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spk06: Greetings and welcome to U.S. Express fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone to require operator assistance during a conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Matt Garvey, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.
spk00: Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the U.S. Express fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. Eric Fuller, U.S. Express's president and CEO, will lead our call today, followed by Eric Peterson, our CFO, who will discuss our financial results. Our discussion today includes forecasts and other information that are considered forward-looking statements. While these statements reflect our current outlook, they are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. These risk factors are described in U.S. Express's most recent Forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC, and in the Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, that is expected to be filed with the SEC in the coming weeks. We undertake no duty or obligation to update our forward-looking statements. During today's call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measure can be found in our earnings release. As a reminder, a replay of this call will be available on the investor section of our website. We have also posted an updated supplemental presentation to accompany today's discussion on our website at investor.usexpress.com. we will be referencing portions of the supplement as part of today's call. And with that, I would like to turn the call over to Eric Fuller.
spk03: Thank you, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, I would like to highlight some of our key achievements in the fourth quarter, provide an update on Variant and our path forward, and after Eric Peterson discusses the financials, I will provide our outlook for 2022. Turning to our fourth quarter achievements in Variant we added 272 trucks to the fleet in the quarter, exiting the year with 1,555 tractors and achieving our target to have more than 1,500 tractors invariant by year end. Variant tractor count growth helped to drive a sequential increase in our overall tractor count of approximately 300 tractors. As a result, we were able to increase our average tractors in the fourth quarter to 6,147 which not only represented growth sequentially, but also year-over-year growth for the first time since the second quarter of 2020. And as a reminder, our terminal network, technology platforms, and key personnel are capable of handling over 8,000 tractors. So growing our fleet back to and beyond historical levels is key to realizing the operating leverage in our model. In dedicated, we experienced a full quarter of the rate increases that we achieved actually in the third quarter, which contributed to an incremental $10 million in revenue sequentially. In brokerage, we continued to grow revenue as revenue for load was up approximately 27% and load count was up approximately 15%. Operating income was $3.1 million and benefited from surge capacity that we provided for some of our customers during the holiday season. Turning to variant, 2021 was a successful year for variant in terms of drug count growth. ending the year at 1,555 tractors and establishing itself as a standalone business unit. However, during the second half of the year, the business began to deteriorate, as shown in our utilization, turnover, and revenue per truck per week, and these trends accelerated in the fourth quarter. Before we get into the issues and remediation efforts, I want to touch upon a couple of key points that were reinforced with me while I spent time with the team in Atlanta over the past couple of months. we remain confident in Varian's business model and continue to believe that we can use technology to better serve our customers while providing a better experience for our professional drivers. With a few refinements to our technology and a little more structure and discipline in our processes, we believe we can get back on track quickly. Through the work of Clayton Christensen and other academics, we have seen examples of how disruption can be managed successfully within a large business. One fundamental principle is to break free from legacy business constraints. We took it to heart, and that's why we incubated Variant outside of our headquarters and non-traditional infrastructure with individuals new to the industry and gave it the autonomy and funding necessary to build something substantial. This is where most companies fail, but where we feel that we excelled. Another fundamental principle is identifying the point when the new venture moves towards maturity and needs to make the transition from nimble startup to a sustainable growing business. This can involve transitioning some leadership, moving away from a grow at all costs startup mentality, and implementing a more disciplined management approach focused on metrics and earnings growth. We believe Variant reached the transition point