C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc.

gentlemen and welcome to the CH Robinson fourth quarter 2024 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the company's prepared remarks, we will open the line for a live question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If anyone needs assistance at any time during the conference, please press star 0. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Wednesday, January 29, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ives, Senior Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Shamali, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today is Dave Bozeman, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Castagnetto, our President of North American Surface Transportation, Arun Rajan, our Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, and Damon Lee, our Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind you that our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. Slide two in today's presentation lists factors that could cause our actual results to differ from management's expectations. Our earnings presentation slides are supplemental to our earnings release and can be found in the investor section of our website at investor.chrobinson.com. Our prepared comments are not intended to follow the slides. If we do refer to specific information on the slides, we'll let you know which slide we're referencing. Today's remarks also contain certain non-GAAP measures and reconciliations of those measures to GAAP measures are included in the presentation. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dave. Thank you, Chuck.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I first like to acknowledge the challenges that many people are facing due to the severe weather and natural disasters in certain regions of the country, including the recent wildfires that damaged and destroyed many homes and businesses in the Los Angeles area. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted. And we extend our gratitude to the first responders who worked tirelessly to keep people safe. I'm proud of the support that our company and our employees provided to help those in need as well as our customers. Turn into our fourth quarter. We've talked extensively over the past year about our new Robinson operating model and the discipline execution that the model is enabling. as well as how we're leveraging our industry-leading talent and technology to raise the bar in logistics. The benefits of these efforts were never more evident than in the significant year-over-year improvement in our Q4 financial results. In what continues to be a historically prolonged freight recession with market growth in 2024 that did not materialize as had been projected, The difference in our execution versus last year is stark. Our people are embracing the discipline needed to generate higher highs and higher lows across market cycles, resulting in a higher quality of volume, greater productivity, and expansion of our gross profit and operating profit margins. In a trucking environment where the cost of purchase transportation increased in Q4 due to a decline in industry capacity, Our dynamic costing and pricing tools, our revenue management practices, and our cost of higher advantage enabled us to provide greater value to our customers and at the same time, improve our NAS gross margin both year over year and sequentially. In our global forwarding business, the team has debunked the thesis that Robinson couldn't continue to improve productivity when volumes are growing. Throughout 2024, I've been impressed with and highly appreciative of the team as they continue to be nimble and highly engaged with our customers to help them navigate various market disruptions and to provide differentiated service and solutions. As a result, our ocean and air shipments grew each quarter on a year-over-year basis, and each grew more than 5% for the full year. Through improvements in process standardization and automation and embracing the rigor of our operating model, the forwarding team decoupled headcount growth from volume growth, reduced their average headcount for the year more than 10% and achieved productivity improvement of greater than 15% for the full year. Over the two-year period of 23 and 24, we delivered compounded productivity growth of 30% or more in both global forwarding and NAST. And as we said at our investor day in December, we view our productivity as evergreen improvements that we do not expect to get back. Enabled by the operating model disciplines and tools that are being applied across our company, we expect to further advance our productivity as we grow our businesses, including both NAST and global forwarding. The productivity improvements have lowered our cost to serve and increased our operating leverage. Combined with our expanded gross margins, this resulted in a 79% year-over-year increase in our enterprises Q4 adjusted income from operations. I want to thank our people, one of our greatest competitive advantages, for their relentless efforts to embrace our new operating model and execute in a fit, fast, and focused way. as we keep pushing the bar higher on exceptional service to our customers and carriers and on financial performance across market cycles. Our new operating model has changed how we discover and inspect root cause issues and quickly implement countermeasures to improve the level of our operational execution. The reliability of our operating reviews continues to increase as we leverage our data-rich environment to inform our decision making and enhance our competitive differentiation. This is showing up in improvements such as more disciplined pricing and better decisions on the volume that we're seeking. We are still early in our journey, but the operating model is helping us execute a solid strategy even better. And we expect further improvement as the accountability that the operating model demands is embraced deeper in the organization. I'm confident in the team's ability to drive a higher and more consistent level of discipline in our operational execution. As freight markets continue to fluctuate due to seasonal, cyclical, and geopolitical factors, we continue to remain focused on what we can control, including deploying our operating model and lean principles across the company, providing best-in-class service to our customers and carriers, gaining profitable share in targeted market segments, and leveraging game-changing generative AI to improve our service, workflows, and cost at scale, not in theory. We also continue to focus on ensuring that we'll be ready for the eventual freight market rebound with a disciplined operating model that responsibly grows market share. further decouples headcount growth from volume growth, drives additional operating leverage, and generates incremental operating income. I'll turn it over to Michael now to provide more details on our NAS results.

Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. In Q4, we delivered further optimization of our NAS volume, our gross profit margin, and our adjusted gross profit per shipment. resulting in a 40% year-over-year increase in our adjusted operating income. From a volume standpoint, the market continues to be in a prolonged freight recession as Dave mentioned. The cast freight shipment index in Q4 was down 3.2% year-over-year and down 4.8% sequentially, and it was the lowest Q4 reading the industry has seen in the last 15 years. At the same time, The truckload line haul cost per mile, excluding fuel surcharges, increased due to a decline in industry capacity. Our resilient team of freight experts responded to the challenging freight environment by improving the quality of our volume with pricing discipline and a cost of higher advantage delivered by our procurement teams and the growing usage of our digital brokerage capabilities. All of this led to an improvement in the AGP yield within both our transactional and our contractual truckload business, and 170 basis point year-over-year improvement in our NAST gross margin. Supported by our operating model and armed with innovative tools, our team also delivered a sequential improvement in NAST gross margin and truckload AGP dollars per shipment, despite the rising cost of purchase transportation. From a volume perspective, our total NAS volume declined approximately 1% year-over-year, outpacing the index for the seventh consecutive quarter. This included a 2.5% increase in LTL volume and a 6.5% decrease in truckload volume. Our team is continuously testing the best combination of volume and margin to improve our earnings. We know we have the optionality to increase our volume when the conditions are right. and we are ready to pivot when it makes sense to do so, but we're going to maintain our discipline. From a market balance perspective, we continue to be in a drawn-out stage of capacity oversupply, although carrier attrition is occurring and moving toward better balance each quarter. Due to a seasonal decline in capacity, the drive-in load-to-truck ratio and spot rates experience some upward pressure during the holiday season and the subsequent winter storms similar to last year. but the load-to-truck ratio and spot rates are expected to return to pre-holiday levels once the storms abate. What stands out is that our execution is markedly different than last December and January, as we're making better decisions on the optimal freight for us and making better use of our proprietary digital capabilities. In our LTL business, the 2.5% year-over-year increase in our Q4 shipments was driven by strength across several of our LTL services, By leveraging our vast access to capacity, our broad range of LTL services and solutions, and our high level of customer service, our LTL team continues to onboard a solid pipeline of new business and build on our existing LTL business that exceeds $3 billion in annual revenue. Looking ahead to Q1, it is typically a seasonally weaker quarter compared to Q4. with the 10-year average of the cast rate shipment index reflecting a 2.5% sequential volume decline from Q4 to Q1. As Dave said, regardless of market conditions, we remain focused on what we can control. Our people and their unmatched expertise enable us to deliver exceptional service and greater value to our customers and carriers. In line with a disciplined and focused approach to capture growth opportunities in targeted customer segments, such as small and medium businesses, we have invested in our sales organization and we will continue to deliver industry-leading solutions to customers and carriers. As recently announced, one of those solutions is the introduction of CH Robinson Financial, an innovative digital payment solution for carriers that is aimed at setting a new standard of speed and efficiency unmatched by any other freight provider. It marks a significant leap forward in fostering financial stability and streamlining operations for carriers. As Dave called out earlier, I also want to take a moment to thank the NAS team for their incredible work in 2024. Our performance and improvements throughout the year reflect their commitment to our customers, carriers, and each other. Through their continued engagement with the CH Robinson operating model, our people are delivering improved results in a very difficult marketplace. and I am proud to lead this team. I'll turn it over to Arun now to provide an update on the innovation we're delivering to strengthen our customer and carrier experience and improve our AGP yield and operating leverage.

