RXO Inc (RXO) 2025 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to the RXO Q1 2025 earnings conference call and webcast. My name is Joelle, and I will be your conference operator for today's call. Please note that this conference is being recorded. During this call, the company will make certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws which by their nature involve a number of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements.

A discussion of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially is contained in the company's SEC filings as well as in its earnings release. You should refer to a copy of the company's earnings release in the investor relations section on the company's website for additional important information regarding forward-looking statements and disclosure disclosures and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures that the company uses when discussing its results. I will now turn the call over to Drew Wilkerson. Mr. Wilkerson, you may begin.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining today. There are four main points I want to convey this morning. First, we completed the most significant technology milestone of the Coyote integration, and our carrier network, along with RXO carrier representatives are now covering freight out of one transportation management system.

Second, we're again raising our estimate for acquisition synergies. We now expect more than $70 million of cash synergies, which includes both operating expense and capital expenditures. As a reminder, this does not include the significant cost of purchase transportation and cross-selling benefits we expect to see.

Third, in brokerage, we achieved 26% less than truckload volume growth. We also continue to see productivity increases through our investments in technology, including AI and machine learning.

Fourth, we maintain the momentum that we achieved over the last several quarters in complementary services. Managed transportation, increase the synergy loads it provides to brokers, and we grew last mile stocks by an impressive 24% year over year.

Putting it all together, our strong and growing business has significantly more scale and is powered by cutting edge technology that is driving continuous productivity improvements. This uniquely positions RXO for increased earnings power and free cash flow conversion over the long term and across market cycles.

I'll start by giving you an update about the integration of Coyote. I mentioned earlier that our carrier and coverage operations are now working out of one platform, freight optimizer. Our carrier network now has access to significantly more freight, and our reps now have access to an even larger network of carriers to cover that freight. The increased capacity is helping us to find the best truck for each load, enabling us to better serve our customers.

The early results from the migration have been encouraging. First, we proved the scalability of our tech, which remains stable during the migration process.

Second, our carrier operations team is working together as one network much faster than expected. As an example, about 20% of Legacy's Coyotes freight was covered by Legacy RXO reps, and about 20% of Legacy RXO's freight was covered by Legacy Coyote reps. This exceeded our expectations and we're already seeing signs of buying better when it comes to purchase transportation.

We're now turning our attention to migrating legacy Coyote customers. In fact, we've already migrated all the master customer data, and we're already managing several legacy Coyote customers within our platform.

We continue to expect the bulk of our tech integration will be complete by the end of the third quarter. Our technology and coverage teams have been working around the clock since the acquisition to ensure a smooth and successful transition. I'm extremely proud of what they've been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.

As the integration has progressed, we found additional opportunities for synergies and now expect to achieve more than $70 million of total cash synergies, including more than $60 million of annualized operating expense synergies. This excludes the significant opportunities for improving our cost of purchase transportation and the impact of our cross-selling efforts. Jamie will talk in more detail about the synergies later in the call.

Now I'd like to discuss our first quarter results, which were in line with our expectations. RXO delivered adjusted even of $22 million within the guidance range we provided to you last quarter. RXO's company-wide gross margin was 16% in the quarter.

Brokerage volume for a combined business declined by 1% year over year. We outgrew the market as measured by the cash rate index despite a significant automotive headwind.

Our volume performance was better than anticipated due to a substantial 26% year over year increase in LTL volume. Full truckload volume decreased by 8% year over year. Brokerage gross margin was 13.3% in the quarter.

We continue to achieve robust productivity gains and brokerage driven by enhancements to our tech platform. Productivity over the last 12 months increased by about 17%, and over the last two years by almost 40%.

Our significant investments in technology, including AI and machine learning, have a strong return on investment. While we've made substantial productivity gains, we're still in the early innings and have lots of runway for further improvement.

Momentum continued within complementary services. Managed transportation increased the number of synergy loads it provided to brokerage in the quarter. And last mile, stocks grew by 24% year over year, accelerating from the fourth quarter growth rate of 15%.

We're also seeing the benefits from the productivity initiatives we've completed over the last few years. The best known brands in the big and bulky space are increasingly turning to RXO for last mile delivery because of our exceptional service, scale, technology, and financial stability. Complementary services gross margin was 21%.

I now want to talk about the overall market conditions. The weather related tightness we saw in January and discussed on last quarter's call eased as the quarter progressed. We quickly reduced our cost of purchase transportation, resulting in an improved gross profit per load throughout the quarter.

We also made significant progress improving legacy Coyotes' profitability. Legacy Coyote gross profit per load improved by approximately 20% from January to March. We made further progress in April and will continue to drive improvements.

The current environment remains highly fluid. In response to changing trade policy, our customers are employing a variety of different strategies. Some have staged inventory in advance of increased tariffs, and others are taking more of a wait and see approach. This uncertainty is impacting near-term truckload demand.

Specifically, in April, RXO's truckload volume was down by mid single digit percentage when compared to March. RXO has several company-specific drivers that we anticipate will yield a sequential improvement gross profit per load in the second quarter. We also expect to grow EBITDA significantly when compared to the first quarter.

The flexibility of RXO's asset light model will continue to drive our performance in all market conditions. Jamie and Jared will discuss our outlook in more detail later in the call. RXO remains well positioned to drive increased earnings over the long term.

