C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHRW) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHRW) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript January 31, 2024
C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the C.H. Robinson Fourth Quarter 2023 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the company's prepared remarks, we will open the line for a live question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, Wednesday, January 31st, 2024. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ives, Director of Investor Relations.
Chuck Ives: Thank you, Donna, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today is Dave Bozeman, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Arun Rajan, our Chief Operating Officer; and Mike Zechmeister, our Chief Financial Officer. Dave and Mike will provide a summary of our fourth quarter results and our expense guidance for 2024. Arun will provide an update on our initiatives to improve the customer and carrier experience, improve operating leverage and increased focus on revenue management. And Dave will share the findings from his initial diagnosis of the company. From there, we will open the call up for questions. Our earnings presentation slides are supplemental to our earnings release and can be found in the Investors section of our website at investor.chrobinson.com.
Our prepared comments are not intended to follow the slides. If we do refer to specific information on the slides, we will let you know which slide we're referencing. Today's remarks also contain certain non-GAAP measures and reconciliations of those measures to GAAP measures are included in the presentation. I'd also like to remind you that our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. Slide 2 in today's presentation lists factors that could cause our actual results to differ from management's expectations. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.
Dave Bozeman: Thank you, Chuck. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Our fourth quarter results did not meet our expectations as we continue to battle through a poor demand and pricing environment. But we made progress on a number of important initiatives, including charting our path forward. But let me address our results first. On our third quarter earnings call, we indicated the Q4 truck volumes in NAST could follow the normal seasonal pattern. And in fact, that is what occurred. Specifically, the average sequential Q4 decline in the Cass Freight Shipment Index over the past 10 years is 2.4%. Excluding the pandemic-impacted years of 2020 and 2021, the average sequential Q4 decline was 3.7%. In Q4 of 2023, the shipment index declined 4.3% sequentially and our combined truckload and LTL shipments declined less than the index at 3.5%.
In Global Forwarding, we increased our ocean shipments on a year-over-year basis, but they were down sequentially as well, as they typically are in a fourth quarter. For the enterprise in total, the sequential declines in volume drove a 3% sequential decline in our Q4 AGP versus Q3. And this equated to $0.11 of our sequential EPS decline. Below gross profit, personnel and SG&A expenses were within the guidance ranges that we provided on our Q3 earnings call. Although personnel expenses were toward the high end of our guidance range. Sequentially, Q4 personnel expenses increased due to the reduction of our incentive compensation accruals in Q3 that we didn't expect to repeat in Q4, as was explained on our Q3 earnings call. SG&A expenses were down sequentially but slightly above the midpoint of our guidance.
In total, the 3.7% sequential increase in our operating expenses equated to $0.13 of sequential EPS decline. The combination of all these changes in AGP and operating expenses, some of which were expected, drove the sequential decrease in operating income. Below operating income, there were a couple of significant items that negatively impacted our financial results and ultimately drove the remaining $0.10 of sequential decline in our adjusted EPS, namely non-cash losses on foreign currency revaluation and a higher income tax rate. Later in the call, Mike will share more details on these as well as provide guidance on our 2024 operating expenses. So that addresses why our Q4 results declined sequentially versus Q3. Now, I'll provide some additional details on our Q4 results in our North American Surface Transportation and Global Forwarding businesses.
In our NAST truckload business, our Q4 volume declined approximately 1.5% year-over-year and 3.5% on a sequential basis. The weak demand environment in an elongated market trough combined with excess carrier capacity continued to result in a very competitive market. With the exception of the holiday weeks in Q4, the dry van load-to-truck ratio was around 2:1. And in the second half of the quarter, was the lowest the industry has seen in the past six years. With this environment at play in Q4, we targeted more truckload volume in the spot market, where we could capture more profit due to seasonal market tension. This led to a sequential improvement in our overall truckload AGP per load in October and November and for the quarter as a whole. Profit per load in December declined as expected as the cost of purchased transportation moves seasonally higher.
For the quarter, we had an approximate mix of 65% contractual volume and 35% transactional volume in our truckload business compared to a 70/30 mix over the past three quarters. The sequential declines that we've seen in our truckload line haul cost per mile since Q2 of 2022 continued through November of 2023, before moving seasonally higher in December. On a year-over-year basis, we saw a decline of approximately 10.5% in our average Q4 truckload line haul cost per mile paid to carriers, excluding fuel surcharges. Due to the usual time lag associated with the resetting of contract pricing to follow spot market cost, our average truckload line haul rate or price built to our customers excluding fuel surcharges declined 13.5% on a year-over-year basis.