Thanks, Michael, and good afternoon, everyone. As I mentioned at our investor day in December, CH Robinson is in prime position to disrupt from within to lead the industry forward in a way that others cannot match. The innovations that we bring to the industry and our customer supply chains, such as automation powered by GenAI, have a market-wide impact due to our size and scale. And we are not just talking about doing this. We are already doing it for thousands of global customers. As an example, with our proprietary technology that reads, classifies, and responds to incoming emails, we've been able to automate more than 10,000 transactions per day. This automation across the quote-to-cash lifecycle of an order whether it be quoting, order entry, load tenders, appointment scheduling, or other manual tasks, enables us to reduce our response times and provide a better and more uniform experience for our customers and carriers. It also creates business model scalability, thereby enabling us to decouple headcount growth from volume growth and to create greater operating leverage. In the fourth quarter, as throughout 2024, We continue to scale our process innovations at our use of GenAI. After utilizing GenAI to automate orders that are tendered via email, the automation of our order tenders increased 1,150 basis points compared to Q4 of last year and 440 basis points sequentially. And while the automation of this process has now reached nearly 90%, the other points in the order lifecycle have more runway for improvement. Increased automation in our order entry process and other points in the order lifecycle enabled us to increase our NASP and global forwarding shipments per person per day by more than 30% over the two-year period of 2023 and 2024. And although our productivity improvements won't continue to compound at these levels, we expect to continue increasing our productivity in 2025 and beyond to create further operating leverage. We also continue to increase the rigor and discipline in our pricing and procurement efforts, resulting in improved AGP yield across our portfolio. With continued innovation in our digital brokerage and dynamic pricing and costing, we're responding surgically and faster than ever to dynamic market conditions by performing more frequent price discovery and enhancing the quality of the pricing that we deliver. Along with our operating model, this was a major contributor for the year-over-year improvement that we achieved during the seasonal market tightness and throughout 2024. But as I also said at our investor day, a digital-only approach has proven to be ineffective in the logistics industry due to the level of complexity and variation in freight characteristics that necessitate human expertise. The active role that our people play from a human-in-the-loop perspective leverages their deep domain expertise, and drives feedback to our algorithms on a regular basis in the form of expert market adjustments. And through our revenue management discipline, our teams are armed with intelligence on targeted countermeasures that they can take to implement a disciplined pricing strategy based on individual customer value propositions. Ultimately, we are innovating and disrupting from within to deliver on three items that are key to our strategy. transforming the customer and carrier experience to drive growth, delivering business model scalability, and driving gross margin and operating margin expansion. With that, I'll turn the call over to Damon for review of our fourth quarter results.

