany best through a multitude of initiatives all the way from incentive comp to local incentive comp programs for, we call the Gladiator to incentivize our supervisors to load with quality to rolling out new technology and how we rate our traders and moving forward, the combination of airbags as we’re launching in all service centers, higher-quality straps and improvements across the board, all of these would lead to an even need higher premium on price over time.

So that’s how — what we see the impact on the medium to long term of that continued improvement in service. There is a benefit on the P&L. Obviously, our claims dollars amount would go down, but that’s small in comparison when you look at it versus the improvements in pricing we can pick up over the quarters and years to come.

Operator: Our next question is from the line of Ken Hoexter with Bank of America. Please proceed with your questions.

Kenneth Hoexter: Great. Thank morning, Mario and team. Just talk about the accelerating yield yet you only target about 100 basis points to outperform seasonality when you just did 370 basis points. Maybe you can kind of delve into the why we should or what the opportunity is to see better versus why you think it maybe takes a step back from outperforming seasonality versus what you just posted?

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