With this price decline coming off a higher base than the costs, these changes resulted in a 29.5% year-over-year decrease in AGP per load. Moving into 2024, we will substantially increase our focus on revenue management objectives to better align revenue and cost in our contractual portfolio. Arun will share more on this in a little bit, but we intend to use our advanced pricing and contract management tools in a more surgical and disciplined approach as we navigate changing market conditions in the future with a focus on profitable growth. In our LTL business, Q4 shipments were down 0.5% on a year-over-year basis, and 3.5% sequentially. AGP per order declined 8.5% on a year-over-year basis, driven primarily by the soft market conditions and lower fuel prices.
On a sequential basis, the cost and price of purchased transportation in the LTL market increased in Q4, primarily driven by the assets and capacity that have temporarily exited the LTL market. This resulted in a 3% sequential increase in AGP per order. In our Global Forwarding business, results continued to be impacted by the imbalance of soft demand and ample capacity. In Q4, our ocean forwarding AGP declined by 17.2% year-over-year, driven by a 20.5% decrease in AGP per shipment that was partially offset by a 4% increase in shipments. Compared to pre-pandemic levels, we have grown ocean market share by providing differentiated solutions and customer service and by leveraging investments in technology and talent, leading to the addition of new customers and diversification of the verticals and trade lanes that we serve.
In the wake of the ongoing conflict in the Red Sea and low water levels in the Panama Canal, global supply chains are facing transit interruptions and vessel rerouting which is causing extended transit times and putting a strain on global ocean capacity. While the Asia to Europe trade lane has been most affected, the impact is extending to other lanes as carriers adjust routes based on shipping demand. As a result, ocean rates have increased sharply in Q1 on several trade lanes, including Asia to Europe and Asia to North America. While the Red Sea disruption continues without any clear timeline of when it will be resolved, the strain on capacity and the elevated spot rates are expected to continue through at least the Chinese New Year. As a global logistics provider with the scale and expertise to strategize and implement contingency plans, we're highly engaged with our customers to help them navigate the evolving situation and ensure flexibility and resilience in their supply chain.
At some point, we expect that ocean pricing will loosen as new vessel capacity continues to enter the market in 2024. Looking ahead, we do not see any indications of a global freight volume upturn in the immediate future. In NAST, similar to the fourth quarter, the first quarter is typically characterized by a sequential decrease in ground transportation volumes. In fact, the average sequential Q1 decline in the Cass Freight Shipment Index over the past 10 years was 2.6%. As the global freight market fluctuates due to seasonal, cyclical, and geopolitical factors, we remain focused on what we can control by providing superior service to our customers and carriers, streamlining our processes by removing waste and manual touches, and delivering tools that enable our customer and carrier-facing employees to allocate their time to relationship building, value-added solutioning, and exception management.
Our 17% improvement in NAST shipments per person per day in Q4, exceeded our stated 15% target and is an indicator of the progress that we've made on removing waste and manual touches. These efforts are also bearing fruit in other key areas of our business as Global Forwarding achieved a 20% year-over-year improvement in their Q4 shipments per person per month. Our continued focus on productivity improvement is one part of our plan to address and optimize our enterprise-wide structural cost. And we expect to carry our productivity momentum into 2024. Our commitment to deliver quality and continuous improvement to our customers continues to be validated by net promoter scores in 2023 that were the highest on record for the company, which we believe puts us in good position with customers ahead of the eventual rebound in the freight market.
Our customers continue to value the quality, stability and reliability that we provide as they work to optimize their transportation needs. They want a partner who has financial strength and the ability to invest through cycles in the customer experience. They also want a partner who can meet their increasingly complex logistics needs by providing expertise and a breadth of innovative solutions enabled by technology and people that they can rely on to serve as an extension of their team. C.H. Robinson is that partner, with a combination of people, technology, and scale to deliver an unmatched customer experience, and with the breadth of capabilities to meet all their logistic needs, including value-added solutions for cross-border freight, drop trailer capacity, and retail consolidation.
As we continue to improve the customer experience and our cost-to-serve, I'm focused on ensuring that we'll be ready for the eventual freight market rebound, with a durable cost structure that decouples volume growth from headcount growth and drives operating leverage. In order to further eliminate productivity bottlenecks in the highest leverage areas, we're focused on a handful of concurrent workstreams that will deliver an improved customer experience through process optimization. These focused workstreams are an example of how the leadership team and I have made changes to drive focus so that we position ourselves for growth in our core business. Our commitment to continuously improving the experience of our customers and carriers and eliminating inefficiencies from our processes will make us a company that is faster, more flexible, and more agile in solving problems for our customers, delivering better customer service, and creating operating leverage and profitable growth.