during the second half of 2021, and we are rapidly transitioning from growing an emerging company in its own ecosystem to integrating what is now a sizable company with defined parts of the broader organization to drive cost reduction and operational efficiency while maintaining the integrity and culture of the new model. In the disruptive startup model, history shows there is risk to acting too early or too late and in integrating too much or too little. Based on the growth of Variant to 1,550 tractors in less than three years, the immediate progress in restoring operating metrics this past month, and the strong cooperation and unified teamwork between Variant and other trucking experts, I believe Variant has progressed better than most efforts at internal disruption, although it has not been, and we never thought it would be, a straight line forward. The first issue was that as Variant grew, it did so without properly increasing the balance of domain expertise, which led to a lot of innovative approaches to the business and the need recently to modify some of these approaches. Variant will continue to be based in Atlanta. But I have reorganized Variant, bringing together the Atlanta-based technology team with the U.S. Express operations team, which has domain expertise in trucking. These groups will report directly to me, and I will provide overall accountability for Variant and ensure we remain balanced in our approach to using technology to provide a better product at Variant. As a reminder, we built Variant purposely outside of U.S. Express with a team that had technology expertise. The team had a little trucking experience, which was by design, so that as they worked to build a technology-enabled OTR fleet, they wouldn't be held back by any preconceived notions about trucking. We understand that as variants scale, they would need to work more closely with those in U.S. Express who understand our core business of delivering freight for our customers and supporting our drivers. During the fourth quarter, we reached a point where the coordination needed to ramp up. the focus on long-term automation needed to be reduced, and the focus on near-term metrics and the driver experience needed to increase. We're in the process of blending what's good with the old along with the innovative new way of doing things. The second issue that we found during our operational review was that not all of our freight in our funnel was running to the optimizer. As background, we built a freight funnel designed to allow our OTR fleet to have first selection of the freight that fits best within our network. We designed it this way to maximize selectivity for our assets while at the same time providing additional capacity for our customers. There was a flaw in the funnel, which meant that the optimizer was not picking from a complete population of freight. This was not an issue when Variant was initially scaling as there was more than enough quality freight that the optimizer could see to produce strong results. But as Variant continued to grow, it became more and more impactful. We quickly identified why the freight was not visible to the optimizer and have initiated multiple work streams to address refining the technology and are already seeing positive results in January as a result of these changes. Third, as part of our deep dive into Variant, we determined there were several logic rules that needed refinement in the optimizer that became more meaningful with more tractors to optimize. We have made refinements in the logic rules already, which we believe are contributing to the better results we're seeing in January. Finally, as issues continued to grow, the team at Variant disproportionately continued to work on longer-term solutions rather than focus on remediation efforts related to the current deterioration in the business, which resulted in an inability to adequately resolve driver issues. As the fleet grew, so did the issues from our drivers, which led to deterioration in response times, an increased driver frustration, and a decrease in driver availability as there wasn't a single line of accountability for the driver. We continue to believe in an exceptions-based approach to fleet management, which will scale better and at a lower cost than the traditional fleet manager model. As part of our improvement initiatives, we are making some refinements to our operations specialist model at Variant. which includes combining specialists currently employed at Variant and others from U.S. Express who manage other fleets in the company. We believe this approach will drive better accountability within the fleet and help improve availability, reduce driver frustration, and ultimately contribute to better revenue per tractor per week and a lower driver turnover in the quarters ahead. Before I close and turn the call over to Eric Peterson to discuss the financials in more detail, I want to thank our shareholders for your continued support and patience as we execute on our multi-year transformation at US Express.