Our technology migration will enable us to realize the benefits of our increased scale, including cost of purchase transportation opportunities. As a reminder, we more than doubled our truckload volume as a result of the Coyote acquisition, which has provided us with better lane density. We're continually improving our tech platform even as we complete the integration.

Our powerful pricing algorithms leverage AI and machine learning, and our employee facing software continues to help improve productivity. When those algorithms are unleashed on our much larger set of carrier and customer data, we expect massive benefits.

Our cross-selling initiatives are fueling new wins across the company. We're growing stable sources of EBITDA, including in LTL and managed transportation, and our last mile business has tremendous momentum. We have even more tenured talent within the organization, and our people are energized and dedicated to the success of our customers and our carrier network.

We've been proactive when it comes to reducing costs, which has helped us mitigate the effects of a difficult freight market and will provide us with significant operating leverage once the market improves. We have a strong balance sheet and a unique platform that provides us with opportunities to drive both organic and inorganic growth. Now, Jamie will discuss our financial results in more detail. Jamie?

Thank you, Drew, and good morning. Let's review our first-quarter performance in more detail. Our results were in line with our expectations in the first quarter. We generated $1.4 billion in total revenue. Gross margin was 16%. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of $22 million.

Our adjusted EBITDA margin was 1.5%. One item to note regarding our EBITDA results was the impact of our automotive business. The slowdown in automotive volume represented a company-wide gross profit headwind of approximately $10 million year to year. This volume, because of its time critical nature and higher service requirements, typically carries a higher gross margin with strong flow through to EBITDA .

Below the line, our interest expense was $9 million. For the quarter, our adjusted earnings per share was negative $0.03. You can find a bridge to adjusted EPS on slide 9 of the earnings presentation.

Now I'd like to give an overview of our performance within our lines of business. Brokerage revenue was $1.1 billion and represented 72% of our total revenue.

Please note, we have a small piece of business within Legacy Coyote brokerage that is fee-based in nature, similar to our managed transportation business. We made a decision to account for this on a net revenue basis, which reduced reported revenue by approximately $35 million. This change had no impact on gross profit or adjusted EBITDA.

Turning to volume, we had strong LTL growth driven by new customer wins, offset by a decline in truckload volume given continued soft freight market conditions. Broker's gross margin was 13.3%. Complimentary services revenue in the quarter was $450 million, increased by 8% year over year, and was 28% of our total revenue.

Company services gross margin of 21% remains strong and increased by 40 basis points year over year. Now let's move to each line of business within complimentary services.

Managed transportation generated $137 million of revenue in the quarter, down 10% year over year. Managed transportation continues to be impacted by lower automobile volumes and our managed expedite business.

Our last-mile business generated $278 million in revenue in the quarter, up 20% year over year, better than our expectations. Last mile stops grew about 24%, accelerating from last quarter's growth rate. We continue to gain share within the big and bulky category and are winning profitable business from both existing and new customers. We also continue to see the benefits from the productivity initiatives we launched last year.

Let's now discuss cache and please refer to slide 10. Adjusted free cash flow in the first quarter was $6 million, a 27% conversion from adjusted EBITDA. The conversion rate was impacted by lower profitability at the bottom of the freight cycle. Longer term, given our asset-light business model, we remain confident in the 40% to 60% conversion through market cycles.

We ended the quarter with $16 million of cash on the balance sheet, consistent with our expectations. As we discussed in February, our fourth-quarter cash balance was higher than anticipated due to the timing of transaction payments related to the Coyote acquisition, which was paid in the first quarter. We also had a cash usage of $17 million for tax withholdings, which was the final tax payment related to pre-spend RSUs.

As you can see on slide 11, our liquidity position continues to be strong with more than $575 million of total committed liquidity at the end of the first quarter. Quarter-end net leverage was 1.9 times trailing 12 months bank-adjusted EBITDA, up slightly higher compared to the prior quarter. We continue to have significant capacity to deploy our balance sheet in line with our balanced capital allocation philosophy.

Let's move to the Coyote integration. We are again increasing our synergy estimate. We now expect more than $70 million of cash synergies. We expect more than $60 million of annualized operating synergies, $10 million higher than last quarter's estimate. We also expect at least $10 million in capital synergies, which will benefit 2026.

It is important to note that the cash outlay required to generate these savings is approximately $50 million, which will generate a strong return of almost 150%. These synergies exclude opportunities for optimizing our cost of purchased transportation spend. With carrier and coverage migration complete, there is a significant opportunity to purchase transportation more effectively.

As a reminder, we had a combined broker transportation spend of about $4 billion in 2024. A 1% improvement in buy rates would represent a $40 million dollar opportunity. These synergies also exclude revenue and cross-selling opportunities across the company, which have already begun to materialize.

Now let's discuss our expectations for the second quarter. The current macroeconomic environment is creating significant shipper uncertainty, which we have incorporated into our outlook. For the combined company in the second quarter, we expect to generate between $30 million to $40 million of adjusted EBITDA.

For the second quarter, you should model depreciation expense of approximately $17 million to $19 million, amortization expense of approximately $9 million to $11 million, and an adjusted effective tax rate of approximately 30%. Jared will provide more details on our second-quarter outlook shortly.