I'll turn it over to Arun now to provide more details on our efforts to strengthen our customer and carrier experience, and our revenue management practices and improve our efficiency and operating leverage.
Arun Rajan: Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. As Dave said, we continue to execute on a handful of concurrent workstreams that are addressing significant opportunities to eliminate productivity bottlenecks and to deliver process optimization and an improved customer experience. Two of the workstreams on the productivity roadmap are aimed at quoting and order entry. In both areas, we are reducing manual touches and our response time to customers driving faster speed-to-market and higher customer engagement. In addition to our past learnings, we're leaning more heavily on Generative AI to deliver process improvements. In our order entry workstream, we're utilizing GenAI to translate structured and unstructured emails, PDFs, and Excel files that we receive from customers and their vendors into orders on our system.
This solution fills in customer-specific requirements based on their past history and customer-specific prompts and scenarios entered by frontline teams who know the customers' business. GenAI puts the power of large language models into the hands of our front-line teams, rather than relying solely on data scientists to train models for unique customer requirements. While our preference is still to receive an order via API or other structured electronic means, there's large variability in how customer orders are transmitted. And this new method allows customers to have an interaction as though we receive their order via structured electronic means even when they choose to email an order to us. With more data and history to leverage than any other 3PL, we have opportunities to harness the power that Generative AI now offers to further capitalize on our information advantage, and we'll continue to look for and pursue those opportunities.
Another area where we've advanced our capabilities is in touchless appointments where we've introduced technology to automate the entire process. This technology also uses AI to determine the optimal appointment based on transit time data from our millions of shipments across 300,000 shipping lanes, facility data such as peak dwell time and the most convenient time windows for carriers. This advancement saves shippers a considerable amount of time, enables them to achieve higher service levels and saves them money by avoiding chargebacks or fines they might face due to freight arriving too early or too late. In addition to an improved customer experience, our efforts are increasing the digital execution of critical touch points in the lifecycle of an order from quote to cash, thereby reducing the number of manual tasks per shipment and the time per task.
This translates to productivity improvements, measured in terms of shipments per person per day, which creates operating leverage. As Dave mentioned earlier, we surpassed our 2023 goal of a 15% year-over-year improvement in NAST shipments per person per day with 17% improvement achieved in Q4. As we deliver further process optimization and an improved customer experience, we plan to deliver the compounded cost structure benefits of additional 2024 productivity improvements of 15% NAST and 10% in Global Forwarding with technology that supports our people and processes. As Dave also mentioned, revenue management is a key focus for us as we navigate this difficult freight market. With continued investment in our pricing science and contract management technology over the course of 2023, we're now in a better position to respond to dynamic market conditions with the tools and capabilities we've developed.
In 2024, we will increase our rigor and disciplines of the application of these tools and capabilities. These tools, together with our scale, data and customer and carrier relationships underpin our revenue management function through which we can be more surgical in how we approach customer discussions and how we implement a disciplined pricing and profitable growth strategy based on individual customer value propositions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike for a review of our fourth quarter results.
Mike Zechmeister: Thanks, Arun, and good afternoon, everyone. The soft freight market outlined by Dave resulted in fourth quarter total revenues of $4.2 billion and adjusted gross profit or AGP of $618.6 million which was down 20% year-over-year, driven by a 24% decline in NAST and a 14% decline in Global Forwarding. On a monthly basis compared to Q4 of 2022, our total company AGP per business day was down 24% in October, down 20% in November, and down 13% in December. Turning to expenses, Q4 personnel expenses were $361.8 million, including a $1.3 million favorable restructuring charge adjustment, primarily driven by the significant devaluation of the Argentine peso prior to completing the divestiture of our Global Forwarding operations in Argentina.
Excluding these reversals, our Q4 personnel expenses of $363.2 million were down 10.5% year-over-year, primarily due to our cost optimization efforts and lower variable compensation. Our average Q4 headcount was down 13.3% year-over-year, including double-digit decreases in NAST, Global Forwarding, and our All Other and Corporate segments. Ending headcount was down 12.4% year-over-year to 15,246. As Dave mentioned, the sequential increase in our Q4 personnel expenses was included in our guidance. Although Q4 personnel expenses were within our guidance range, they came in at the higher-end due to the achievement of certain objective bonus targets, for example, delivering results on cost-reduction initiatives. Moving to SG&A. Q4 expenses were $149.4 million, including a $2.9 million reversal of restructuring charges, also driven by the peso deflation prior to completing the divestiture of our Global Forwarding operations in Argentina.
