U-Haul Holding Company

Good morning and welcome to the U-Haul Holding Company third quarter fiscal 2023 investor conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sebastian Reyes.

Please go ahead. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Welcome to U-Haul Holding Company third quarter fiscal 2023 investor call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that certain of the statements during this call, including without limitation, statements regarding revenue, expenses, income, and general growth of our business may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties, some of which cannot be predicted or quantified. Certain factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. For discussion of the risks and uncertainties that may affect the company's business and future operating results, Please refer to Form 10Q for the quarter ended December 31, 2022, which is on file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. I'll now turn the call over to Joe Schoen, Chairman of U-Haul Holding Company.

Good morning and thanks for being on the call. I am not satisfied with our third quarter or our year-to-date numbers. Clearly, the post-pandemic easy top-line growth is going away. We knew it would. The question now is, will we maintain the new customers we served during the boom? Of course, I intend that we do. In U-Move, we are experiencing a decline in average miles per one-way move and a decline in total one-way moves. In in-town transactions, I would expect us to begin to stabilize. Our third quarter decline in in-town revenue is a bit misleading as while we saw last-mile delivery business income decline, we have also increased our transactions with our reliable individual consumers. Self-storage is tightening up for everyone in the sector, and we're not immune to that. However, we are still re-renting rooms as customers vacate and getting a fair rate. Self-storage is very local market dependent. Of course, this is not news. And a great effort is being made to add storage in an opportunistic as well as a strategic manner. Personnel expense is up. We are running a bit more personnel than our revenue justifies. We need to effect some productivity improvements before this will flatten out or come down. Rental equipment maintenance is up. The difficulty in purchasing enough new vehicles and the resulting tradeoff of lower depreciation for increased repair expense is a tradeoff I would rather not be making. At this point, I believe we are trading down. We have very modest input on what original equipment manufacturers are willing to produce and sell. Until their appetite increases, and unless we can figure out a better solution, this will be a drag on us. We have experienced this before, and it does not fix very fast. Overall, I am very optimistic on our prospects. We are working to increase our service and value to the customer. This is achievable, and I remain hard at it.