Slide 16 includes our 2025 modeling assumptions. There are a few things I would like to highlight. We are reducing our 2025 capital expenditure estimate by $10 million to approximately $65 million to $75 million. We are also lowering our depreciation expense accordingly and now expect depreciation to be in the range of $65 million to $75 million. We are also lowering our 2026 capital expenditure estimate, which will benefit from the previously discussed heavy synergies.

We anticipate 2026 CapEx to be between $45 million to $55 million, down materially from 2025. You will also notice this year's estimated adjusted effective tax rate moves higher and is expected to be between 30% and 33%. This is solely a function of lower pre-tax income given the current state of the freight market. Our long-term target of 25% remains unchanged.

Before handing it over to Jared, I want to highlight the benefits of our asset-light operating model, which is a key strategic benefit, especially in periods of volatility. We have minimal maintenance CapEx requirements and can move quickly on cost. While we continue to operate in a soft environment, we are investing for the long term, making significant progress with the integration of Coyote and scaling the business to position us for when the market recovers.

We have taken out significant costs, executed aggressively on our synergy targets, and successfully migrated carrier and coverage operations, enabling opportunities for cost-to-purchase transportation synergies. These actions position us well to produce strong results over the long term. Now, I would like to turn it over to the Chief Strategy Officer, Jared Weisfeld, who will talk in more detail about our results and our outlook.

Thanks, Jamie, and good morning, everyone. As I typically do, I will start with an overview of our brokerage performance in the quarter. To make the comparisons more useful for you, I will give you combined numbers for our brokerage business, which includes Coyote's results in prior periods.

Brokerage volume in the quarter was down 1% year over year, ahead of our expectations. The better-than-expected performance was driven entirely by LTL strength. LTL volume increased by a strong 26% year over year, the result of successfully onboarding new customers. LTL represented 25% of corporate volume in the first quarter, up 500 basis points year over year.

Full truckload volume was down 8% year over year, impacted by continued soft freight market conditions. Automotive weakness was the biggest driver, and automotive volume was down more than 25% year over year.

Truckloads represented 75% of our brokerage volume. We also maintained a favorable mix of contract and spot business in the quarter. Contracts represented 73% of our full truckload volume, down 100 basis points sequentially, and up 100 basis points year over year. Spot was 27% of full truckload volume in the quarter. We continue to operate in a prolonged soft environment with minimal spot opportunities.

Before reviewing our financial performance and market conditions in more detail, I would like to talk more about the progress we have made to integrate Coyote technology into RXO's platform. As you can see by the milestones noted on slide 6, we have taken a phased approach and moved quickly.

We launched a unified company website that enables instant quoting. We have successfully integrated our payment networks. We have migrated to one CRM platform, which is helping our sales teams see opportunities across RXO.

We completed the most significant technology milestone of the Coyote integration, and our carriers and operations teams are now covering freight on one common platform. We are now leveraging a unified data set for pricing and network decision-making.

This last point is an important one. RXO led the industry in adopting AI and machine learning. Pre-acquisition, we had 10 years of data on which our algorithms could learn and optimize. Following the successful data migration, our next-generation models are already running on our larger combined data set, including legacy Coyote's pricing models.

Let’s now review our brokerage financial performance and market conditions in more detail. You can find this information on slides 12 to 15 of the presentation. Starting with revenue per load on slide 12, in the first quarter, full truckload revenue per load trends continued to improve. Revenue per load, excluding the impact of changes in fuel prices and length of haul, was up 4% year over year. After a successful midseason, we continue to expect 2025 contract rates to be up low to mid-single digits year over year.

Let’s move to slide 13 and discuss brokerage performance and current market conditions. Following difficult weather conditions in the month of January, the market loosened in line with our expectations. Specifically, the load-to-truck ratio decreased from 7:1 to less than 5:1, and tender rejections decreased from 7.5% to 5%.

Importantly, while the market softened, industry KPIs were higher year over year, consistent with our view that capacity had exited the market, which brought the industry to a more balanced state in the quarter.

Supporting this view, Class 8 net orders have declined materially to start the year, and the [AFL] decline was one of the largest sequential declines on record. Amid user market conditions, we quickly brought down our cost of purchased transportation in the quarter. This resulted in lower buy rates and higher gross profit per load as the first quarter progressed.

Turning to the second quarter, shippers are highly uncertain given the current environment, and we saw that in our April results. Within our brokerage business, the second quarter started off with continued soft volume trends led by automotive weakness.

April truckload volume was down a mid-single-digit percentage when compared to March and was down a high-single-digit percent year over year. However, LTL continued to grow strongly, and total volume was up slightly year over year.

Despite the fluid environment, RXO has multiple levers for margin improvement, and we anticipate gross profit per load to improve in the second quarter. Our contract rate increases are continuing to phase in, and we remain laser-focused on purchased transportation costs. With last week's successful carrier and coverage migration, there are additional opportunities to procure capacity even more effectively.

Let's put slide 14 and look at quarterly full truckload gross profit per load trends. We were able to improve gross profit per load significantly throughout the quarter, resulting in a relatively stable gross profit per load when compared to the fourth quarter. Specifically, truckload gross profit per load improved by approximately 20% from January to March.

Moving to slide 15, RXO's LTL brokerage volumes continue to outperform the LTL market with stable gross profit per load. We have significant opportunities to continue to grow our LTL business. I now like to look forward and give you some more color on our second quarter outlook that Jamie provided.