Excluding the reversal, SG&A expenses were $152.3 million, a decline of 5.8% year-over-year, primarily due to reductions in contingent worker expenses, and were down 2.6% sequentially. As you recall from our Q1 earnings call in April, we raised our cost-savings commitment to $300 million from $150 million which was defined as the net annualized cost savings by Q4 of 2023, compared to the annualized run rate of Q3 of 2022 which is when a commitment was originally made. With the progress on our 2023 productivity initiatives, we delivered $346 million in cost savings for the full year excluding restructuring charges with the majority of these savings expected to be long-term structural changes. Consistent with our strategy, we believe these cost savings will improve our operating leverage and help our margins as demand and a more balanced freight market return.
Turning to our 2024 annual operating expense guidance. We expect our personnel expenses to be $1.4 billion to $1.5 billion. At the midpoint, this is up 0.2% compared to our 2023 total of $1.447 billion excluding restructuring charges. The personnel expense drivers in 2024 include two items that are expected to offset each other, the restoration of target incentive compensation related to the expected improvement in financial performance will be offset by continued productivity improvements across the business, and lower headcount as the team continues to decouple volume growth and headcount growth. 2024 SG&A expenses are expected to be in the range of $575 million to $625 million, down 0.8% at the midpoint, excluding the restructuring charges in 2023.
This includes 2024 depreciation and amortization expense that is expected to be $90 million to $100 million. Although most of our SG&A expenses are subject to inflation, we expect continued cost reduction efforts to offset the inflationary impact. Shifting to expenses below operating income. Our Q4 interest and other expense totaled $38.1 million, which was down $4.3 million, or 10.1% year-over-year. Q4 included $21.6 million in interest expense, which was down $3.1 million, or 12.6% versus Q4 of 2022, driven by $394 million of debt reduction compared to Q4 of '22. Another factor that drove Q4 other expense was an $18.5 million loss on foreign currency revaluation and realized foreign currency gains and losses, which is compared to a $16.9 million loss in Q4 of 2022.
The Q4 loss was driven primarily by weakness in the Argentine peso and euro relative to the US dollar. As a reminder, our FX impacts are predominantly non-cash gains and losses related to intercompany assets and liabilities. On a sequential basis, FX had an unfavorable impact of $18.4 million and included an $8.9 million loss related to the significant devaluation of the Argentine peso prior to exiting the business in late December. As you recall from our third quarter earnings call, operating in Argentina had become challenging due to its strict monetary policies and currency devaluation. The divestiture mitigates our exposure to the deteriorating economic conditions and the increasing political instability in that region. As a part of the divesting of our operations in Argentina, we converted the business to a local independent agent to ensure continued service to our customers with shipments in that region.
There were also a couple of large one-time tax-related items that impacted our results in Q4. Our Q4 tax provision of $38.3 million included a tax settlement of $19.2 million and $4.7 million of tax expense related to the Argentina divestiture. In regard to the tax settlement, the company came to an agreement with the I.R.S. Appeals division on a tax position related to tax incentives for domestic investments in the years 2014 through 2017. Although we maintained that our software investments were supportable deductions, we were only offered a partial settlement, factoring in costs of litigation, expert advice, and that other companies who have challenged similar positions have experienced unfavorable results. We decided it was in our best interest to settle the issue.
The company has no ongoing financial exposure relating to this specific deduction as it was eliminated from the tax code beginning in 2018. Excluding these one-time tax expenses, our effective tax rate came in at 19.5% for the quarter and 15.0% for the year, compared to 19.3% in 2022. Our lower tax rate in 2023 was primarily driven by our -- by lower pretax income and incremental benefits from foreign tax credits. We expect our 2024 full year effective tax rate to be in the range of 17% to 19%. Q4 adjusted or non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.50 excludes $23.9 million of one-time tax expenses, $8.9 million of foreign currency losses on divested Argentina operations, and the $4.3 million reversal of restructuring charges. Turning to cash flow.