spk04: Thank you, Eric, and good afternoon, everyone. This afternoon, I would like to discuss our performance in the fourth quarter and provide more detail on how our operating model will deliver better operating leverage as we improve the per-unit economics of variant tractors and add more tractors to the variant fleet. Turning to our performance in the fourth quarter, we generated revenue of $487.3 million excluding revenue associated with our fuel surcharge program. This represented an increase of 13.7% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020. The increase in revenue was primarily the result of a $35.5 million or 46.5% increase in revenues in our brokerage segment and a $23 million or 6.5% increase in truckload segment revenues. Turning to our operating expenses, adjusted operating expenses were $488.1 million, an increase of 18% or 74.4 million compared to the fourth quarter of 2020. This amount excludes the impact of our fuel surcharge program, as well as a $4.3 million non-cash write-off we recognized in the fourth quarter which related to technology we determined to be obsolete. In the fourth quarter, salaries, wages, and benefits increased by $30.9 million, driven by a 16.7% increase in driver wages and a 31.9% increase in office wages, primarily due to our digitization efforts in both variant and express technologies, and to a lesser extent, across the entire organization. Purchase transportation increased by $32.9 million, primarily as a result of the increase in brokerage revenue of $35.5 million. Offering expenses and supplies increased by $10 million, primarily due to driver acquisition costs related to increasing our seated tractor count by 298 in the fourth quarter. Insurance premiums and claims expense increased $2.5 million as we experienced two severe accidents in the quarter, which increased our insurance claims expense by $6 million and partially offset by improvements in our company-wide safety programs. Offsetting some of the increased expenses in the quarter was a $6.2 million reduction in equipment costs year over year. The decrease was primarily attributable to an increase in proceeds from the sale of used equipment and fewer owned tractors in the fleet. Turning to variant, for the full year, 2021 expenses related to variant, which are primarily office wages, were $20.5 million, and we capitalized an additional $13.7 million, which related to software development for initiatives including our freight optimization engine, bringing our total investment for the year in Variant to $34.2 million. In 2022, as Eric mentioned, we will be intentional with our investments at Variant, and in the early months, we'll be focused on advancing our freight optimization engine. Turning to capital expenditures, net or proceeds. For the full year, net capital expenditures, which relate primarily to tractors and trailers, were $97 million, excluding equipment financed under operating leases. This was below our previous guidance expectation of between $130 and $150 million, mainly due to delays in equipment deliveries, which were anticipated in the fourth quarter of 2021. In addition, proceeds from the sale of used equipment were higher than anticipated in the fourth quarter. While I am disappointed in our fourth quarter financial results, as we have stated on prior earnings calls, our consolidated results will improve as we grow our overall fleet back to and ultimately beyond our historical levels. Next, I want to spend some time discussing the fixed cost infrastructure of our truckload segment and how operating income is expected to improve as we add tractor count to our overall fleet. We define our fixed costs as costs that do not vary directly with the number of miles traveled and excludes depreciation, interest, and rent expenses associated with our tractors and trailers. Given the unprecedented impact of COVID on our industry, I would say that fleet growth at Variant was a little ahead of our expectations. However, turnover in our legacy over-the-road fleet was greater than we expected. This dynamic, combined with an increase in fixed costs and nominal dollars, has led to delays in realizing the operating leverage in our business. I will cover this in detail. At the end of 2019, we launched Variant as a startup and at the same time began to defund our legacy over-the-road divisions. It was at this time that our overall tractor count began to decline as attrition in our legacy over-the-road division outpaced the growth in our startup over-the-road model variant. As you can see on slide 10 of our earnings supplement, quarterly from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2020, our overall seeded tractor count declined by 521 tractors. In 2020, for each tractor that we added in variant, we are losing two tractors in our legacy over-the-road division. This pressured our results as our fixed costs also increased in nominal dollars by 6.7% for the full year of 2020 compared to the full year of 2019. In 2021, we increased our investment in variant as we grew the tractor fleet from 688 tractors at the beginning of the year to 1,555 tractors exiting 2021. At the same time, we experienced attrition not only in our legacy over-the-road division, but also in our dedicated division as the overall market for professional drivers became extremely competitive as the year progressed. Our investments led to an increase in fixed costs of $55.6 million for the full year of 2021 compared to 2020, or an increase of 17.9%. This increased investment, combined with the decline in tractor count of 208 tractors year over year, led to our fixed costs increasing to 26.6% for the full year, and in the fourth quarter, our fixed costs were 30.1% of truckload revenues. We believe that our tractor count bottomed in the second quarter of 2021, and we have added season tractor count sequentially in both the third and fourth quarters of 2021, which are critical to growing back into our cost infrastructure. We expect our fixed cost infrastructure to grow in nominal dollars, but to decrease as a percentage of revenue as we grow our truck count in the coming quarters. As a reminder, every 1% reduction in fixed cost as a percentage of net truckload revenue creates approximately $12.5 million of incremental operating income. In addition, execution of our transition to a more disciplined approach as we refine the variant product and scale should also contribute to a better fixed cost coverage and reduce our variable expenses as a percentage of revenue. We believe this infrastructure that we have created can handle an additional 2,400-plus seated tractors, bringing our truckload fleet to more than 8,000, which would equate to an additional $500 million in truckload revenues net of fuel relative to where we are today without adding any meaningful infrastructure costs. In 2022, it will be critical for us to continue to improve the overall variant product and scale this fleet, which will ultimately allow us to grow into our enterprise cost infrastructure and make progress towards our profitability initiatives. Admittedly, the transition from product creation to scale didn't come without its challenges. However, we believe our thesis remains strong and we have line of sight to improve results with the recent changes made that Eric discussed earlier. Turning to guidance. For the time being, we are focused on improving the unit economics of our variant trucks and are not providing fleet growth targets until we are confident the operating issues within variant have been fixed and the truck load segment is ready to go again. We expect sequential improvements in our results through 2022 as our efforts take hold, but the pace of change may be uneven. With that, I'll turn it back to Eric for our outlook.