Starting with brokerage, we expect overall volume to decline at a low-single-digit percentage year over year with continued soft truckload volume trends, mostly offset by strong LTL growth. We expect brokerage gross profit per load to move higher into the second quarter, resulting in a brokerage gross margin of between 13% and 15%.

Let's now talk about complementary services. In managed transportation, while the business has significant sales momentum, managed expedite automotive headwinds continue to impact us in the near term. In the last mile, we expect another quarter of year-over-year stop growth, although at a slower rate when compared to the first quarter. As a reminder, the third quarter is seasonally weaker for the last mile when compared to the second quarter.

Putting it all together, we expect RXO's second-quarter adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $30 million to $40 million. We thought it would also be helpful to provide more color on the assumptions underlying our outlook. Typically, truckload volume ramps throughout the second quarter. We have not incorporated that assumption into our guidance range.

The high end of our outlook assumes truckload volume and gross profit per load remain consistent with April levels. The low end of our outlook assumes that truckload volume declines materially from April with lower gross profit per load. Additionally, our outlook does not assume any material purchased transportation benefits associated with the carrier and coverage migration that was completed on May 1.

To close, while we are operating in a more uncertain environment, RXO has multiple idiosyncratic levers that position us well for long-term earnings and free cash flow growth. Coyote carrier and coverage migration is now complete, which will enable significant cost-of-purchased-transportation savings opportunities. We again raise our cost synergy estimates.

We are staying close to our customers and will capture spot opportunities when the market recovers. Our LTL volume is growing quickly, and there is a long runway for sustainable and profitable growth. Last mile continues to gain significant share, and we have a strong balance sheet and are positioned well to capitalize on additional organic and inorganic growth opportunities. With that, I will turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

(Operator Instructions) Stephanie Moore, Jefferies.

Hi, good morning. Thank you. I think it would be helpful if, maybe Drew or Jamie, whoever wants to handle this, if you could speak to your mid-cycle earnings power now with Coyote under your umbrella, obviously there's been a faster than expected tech integration that you called out and some pretty clear line of sights on PT synergy. So how could this compare to your prior mid-cycle earnings? Thanks.

Yeah, I think Stephanie, when you look at the business, we took what was a really strong business in Legacy RXO, and we've dramatically improved the long-term earnings power of the business. You focus on purchase transportation. And Jamie framed it up that if we're only able to improve that by 1%, well, it'll be around $40 million of how well we buy versus what's going on in the market.

You look at doubling our volume and brokerage and being able to spread our cost out across more loads, which essentially lowers our cost to serve for our customers, makes us more profitable. When you look at the productivity improvements that we're really just getting started on right now at 17% on a year over year basis, for us there is so much runway in continuing to improve the long term profitability of the business and being able to have higher lows, higher midpoints, and higher highs.

Great, appreciate the color. And then maybe just taking a a more linear term view, appreciate the color, Jared, you just highlighted in terms of the 2Q guidance. Given how uncertain the macro backdrop is, if you could touch a little bit about what your underlying freight market assumptions are for 2Q?

And then is. April kind of the right run rate just based on the conversations that you're hearing? So meaning do you feel like in April your customers were a little bit more negative and then got -- and then improved as the month progressed, or do you feel like April is a good starting point? Thanks.

Sure. Stephanie, it's Jared. So when you look at the month of April, we talked about full truckload volume being down roughly mid single digits when compared to the month of March. If you actually look historically for Legacy RXO, that number is actually usually up slightly. So we saw that softness materialize into into April, and then as Q2 seasonally progresses, we usually see volume ramp from April into May into June.

Given the uncertain environment that we're in, none of those assumptions are incorporated into our outlook. So off of that lower base of April, we are not assuming any improvement in freight market conditions across that outlook range, even at the high end. That does not assume that market conditions continue to improve.

And at the very low end, what we did was we assumed that -- we take another step lower in volume relative to that April base which is already below seasonal and lower gross profit for load. So we tried to go ahead and give a framework that goes ahead and encompasses a lot of different scenarios that could occur within Q2.

And I think importantly two things to add on that. None of the scenarios include any significant benefit associated with purchase transportation, where we're seeing some early wins. And gross profit per load will improve for the business sequentially across those scenarios from Q1 to Q2.

Chris Wetherbee, Wells Fargo.

Okay. Great. Thanks. Maybe to follow up on that question, if you think about the gross margin percentage range for the second quarter, I guess maybe can you talk a little bit about the sort of the potential dynamics that can influence you one way or another, presumably if you've seen the TL market continue to soften, that might help that number? I just want to get a little bit of sense of how you think about sort of the high end or the low end there. What are the dynamics you'd expect to see.

That's exactly right. I mean, to the extent that the market does soften and you'll see the ability of continued improvement in gross profit per load. I mean, if you look at Q1 as a proxy, I think that's a really good example in terms of how quickly we brought down purchase transportation.

If you look at between January and March, we increased gross profit per load by approximately 20% across our truckload business, mostly attributable to the buy side. So if the market does go ahead and get a bit looser. And then you think about on the sell side in terms of some of the contract rates that we talked about where low to mid single digits, we still feel very good about for the full year. And that was up about 4% year over year in Q1.

Those should all be tailwinds, and I think most importantly now that we are buying capacity, procuring capacity as one organization with all carrier reps procuring and covering freight in one system, freight optimizer, we have, our customers have better access to more trucks with the right loads. And that has the ability to go ahead and contribute as well.