Q4 cash flow generated by operations was $47 million, compared to $773 million in Q4 of 2022. The year-over-year decline in cash flow was primarily driven by changes in net operating working capital. In Q4 of 2022, we had a $650 million sequential decrease in net operating working capital, driven by the sharply declining costs and price of purchased transportation. In Q4 of 2023, we had a $7 million sequential increase in net operating working capital. In Q4, our capital expenditures were $16.1 million compared to $27.8 million in Q4 of 2022. We expect 2024 capital expenditures to be $85 million to $95 million. We've returned $74 million of cash to shareholders in Q4, which was down 85% year-over-year, primarily due to the decline in cash from operations.
Now onto the balance sheet. We ended Q4 with approximately $1.0 billion of liquidity comprised of $840 million of committed funding under our credit facilities and a cash balance of $146 million. Our debt balance at the end of Q4 was $1.6 billion, which was down $394 million since the end of 2022. Our net debt to EBITDA leverage at the end of Q4 was 2.34 times, up from 2.10 times at the end of Q3, driven by the lower EBITDA. Our capital allocation strategy is grounded in maintaining an investment grade credit rating, which allows us to optimize our weighted average cost of capital. Our $619 million in debt paydown since Q3 of 2022 has helped maintain our strong liquidity position and investment grade credit rating. Keep in mind that the cash that we use to reduce debt generally reduced the amount of cash for share repurchases.
Overall, I'm encouraged by the much needed progress that was made on our 2023 productivity initiatives and the plans in place to build on that progress in 2024. With the 17% productivity improvement delivered in NAST and the 20% productivity improvement in Global Forwarding in 2023, combined with an expectation of an additional 15% in NAST and 10% in Global Forwarding in 2024, each business is expected to deliver compounded productivity improvements of 32% or better over the two-year period. A robust pipeline of process technology and waste elimination initiatives continues to be acted upon. By leveraging Generative AI combined with machine learning to take the capability of our people to an even higher level, Robinson is positioned well to further reduce waste and drive structural cost changes that improve our operating leverage and help deliver on the long-term operating income margin expectations.
With that, I'll turn the call back over to Dave for his final comments.
Dave Bozeman: Thanks, Mike. We shared a sentiment of some of our peers in that we're happy to say goodbye to 2023. And although 2024 still presents some of the same challenges and headwinds, I'm excited about the work that we're doing to reinvigorate Robinson's winning culture. Over my first six months here, I completed my initial diagnosis and we're taking actions to chart our path forward. At a high level, we need to focus on both our customer value proposition and revenue generation, and our structural cost, and we need to aggressively seek the optimal balance. Let's review my findings. First, our structural cost base grew too much during the pandemic and we made significant progress on reducing that cost structure in 2023, but it needs to continue to improve.
We will do that by embedding lean practices, removing waste and expanding our digital capabilities. This will enable us to strengthen our productivity and optimize our organization structure in order to be the most efficient operator in addition to the highest value provider. Second, as I listen to our customers, it's clear that their logistics needs are becoming increasingly complex and robust capabilities are required to power vertical-centric and value-added solutions. I have found that C.H. Robinson has people with deep expertise in the freight market and long standing trusted relationships with our customers and carriers. This is a competitive advantage, but we can do a better job of leveraging our unique expertise and information advantage and advance our cutting-edge technology to deliver more robust capabilities and market leading outcomes.
Third, we need to focus on profitable growth in our four core modes, North American truckload and LTL, and global ocean and air as the engines to ignite growth by reclaiming share in eroded segments and expanding our addressable market through value-added services and solutions that drive new volume to the core modes. And fourth, we need to drive better synergies across our portfolio of services to accelerate profitable growth. One way that we're going to do this is by improving how we go to market as one company with unified account management versus showing up as distinct business units. Our journey to unlock the power of our portfolio is underway as we take action on all of these fronts. One example of this is the recent launching of our Enterprise Strategy Program Management office and the addition of Jim Reutlinger to the senior leadership team to lead our strategic approach to our critical planning activities.
Jim is an expert in continuous improvement and lean methodology and he brings learnings from his leadership experience at Danaher, a company with a well-established reputation for continuous improvement. Jim will help us drive lean principles and continuous improvement deeper into the organization and create growth and success in our strategic priorities. I continue to see an opportunity for the company to reach its full potential and create more shareholder value by improving our value proposition, increasing our market share, accelerating growth, further reducing our structural cost, and improving our efficiency, operating margins and profitability. I'm confident that together we will win for our customers, carriers, employees and shareholders, and I'm incredibly excited about our future.
This concludes our prepared remarks. I'll turn it back to Donna now for the Q&A portion of the call.
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