Thanks, Arun, and good afternoon, everyone. As covered by Dave and the team, we delivered significant year-over-year improvement in operating income in Q4, driven by an increase in AGP, while reducing cost through our operational discipline and productivity initiatives, and thereby driving higher operating leverage. In the face of continued soft market volume and rising spot cost due to declining capacity, discipline procurement of capacity and revenue management improved the quality of our volume and our AGP, which was up 66 million or 10.7% year over year. driven by a 25.6% increase in global forwarding and a 6.2% increase in NAST. On a monthly basis, compared to Q4 of last year, our total company AGP per business day was up 9% in October, up 6% in November, and up 12% in December. From an expense standpoint, our total operating expenses, excluding restructuring charges, declined $15.3 million year over year. Q4 personnel expenses were $354.4 million, including $3.7 million of restructuring charges related to workforce reductions. Excluding restructuring charges in the current and prior year, our Q4 personnel expenses were $350.6 million, down $12.5 million due to our continued productivity and cost optimization efforts, and despite an increase and incentive compensation related to our improved financial results. Our average Q4 headcount was down 9.5% compared to Q4 of last year. Moving to SG&A, Q4 expenses were $146.4 million, including a $12.6 million decrease in the loss related to the planned divestiture of our European surface transportation business, and $9.5 million of other restructuring charges, primarily related to reducing our facilities footprint. Excluding these, SG&A expenses were $149.6 million, down $2.7 million year-over-year, with the expense reduction across several expense categories. Turning to our 2025 annual operating expense guidance, we expect our personnel expenses to be 1.375 to 1.475 billion. This includes some headcount decline, including those related to the planned divestiture of our Europe surface transportation business and driven by continued productivity improvements, partially offset by investments in our team as we reward the talented people that fuel our progress. We expect 2025 SG&A expenses to be $575 to $625 million, including depreciation and amortization of $95 to $105 million. Although most of our SG&A expenses are subject to inflation, we expect continued cost improvements to partially offset the inflationary impact. Shifting back to Q4. Our effective tax rate for the quarter, excluding the tax impact of restructuring charges, was 12.4%, resulting in a full-year tax rate of 18.7%. We expect our 2025 full-year effective tax rate to be in the range of 18 to 20%. Our capital expenditures in Q4 were $15.2 million, bringing our 2024 total to $74.3 million. For 2025, we expect capital expenditures to be 75 to 85 million. From a balance sheet perspective, we ended Q4 with approximately 1.2 billion of liquidity, comprised of 1.04 billion of committed funding under our credit facilities, and a cash balance of 146 million. Our financial strength continues to be a key differentiator in our industry, as it enables us to continue investing and improving our capabilities. Our debt balance at the end of Q4 was $1.38 billion, and our net debt to EBITDA leverage at the end of Q4 was 1.61 times, down from 2.08 times at the end of Q3. This was primarily driven by the improved performance of the business and the resulting increase in our trailing 12-month EBITDA as well as a decrease in our net debt balance. Overall, our Q4 financial results are a testament to our disciplined execution and our focus on profitable growth, and I am optimistic about our runway for further improvement. With that, I'll turn the call back to Dave for his final comments.

Thanks, Damon. As I reflect on the noteworthy progress that we made in 2024, I'd like to thank the Robinson team for all the work they've put in to get to this point. I don't take their efforts and dedication for granted, and I commend them for helping us get more fit, fast, and focused, and for embracing the discipline that the new operating model demands. Our improved execution at the bottom of the freight cycle is delivering improved financial performance. we're making better and faster decisions on capturing the right freight at the right price to deliver a higher quality of volume. I believe the disciplines and practices that we have implemented at Robinson can endure through a prolonged freight recession, through a market inflection, and through any part of the freight cycle. As I've mentioned during the past year and at our investor day in December, All the changes we're making are aimed at our north star of generating incremental operating income by focusing on growing market share and expanding our growth and operating margins. We expect to continue growing market share by reclaiming share in targeted segments and by leveraging our robust capabilities to power value-added services and solutions for our customers and carriers that drive new volume to our four core modes and expand our addressable market. We're optimizing our gross profit by monitoring key input metrics and responding faster to error states and changing market conditions with countermeasures and innovative technology that improves our execution, such as our dynamic costing and pricing tools and our digital brokerage capabilities. And we're improving our operating leverage and operating income margins by embedding lean practices, removing waste, and expanding our digital capabilities, such as leading the logistics industry on implementation of the game-changing capabilities of Gen AI. We are arming our people with better tools and moving with greater clock speed and urgency to seize opportunities and solve problems in order to win now and to be ready for the eventual freight market rebound. On my first earnings call in August of 2023, I said that I looked forward to leading this great company to new heights and sharing our progress with all of you along our journey. While there's still more grass to cut, I believe we're on the right path. And I'm pleased with the progress we've made on evolving our strategy and improving our execution by instilling discipline with our new operating model. This concludes our prepared remarks. I'll turn it back to the operator now for the Q&A portion of the call.