That's great. And then maybe one follow up here, maybe zooming out a little bit, thinking bigger picture about EBITDA progression as you move through the rest of the year, I guess what we're trying to kind of figure out is, I guess you have seasonality, which I think in some cases might be a little bit softer than 3Q versus 2Q for the overall business, but you obviously have synergies, the potential for PT optimization.

Any help that you can give us in terms of thinking about how this might build over time? I understand also obviously that the macro is quite challenging and difficult to predict. But anything you can kind of help us with? How do you think about the shape of the rest of the year from a profitability perspective?

Sure, I'll start and then I'll let Jamie come in and give you some more color as it relates to synergies. When you think about Q2 to Q3, as we give guidance one quarter at a time, but we can certainly give you some frameworks in terms of how we're thinking about the back half of the year.

Q3 will get to benefit from the new implementation of all the contract increases that we talked about. As we will go ahead and it's a staggered approach right where as the new contracts start to roll in Q3 will reflect the full run rate benefit of that.

We're working really hard to benefit from purchase transportation synergies quickly with the successful integration complete on carrier migration last week. Last mile business, to your point, is seasonally lower relative to Q2. We are continuing to gain a significant share there. You saw up 24% year over year last quarter. That'll moderate a bit into Q2.

But from a sequential standpoint that is seasonally weaker into Q3. But the biggest variables are going to be volume and gross profit per load. And I think at this point, we're in such an uncertain environment. We certainly incorporate incorporated that as it relates to our Q2 outlook. But beyond that, I think it's too early to call. And I'll hand it over to Jamie on the synergy front. Yeah.

Thanks on synergies, we've taken out a lot of calls, $70 million annualized. We realize for the year, about $45 million of that into 2025. You saw sequential Q1 to Q2. There should be a bump of about another 4. There'll be a slight increase going into the back half of the year. As we take out that last $10 million of OpEx primarily in the back half of the year, we get a little bit of that in the fourth quarter. But we should see most of that realized in '26.

The other thing that Jared touched on to reemphasize, we just cut over the procurement side of our carrier transportation costs. There's a big opportunity there. We gave the framework, $4 billion spend. We can get 1%. We should be able to buy better than the market rates.

We see that ramping up as we head into the back half of the year as well in terms of the execution of the opportunity.

Brandon Oglenski from Barclays.

Hey, this is [David Zolon] for Brandon. I know you've previously talked about the RXO business being primarily a domestic business. I wonder if you could help us a little bit on what you're thinking for the potential tariff impacts in second quarter and third quarter. I think we're seeing, pretty sharply down imports coming in from Asia. So how that might impact your business and where that's incorporated into your guide.

Yeah, we're seeing different things from different customers, David. There's not a uniform approach to what customers are doing. We've got some customers that have pulled inventory ahead. We've got some that have paused completely. And we've got some that have continued shipping as normal.

Obviously we're watching it closely and well aware that imports coming into the US are dramatically down over the last 30 to 45 days. With that said, it could have an impact on the overall truckload market and the truckload demand, and our playbook there is we're going to focus largely on purchase transportation to be able to improve profitability if that's what occurs.

Thanks. And then, specific to volume trends, you touched a little bit on it earlier. Our perception is the cops on the Coyote side are getting a little easier. Are you expecting to have maybe a little bit of tailwind there and there some offsets that would potentially, like you mentioned, you maybe have some headwinds in April and moving forward into.

I think the biggest headwind is automotive. When you look at it, we are the leader in the US on ground expedite shipments, and that's largely driven by automotive. And we have been forever. So that's -- as that comes back, that'll be a tailwind to the business. But for right now, you certainly see the impacts of less automotive expedite shipments out there within our network.

For the Legacy Coyote and Legacy RXO, yes, comps get easier. But I'd say the most important thing is the feedback that we're getting from our customers. When you look at what we've heard from our customers, we're hearing good feedback on the awards that we're actually receiving, the awards that are still coming in. And where they expect us to finish from a rate perspective, we still expect to see that increase on contractual business of low to mid single digits.

Jeff Kaufman, Vertical Research Partners.

Thank you very much and thanks for the context and your outlook. I guess I'd like to ask a question a little bit differently. I hear the conservative forecast and how this second quarter is a little different from previous second quarters. But in any forecast, there's the parts of the forecast you feel you've got your arms around and then there's the parts of the forecast that are a bit of a leap of faith. I'm just curious what the leaps of faith are in your outlook, whether it's second quarter or full year 25.

We're confident in the forecast that we put out, Jeff. I think that the way that Jared framed it up, we looked at a number of different scenarios. We've got a playbook if volume goes down to be able to focus even more on purchase transportation. We have the tailwind of coming onto one platform that is idiosyncratic to us.

I'm sure everybody has focused on purchase transportation, but we've got the benefit of having capacity that didn't cross over to be able to find the right truck for the right load to be able to improve it there. So when you look at gross profit per load, for us to be able to say that we expect that to improve sequentially, there's confidence in the numbers there.

And just to follow up, nobody really knows what's coming with this freight air pocket that's going to hit us in 2Q and 3Q. If the environment is somehow worse yet than even you're looking for, how much flexibility do you have at this point with the technology part of the integration more behind you to respond to a positive or negative market environment?