spk03: For the macro operating environment, we expect a robust freight market early in the year that moderates as the year goes on due to improvements in the supply chain, inventory restocking, and perhaps some slowing of manufacturing and imports based on Fed tightening and a return to consumer spending on services. At the same time, shortages of drivers and new tractors and trailers should limit capacity expansion. We expect this to result in low double-digit increases in OTR contract rates and lesser in dedicated, at least in the first half of the year. We are also expecting higher new equipment prices to be offset by a continuation of the strong market for used equipment. To the extent the macro environment is different than these assumptions, our pace of improvement could be faster or slower. Based on our macro expectations, improvements in our operating results are likely to come primarily from improvements in OTR per truck utilization, better freight selection when more freight is being run through the optimizer, and better fixed cost coverage through increases in total fleet size and miles. The good news is much of this is under our control, and I believe we have the right team and the right jobs with the right plan for success. The pace of our success will be apparent in the results of turnover, safety, revenue per truck, and eventually total seated truck count, primarily invariant, but also across our entire truckload segment. One thing that was reinforced with me over the last two months is that across US Express, we have incredibly smart and capable people who have the dedication and drive to make sure we achieve our goals. With the new structure that promotes cooperation between the tech and operations teams, there is new energy to turn silo measurements into enterprise-wide financial results. Early returns on our remediation efforts are positive, as we have averaged approximately $4,100 in revenue per tractor per week in variant over the last four weeks and have reduced our operating expenses by $10 million in annualized costs. While it is still early, we are encouraged by the progress made in a relatively short period of time. Some may ask whether we still believe building variant is the correct strategy. We strongly believe it is, because we believe this industry is ripe for a model that scales at a lower per unit cost. The past 20 years have proven that most companies in our industry work diligently on costs and have a hard time growing their fleet. We want to build a model for growth and economies of scale. The combination of growing to the most difficult driver market in memory and being able to adjust the model rapidly over the past several weeks gives us confidence in the variant strategy and that we are on the path to success. And with that, operator, we are ready to take questions.
spk06: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. Our first question comes from the line of Jack Atkins with Stevens. Please proceed with your question.
spk01: Okay, great. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. So... Hey, Jack. So I guess Eric Fuller, uh, for first question. Yeah. First question's for you. Uh, you know, when, when you think about the, I guess what's left to do to get variant, you know, on track, you know, could you maybe walk us through sort of, you know, the next steps there? Are there any next steps in the first quarter, first half of the year? And then I guess from a bigger picture perspective, you know, could you maybe kind of take us through some lessons learned on your end in terms of being CEO of the company? And maybe how you're going to manage the business differently as you kind of think forward.