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the start keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Chris Weatherby with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, great. Thanks. Good afternoon, guys. You know, I guess I wanted to kind of just make sure that I understood sort of the approach that you're taking to the market as it stands today. So at the investor day, you outlined gross margin opportunities, also certain productivity opportunities on operating margin expansion. And I think while you outperform sort of the market from a volume standpoint in NAS, I guess TL was down sort of in that 6.5% range. So I guess I just want to make sure I, you know, kind of get some clarity on how do you think about those separate opportunities of the gross profit margins and then ultimately the operating margins as we're in this type of market? So I guess how should we expect you to try to balance those priorities, particularly as we turn over into 1Q and 2Q, where maybe we're seeing some recovery, maybe we're not. It's still a little bit unclear.

Yeah. Hey, Chris, this is Dave. Good to hear from you and good to see you at Investor Day. A number of things in what you said there, it certainly still is a very tough market out there for us, which is why I'm really proud of the team and how they're really navigating the waters here within NAST. I'm going to have Michael go a little bit deeper into the team and where you're getting at, and then we can also circle back to it as well when he's done it. We don't double-click enough on it, but Michael, let's go a little bit further on that one.

Yeah, thanks, Chris. I think you called out really what we're trying to make sure we accomplish, which is the quality of volume that we manage and execute for our customers and carriers. And Q4 continued to be a very competitive marketplace where demand is just not where the market needs it to be. And with that in mind, we're prioritizing making sure that we haul the right freight, that we deliver a very high level of service. And through the tools that we've implemented, you know, we were able to expand our gross margins in a rising cost market, which was a challenge we really set out for ourselves during some of the work you saw us talk about at Investor Day. And so really to Dave's point, proud of the work the team did. Certainly as we head into Q1 and Q2, we would want to share the same sentiment that you have that hopefully those shoots of volume start to come forward. But even then, we're going to still maintain that discipline that we price things correctly, we haul the right freight, we meet our customer service expectations, and we deliver strong bottom line numbers as a result.

Yeah, Chris, and then again, just kind of put a period on that. It's really about that flexibility with our model and where we're going. If we start seeing this thing inflect, you know, Michael and team and the rest of the team across Robinson, as we said in investor day, we are prepared with the flexibility for when this market starts to come back. And again, driving that higher lows, if it's steadier throughout the year, we're prepared to continue to deliver what you're seeing here. So thanks for the question.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of BASCOM majors with Susquehanna International Group. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks for taking my questions. We're a couple months removed from when you put the plan together to share with us in December. Just curious if you could walk through some of the cyclical puts and takes on the path to 26 as you feel today and if there's any other leanings in either direction on any of your businesses compared to what we heard in early December. Thank you.

Hi, Bascom. This is Damon. You know, look, you know, certainly Investor Day was a good event for us. I think our message came across loud and clear. You know, we feel good about the targets we laid out in Investor Day and the mix of those targets between businesses and initiatives. So I would say there's not been any pivot or change from our position on how we laid out Investor Day in December and what we see what we see today. So again, we feel good about the targets we laid out. We feel good about the path in which we will deliver those targets. And you're touching on an exact reason on why we gave a range for the market, right? No one knows what the market's going to be between now and 2026, but we're going to control what we can control and keep the discipline. And as Michael mentioned, the focus on the quality of volume. And I think all of that will certainly line up to delivering those 2026 goals the way we laid them out in December.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ariel Rosa with Citigroup. Please proceed with your question.

Yes, this is Ben Moore on for Ari. Thanks so much for taking our call. Great to see you guys at the Investor Day. On your two key areas for revenue growth, you mentioned enterprise versus S&B markets. What would you say you're in in terms of inning for both of those? Is it more like seventh inning for enterprise, but a whole lot more like third inning for S&B? And then On your cross-selling opportunity as your second area, you've noted 20% of global forwarding AGP growth comes from relationships that began at Nest, and there could be more runway. How much opportunity is left from this cross-selling across your segments? Would you say you're in the third inning there? I would love to hear your thoughts on both these areas of growth, please.

Yeah, Ben, this is Michael. Thanks for the question. I think the broad answer to everyone.