We're very agile. We've shown the ability to move quick and realize the synergies faster than what we originally communicated out. We've talked about in the past being staffed for growth and being staffed at around 15% overnight growth that we could realize. We're above that right now from where we sit. So we've got a lot of different things that we can run from the playbook with the market right now.

Okay, thank you very much.

Lucas Cervera, Truist Security.

Hey guys, good morning. Just wanted to touch on productivity improvement. Where could you see some of those further improvements longer term. And then I'll have another one after that.

Hey Lucas, it's Jared. So I think one of the key strategic benefits associated with the acquisition of Coyote was, we have the ability to go ahead and actually accelerate our technology roadmaps after we closed the acquisition and we compared the technology roadmaps. It was really interesting to sort of do side by side because a lot of things that we had on our roadmap -- Legacy Coyote in some cases actually had implemented, and I think part of that also we saw last week with the successful migration of the carrier coverage where you know if you think about the makeup as it relates to the carrier bases across the organization.

RXO, historically, more owner operators; Legacy Coyote leveraged larger fleets, private fleets. So their digital capabilities, their ability to cover freight with those larger freights with those larger fleet sizes, I think we took the best of both worlds. We've integrated that. And I think we're going to -- I think that's one area to continue to focus on in terms of how to go ahead and continue to be efficient from a cost to standpoint and increase our productivity by leveraging the technology suite of the combined company.

Okay. And then, last mile came in ahead of overall expectations. Do you think there was a level of pull forward there from end consumers maybe trying to get ahead of tariffs?

Absolutely not. Last mile had a whopping 24% year over year increase in their stops. And that was driven by growth from current customers as well as new customers. When you look at current customers, we were getting business in new markets that we were not operating for them today, where we've got really good service. We've got strong relationships.

They've seen the results that we've been able to deliver for them. New customers were taking markets from other other competitors and giving them to us because of how much they trust us. Because we've been the leader in the space, we've got a great reputation. We've also seen new customers come on at a really good rate and the onboardings have been great. So it's a growth from new customers as well as existing customers, but it's new markets importantly.

Ken Hoexter, Bank of America.

Hey Greg, good morning. Less than truckload volumes are up 26% in a market that's seeing kind of upper single digit declines. What's driving the share gains? Is there something where you're using price to take share? Is there different capacity offers from the carrier partners that are working with you to enable the share gains? Just wondering what's driving such a different factor versus the market.

So Ken, let's start with the price piece. When you look at our revenue per load in LTL on a year to year basis and you back out fuel and you back out length of haul, it's flat. So I think the answer is if you're looking for for price as a lever, it's not how we do business. That's something that's not in our playbook.

We want a price in line with what's going on in the overall market. The first part of your question about how are we taking share, the biggest thing that we're seeing right now is a lot of times LTL can be a pain point for customers. It's a small piece of their revenue spend. And it's a small piece of their overall volume.

But when you talk about tracking, when you talk about claims that come in, you talk about loss shipments, you talk about working with multiple different carriers for something that's a small piece of their business, we bring an easy solution to use from the technology side for them. They're familiar with us from the service that we've provided from the truckload side. So we're winning with large enterprise customers that are coming to us and giving us the opportunity to service LTL in addition to truckload.

And I would close with, we're just getting started in LTL. It went from 20% of our volume to 25% of our volume. But if you look at some other large brokers in the industry, 50% to 60% of their overall volume comes from the LTL side. So we think we've got a lot of share to take in the market in the coming years.

Thanks for that. That's great. I just want to clarify, did you say pricing was flat or did I -- revenue per load? I missed what the original comment was there.

Revenue per load excluding fuel and length of haul was flat. So when you look at lowering price to get business, not in our playbook.

Yeah, okay, great. And then you mentioned the cut over on May 1 of the systems. Any early signs of the PT cost savings that you've enacted? Does it happen? Can you get it in that quick, or is that something you need practice and it takes time to start to blend those in?

So our expectations coming in were 0. I mean, like all we wanted to be able to do was have a system that could handle the scale that we were putting on, making sure that it was a stable system, and that people were learning how to operate in the system and we were servicing our customers. Knock that out of the park.

So we didn't expect to see a lot of cross pollination from capacity in the in the early innings of this. But on day one we started seeing it. Legacy Coyote, when you look at what their care res recovering, it's around 20% of what's coming on Legacy RXO freight. And it's the same for Legacy RXO carrier. So about 20% of what they're covering is coming from Legacy Coyote freight.

So our customers are getting the right truck for the right load, services there. And then when you look at purchase transportation, we are seeing some early signs. Now, we're 4 days in. We're not running around high fiving and celebrating. We're laser focused on continuing to improve purchase transportation, but there are early winds that we're seeing in the first four days.

Great. All right, thanks. Good luck. Thank you. I appreciate the time.

Ravi Shanker, Morgan Stanley.

Great, thanks. Good morning everyone. So just to follow up on the LTL, share commentary. What is the -- so when you look at the LTL market and what is the, target share of the overall industry? Do you think the asset light print players can get versus asset? Heavy relative to the TL market?

And also in the past on the TL side asset-based carriers have sort of almost blamed brokers for putting pressure on the industry as a whole. Do you think the same thing will happen on the LTL side as well? This is not an RXO question as much as an overall industry question.