spk03: Yeah. Yeah. I think first off, you know, we've gone through some remediation efforts over the last eight, 10 weeks. I mean, there were some things that needed to get addressed. We needed to infuse more domain knowledge back into the business. And so I think that we've, we've done that. In fact, Eric and I have pretty much spent our entire time since, you know, We made the move in mid-December. We spent all of our time in Atlanta. In fact, we're in Atlanta today. And so we're here actively participating and kind of managing the business. We have identified some of our key leadership and some of our other areas that we put back into Varia to drive better results and a little bit, like I said, really The domain knowledge piece was really the big issue. And so trying to fuse that domain knowledge back into the business has been crucial. And we've seen it in our results. The last four weeks, we have seen significantly improved results just about across the board in our revenue per truck and our turnover stats and our phone stats. Like everything that we track and look at, things are moving in the right direction. So we feel very confident that we are moving in the direction that's going to start driving positive earnings growth over the next year. In regards to lessons learned, Jack, I mean, you know, when you build out something like this, we were very intentional about building it offsite, building it within or outside of our four walls, you know, building it with a new team and kind of a new approach. I would say that we probably should have worked towards transitioning that, you know, business from startup to more of a mature business. And Eric and I, especially myself, should have infused myself quicker. If I look back, you know, we were really running really good stats in variant until the summer. And then, you know, it was about summertime that things kind of started to drop off. And so, you know, hindsight, you know, maybe gotten down here a little quicker, but I don't know. I mean, I still think that we moved relatively fast relative to when we started to see a deterioration in the numbers.
spk01: Oh, okay. Got it. I guess maybe a follow-up on that. You know, you noted in your prepared comments that the variant is still going to be based in Atlanta. You know, can you maybe take us through why, you know, that makes you know, sense or why, why you want to continue to have them based there, you know, the variance, the future of the company from, from what you guys sort of believe. And, you know, the company's based in Chattanooga. Why, why is variant, why does variant need to be based in Atlanta?
spk03: Well, we have, so most of our tech team and we're still, you know, we're still all in on this model. I mean, I, I know it, you know, it feels with, with some of the changes that have happened over the last few weeks or last month or so that, uh, I want to make sure that that message goes across that we're not deviating from our strategy and our strategy all along has been to leverage the technology capabilities of the team down here to really build out a model that we think can scale long term. And we still believe in that basis. And so our team that we've built in Atlanta, our tech team is located here. Now, a lot of our operations are more on-site at terminals and things like that, but most of the management, especially from a technology standpoint, are based in Atlanta, and we don't think that we could probably source that level of talent in Chattanooga. It's just not a market that can sustain the level of tech talent that we need, and so we think Atlanta is more appropriate.
spk01: Okay, last question, and I'll jump back in queue. But, you know, when you think of all the moving pieces, and I'm not trying to pin you down, but I guess we're just trying to kind of think about the moving pieces here. The costs that have come out of variant, revenue per truck per week is improving, but you've got seasonality that's not your friend, fourth quarter to first quarter. You know, do you think the business can be profitable, whether it's from an operating income perspective or from a DPS perspective, in the first quarter? Absolutely.
spk03: Absolutely. um yeah we feel we feel confident um that we're going to start seeing sequential earnings improvement from here on out that we have we've we've kind of you know that inflection point that we talked about repeatedly at 1500 or so trucks we've passed that we are growing um continuing to grow and so we feel very confident that we're going to be moving into positive earnings territory from here on out okay i'll turn it over uh thanks again for the time
spk05: Our next question comes from the line of Scott Group with Wolf Research.
spk06: Please proceed with your question.
spk02: Hey, thanks. Just to follow up there, were you profitable in January?
spk04: Yes, questions were we profitable in January, and I will say we're still finishing up January, but we were encouraged by the sequential improvement we made with the increased revenue productivity on the trucks and with the cost coming out. I will say that all of those costs, the $10 million, they weren't out effective January 1st. That's something that's happened today. So I still don't have that full benefit in the month of January, but very encouraged with how January is looking relative to where we were in the fourth quarter.
spk02: Okay. What do you think is a realistic
spk04: operating ratio for the trucking segment this year if you guys have all the success you're hoping to have yeah i mean obviously you know our targets for profitability is we want to sequentially get better every quarter and i think where we've struggled a little bit is not on if we believe in this thesis and what variant can do to our enterprise but what's been tough is the win and we've hurdles have popped up along the way that have made you know our our timeline on expected profitability you know, go a little longer, uh, based off, you know, some of the challenges we've had, but, um, look, we still believe this model is going to get us, you know, longer term, you know, to the lower nineties and then, then into the eighties and where we still have line of sight to that. I just can't give you a good answer of, you know, what that earnings will look like by quarter.