I think that we look at the carriers, Ravi, as our partners who we're doing business with, and we're a sales channel for these LTL carriers to be able to grow over the years. We've got great relationships with them. And for us, it's all about finding the lanes that work within their network and where they're going to provide the best service and a reasonable price to the customers. And it's about giving the customers the right truck for the right load. A lot of it comes down to the technology and the ease of use within the system that we're able to provide for the customers.

I look at it not necessarily on where the market can go from asset versus non-asset because eventually it's ending up on the LTL carriers' trucks. I more look at it as where can we take our volume to. And again this is something we're just getting started. And it's only 25% of our overall volume, and we feel like we've got a lot of runway.

And the LTL, remember, it's got a fairly stable gross profit per load. If you look at the slide in the chart, it's relatively flat over the years that we've had. So as you start talking about to Stephanie's question earlier of higher highs, higher lows, higher midpoints, LTL provides that stability through a cycle as we grow that out.

Understood, and maybe just follow up on the synergy topic as well. How are you able to -- I mean, obviously very good that you're able to raise the synergy target so often, but where is that coming from? Is this like, peeling layers of the onion where every layer take off and kind of you find more in which case kind of how much more of the onion do you have to cut? I think this analogy works better than the baseball innings one, so I'm going to stick with it.

This is Jamie. Yeah, we've had good success in our synergies and we have raised it now 3 times in the last 3 quarters. Think about the typical places in business like this, bringing this technology integration first phase to be complete. That's a big win not only operationally, but it gives us an opportunity to take out duplicative costs.

We've had good wins in real estate consolidation. Just taking a building and closing the floor and putting folks on two floors instead of three as an example, subletting the space. And then third, probably one of the bigger ones, it really doesn't begin to hit until next year from a realization standpoint is the procurement side, taking two businesses that really do virtually the same thing, having contracts with the same vendor or having contracts with two different vendors, putting them together and getting the power scale.

And so we've been able to do all of those things. As you'll know, $10 million of that $70 million is CapEx savings. That is -- that would be to be eliminated going into next year because now we have one platform instead of two to spend money on.

And Ravi, one other thing to add, if you look at that $70 million, the return on investment that we've gotten has been very powerful. I mean, we're going to spend, let's call it $50 million in total to generate $70 million of savings that's annualized on a go forward basis. We're very pleased with that return.

Brian Ossenbeck, JP Morgan.

Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. So I just wanted to ask a little bit more about the competitive dynamic. Obviously the market is quite soft and a lot of uncertainty as you highlighted. We've seen one major retailer at least maybe get into the brokerage side a little bit more. But maybe you can broaden out just to the competitive dynamic, specifically in full truckload as we go through an extended week period of the cycle here.

Yeah, good morning, Brian. I've been doing this almost 20 years. Brokerage has always been a very competitive business. We have seen retailers come into the space before. This is not something that is new for us.

You have to look at how we're building the business. And we built the business on having fantastic service for our customers. We've got solutions that we put together for them that allow them to optimize their freight more efficiently and gives them great visibility of what they're doing.

We've got technology that helps them drive decision making, telling them what days of the week they should ship something, what mode of transportation they should use. And we've got long tenured relationships and a history of creating these solutions for them.

When you look at our top customers, they've been with us for over 15 years on average. So for us, we look to be able to build on that and it's more about how are we building and what has always been a competitive landscape in the brokerage industry.

So maybe if you can give a little more color on the pricing dynamics. You're expecting contracts specifically phasing in throughout the rest of the year. You mentioned the low single to mid single digit improvements. Obviously market needs to cooperate for those to become effective.

So maybe a little bit more on the confidence and visibility to those rates actually coming through. Again, I guess, it's more of a competitive question, but confidence in this holding and being able to recognize that I guess more specifically, what are you reflecting in that sequential improvement in 2Q.

Hey Brian, it's Jared. So our confidence is high as it relates to the contract rate increases that we talked about. So we're reiterating our view in terms of low to mid single digit contract rate increases year over year. You're starting to see the implementation of that throughout Q1, throughout Q2, with the full run rate impact of that into Q3. So we feel really good about that.

And I think that that's exactly what Drew was talking about earlier, the service of the -- service that we provide to our customers, right? We have to win the right to serve every load, and we see that in our service results. So that's part of it.

The other thing to think about certainly is mix, right? So you can, I think Q1 was a great example of that .where revenue per load in our full truckload business, excluding fuel was up 4% year over year, right, but that was also in the context of automotive being an approximate $10 million headwind to gross profit year over year given the time critical nature of those shipments.

So we feel really good about our contract rate increases, but it needs to also be viewed in the context of mix where automotive has been a headwind for the business. And that's also incorporated into our Q2 outlook as well.

Understood. Thanks very much.

Bruce Chan, Stifel.

Good morning, guys. Still a little bit confused on the brokerage GP per load trends. Hopefully you can sort me out here, but you mentioned that Coyote GP per load improved 20% from January to March. And when I think of that against the overall trends for the overall business still being kind of stagnant, while you know some of your peers have maybe seen a pretty steady improvement in AGP.

Is that all due to automotive? And then, Jared, you talked about the big opportunity in GP per load now that you're on the unified platform, but you also said that the high end of the guidance range assumes a flat AGP per load from Q4. So maybe you can just help me to synthesize all that commentary and kind of figure out why you're seeing flatter trends versus some of the competition.

I'll have to take that Bruce. So when you think about the baseline, just to just to frame it up, right, January was a very difficult month for us in the industry, and we moved quickly from January. To reduce cost of purchase transportation very quickly, that improvement that we saw from January to March was, almost entirely by site driven. So we were able to go ahead and improve gross profit per load by about 20% from January to March. That improvement sustained as it related to the month of April as well.

So we saw stable gross profit per load off of that improvement. And when you look at Q2 as a whole. All of the guidance scenarios that we provided assumes that gross profit per load will be up sequentially from from Q1 levels at the high end and at the low ends. To your point, if you look at the high ends where, off of that April baseline, we are assuming gross profit per load is stable at the low end of our guide we are assuming a move lower in gross profit per load per move lower, and we're also expecting a gross margin percent improvement as well from Q1 to Q2.

If you look at the midpoint of our outlook, it's about 14%, which I think is is pretty strong relative to the industry. And remember mix is also a percentage of that. I think Drew touched on this earlier. When you think about mix on gross margin percentage, recall a higher LTL mix will generally yield a higher gross margin percentage, and we think we've got a long runway to go as it relates to LTL growth, which would be a tailwind to gross margin percentage longer term.

Jordan Alliger, Goldman Sachs.

Yeah, hi, just a couple quick questions. One, on the volume, you gave sequential thoughts as to how March to April's doing, but can you maybe translate that to sort of year of a year for the second quarter? And then just a follow up Jared, on what you just talked about on LTL and the gross margin percentage, can you also talk about LTL versus TL, gross profit per load, and how they compare?

Thank you. Yeah, if there's some order of magnitude differential since LTL seems to be a bigger piece of your pie.

Yes, I'm happy to take that, Jordan. So when you look at Q2 volume, our outlook calls for a low to mid single digit decline year over year. I think when you look at April trends, that's a pretty good way to think about how we're thinking about the quarter, that would equate to you. Truckload down right high single digits year over year, LTL up strongly, but I think importantly in the month of April volume was actually up year over year, right? So I think we're we're seeing that play out as it relates to that's sort of the dynamics that are underlying our Q2 assumption.

And as part of your second question in terms of the different dynamics across TL and LTL, generally speaking, LTL, building off the person's question, carries a higher gross margin percentage. So and a lower gross profit per load and it could be significant right in terms of lower gross profit per load, which is why when you saw Q1, our volume outlook was ahead of our expectations, entirely driven by LTL, but because TL came at the lower end of our expectations for the quarter, you had that you had that result in terms of Q1 results. So I think that, lower gross profit per load on LTL, but higher gross margin percentage and in some cases it could be significantly higher.

Scott Schneeberger, Oppenheimer.

Thanks. Good morning. Could you speak the cross-selling question that you mentioned managed transportation, increased synergy loads, provide the brokerage, just talk about the opportunities there over the course of this year. Thanks.

Yeah, Scott, every time managed transportation on boards a new customer, it's an opportunity for brokerage if they've got great service and the rates are in line with what's going on, from the market. It's an opportunity for brokerage to be able to win business and. Because our brokers has good service, a lot of customers are coming into that sale cycle asking managed transportation to use our brokers or where can we use our brokers.

Any time something goes wrong for a customer, which happens in transportation on the manage Tran side, the customer has more comfort knowing that we've got a back. Stop from a capacity standpoint with our brokers. So brokerage has always been a part of the sales cycle for us with managed transportation. The synergies between those two teams are extremely high, and they've done a good job of building it over the years, and I think we've got a lot of opportunity to be able to continue to do that.

Great thanks. And then Jamie, the cap actually taking it down $10 million this year and it looks like it's gave some guidance for 2026, 45 to 55, a good bit lower than 2025. Do you speak to to what what areas are the focus of the pullback and and what you view as far as how that, what areas you're cutting in specifically.

Yeah, so for '25 specifically, I mean, it was nothing specific other than we are constantly doing an evaluation of what's a good return on an investment. We found the opportunity to take $10 million out of our CapEx plan. We're not, pulling back on any strategic or, high ROIC investments. So I'd say bringing the 10 down is just normal course of business that we're constantly looking at. If you move into '26.

Specifically two items. One is we have about $10 million in there related to the integration spend that you know we'll be done with that latter half of 2025 in Q4 and so that goes away. And then we have one investment that we're spending some money on this year, some strategic real estate investment, call it $10 to $15 million that goes away in '26. It's not a repeatable spend, so. That's the '25 to '26, but still all high RIC organic type investments that we think are good position and that's good for the long term.

There are no further questions at this time, I will now turn the call over to Drew for closing remarks.

Thank you, Joelle. In closing, I want to outline how we're more confident than ever in RXO's ability to drive increased earnings and free cash flow that's going to go across market cycles.

Our successful migration of legacy Coyotes carrier and coverage operations over to RXO's platform is game changing.

Our early results provide us with confidence that we'll be able to realize significant cost of purchase transportation synergies. Our investments in technology, including AI and machine learning, are driving significant productivity improvements across our business. We remain disciplined when it comes to cost, and we have a strong balance sheet and a unique platform that provides us with opportunities to drive both organic and inorganic growth.

Our people remain focused on providing exceptional service, a comprehensive set of solutions, continuous innovation, and close customer relationships. We're making the right strategic investments to drive long-term success and outperform across all parts of the freight cycle. Thank you and look forward to seeing many of you soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.