spk02: Okay. And then any thoughts on CapEx guidance for the year?
spk04: Yeah, I believe, you know, in the supplement on the last page, we'll have that in there. Um, We're still in there at about $130 to $150 million, and that's taken into account any delays we experienced in 2021 that got pushed to 2022, but obviously does not take into account any unknown supplier disruptions that we may encounter.
spk02: Okay. And then just last thing, just bigger picture, you talk about the issues at Variant starting over the summer. It seems like that also happened just as the fleet started getting bigger. So how do we know this isn't just an issue of this is a tough thing to scale? And when you've got fewer trucks, it's easier to have better utilization and less turnover. And just naturally, as the fleet gets bigger, it just gets tougher.
spk03: Yeah, Scott, I think it's a fair question. And I think there's some truth to that. I think that we saw... that the model was incredibly successful at a smaller size. And as it grew in scale, I'm not sure that we had some of the understanding around the domain that really needed to be there in order to drive that to a, you know, to a scale, to a size, to get the same results that we were getting previously. Um, and so that's, you know, a large part of what we've been focused in down here is looking at like all the components and the fact, uh, and all the, um, the different pieces of the optimizer, making sure that the parameters are set accordingly. There were some parameters that were probably not set the way that they probably should have been set. And so there were some small tweaks and some changes there. And so I think by infusing a lot of this domain knowledge back into the business, we're able to make some relatively quick fixes. I think what we found was that what was built here and the infrastructure here is really strong. I think there was a little bit of maybe some misguided approaches because of a lack of domain knowledge. But at the end of the day, what we built from a technology standpoint, the team that exists down here, we believe that that team and that technology is incredibly powerful and strong. And now it gives us something to build off of.
spk02: Okay. And then just lastly, Eric Fuller, just maybe a tough question, but, you know, What do you need to see to view success? At some point, do you think about considering strategic alternatives for variant for the whole business? How do you think about that?
spk03: We believe in what we're doing. And we believe, we have line of sight. I mean, I can tell you, I think things are going to look a lot better in this next quarter and in subsequent quarters. And as long as we see that, then we're going to be very optimistic and going to be ultimately happy with the direction that we've taken. Now, with that said, I mean, we're not foolish if we see that for some reason that we aren't able to get the traction, then, you know, we would look at other alternatives. But I can tell you right now that we are getting the traction. We feel confident about it, and so there's no reason for us to consider that at this point.
spk02: Okay. Thank you for the time, guys. I appreciate it.
spk06: As a reminder, it is Star 1 to ask a question. Our next question comes from the line of Grady Carr with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.
spk07: Yeah. Hi, guys. I'm standing in for Brian Austin back on the call today. Hey, Grady. Thanks for taking my question. So just wanted to discuss two items a little bit further, one being the obsolete technology, that $4.3 million. and then some more details on the severe accidents and what that kind of looks like going forward. So any more color on that would be helpful. Thanks, guys.
spk04: Yeah, I'll go ahead and go in reverse order first on the severe accidents. We haven't had accidents like that over the last three years if you've been following our releases and then have two in the same quarter. And so obviously we're not planning on that being our new run rate on a go-forward basis. As it relates to the non-cash write-offs, Yeah, I really look at this as a positive. I mean, we've developed a lot of new technology. We're going to better platforms. So some of the technology that was being developed and that we had used in the past, we're saying is obsolete. We're saying we're not going to use it because we have better. So I actually think that this is a good thing. And it's another proof point that what we're building and what we're transitioning to is working.
spk05: Got it. Thanks. Thanks for the time. There are no further questions in the queue. I'd like to hand it back over to Mr. Fuller for closing remarks.
spk03: Thank you everyone for your participation today. Before we close, I'd like to reiterate that speed and execution are key to getting variant turned around quickly in 2022. The changes that we're making invariant are within our control. We have the right people internally with expertise to execute our remediation plan. And we've seen improvement in our key metrics in January, which gives us confidence that we're moving in the right direction. We thank you for your support. We look forward to providing a progress update on our first quarter call. Thank you.
spk06: Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.
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