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Schneider National Inc. (SNDR) reported its third-quarter 2025 earnings, revealing a significant miss on earnings per share (EPS) expectations, although revenue slightly surpassed forecasts. The company posted an adjusted EPS of $0.12, falling short of the anticipated $0.20, a 40% miss. Despite this, revenue reached $1.45 billion, exceeding projections of $1.43 billion. Following the announcement, the stock dropped 8.77% in pre-market trading, reflecting investor concerns over the earnings shortfall. According to InvestingPro data, 9 analysts have recently revised their earnings downwards for the upcoming period, signaling continued challenges ahead.
Key Takeaways
- Schneider National’s Q3 EPS of $0.12 missed forecasts by 40%.
- Revenue rose to $1.45 billion, slightly above expectations.
- Stock fell 8.77% in pre-market trading after the earnings release.
- AI implementation is driving significant productivity improvements.
- The company anticipates a more favorable market environment in 2026.
Company Performance
Schneider National’s performance in Q3 2025 was mixed, with a notable decline in adjusted income from operations by 13% year-over-year to $38 million. Despite this, enterprise revenues, excluding fuel surcharge, increased by 10% compared to Q3 2024. The company faced a financial headwind of $16 million due to unexpected claims-related costs, impacting its profitability.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: $1.45 billion, up 10% year-over-year.
- Earnings per share: $0.12, down from $0.18 in Q3 2024.
- Adjusted income from operations: $38 million, a 13% decrease year-over-year.
Earnings vs. Forecast
Schneider National’s actual EPS of $0.12 was significantly below the forecasted $0.20, marking a 40% miss. This deviation contrasts with the company’s historical trend of meeting or exceeding expectations, highlighting a challenging quarter. However, revenue surprised positively, surpassing forecasts by 1.4%.
Market Reaction
The stock market reacted sharply to the earnings miss, with Schneider National’s shares declining by 8.77% in pre-market trading. The stock’s price fell from its last close of $22.63 to $20.76, nearing its 52-week low of $20.41. This movement reflects investor disappointment with the earnings results, despite the slight revenue beat.
Outlook & Guidance
Looking forward, Schneider National maintains its full-year 2025 adjusted diluted EPS guidance at approximately $0.70. The company anticipates a more constructive market environment in 2026, driven by supply-side rationalization. Long-term EPS forecasts for FY 2026 stand at $1.15, indicating expected growth.
Executive Commentary
CEO Mark Rourke emphasized the potential for a more favorable market next year, stating, "We do believe that the environment, as I mentioned, because of the supply side, is more constructive as we go into next year." He also highlighted the impact of AI on productivity, saying, "We believe [AI] is going to be a key driver of our ability to grow our business."
Risks and Challenges
- Unexpected claims-related costs impacting financial results.
- Sub-seasonal freight market conditions.
- Contraction in the industrial economy.
- Potential regulatory impacts on trucking capacity.
- Challenges in implementing new business in the Dedicated segment.
Q&A
During the earnings call, analysts probed into the regulatory impacts on trucking capacity and the challenges faced in the Dedicated segment with new business implementations. The role of AI in enhancing productivity was also a focal point, along with potential demand catalysts for 2026.
Full transcript - Schneider National Inc (SNDR) Q3 2025:
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Schneider National Inc.’s third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, again press star one. Thank you. I’d now like to turn the call over to Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: You.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: You may begin.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Thank you, operator, and good morning everyone. Joining me on the call today are Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics. Earlier today, the company issued an earnings press release. This release and an investor presentation are available on the Investor Relations section of our website at schneider.com. Our call includes remarks about forward expectations, forecast, forecast plans, and prospects for Schneider National Inc. These constitute forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbor provisions under applicable federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations.
The company urges investors to review the risks and uncertainties discussed in our SEC filings, including but not limited to our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and those risks identified in today’s earnings release. All forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this call, and Schneider National Inc. disclaims any duty to update such statements except as required by law. In addition, pursuant to Regulation G, reconciliation of any non-GAAP financial measures referenced during today’s call can be found in our earnings release and investor presentation, which includes reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. Now I’d like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mark Rourke.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thank you, Christyne. Hello everyone. Before Darrell provides a financial overview of the third quarter results and shares our updated 2025 guidance, I will start by sharing my perspective on the freight market as well as the ongoing structural improvements we are making in the business. After, we’ll answer your questions. One item I’d like to address before I turn to the broader market is claims-related costs. During the third quarter, we recorded roughly $16 million more in these costs than we had previously expected. This was also higher than we had incorporated into our previous guidance. Even at the low end, this was driven primarily by unfavorable developments on three claims from the 2021 and 2023 policy years. We do not expect the cost associated with these developments to repeat in the fourth quarter.
Now with regard to the freight market, when we updated our expectations for the second half during our last earnings call, we experienced a solid uptick in market conditions in the back half of July and that gave us some cause for optimism as we moved further into 2025. However, that strength faded as the quarter progressed, with August and September market trends largely sub-seasonal. This was evident through pockets of softer volumes with existing customers, retreating spot rates, modest peak activity to date, and an overall softer September versus typical patterns that would see strength into quarter end. Looking forward, these conditions are likely to persist into the balance of the year. Despite this, we continue to see traction in several of our key initiatives, which I will discuss in more detail shortly.
Though this down cycle has been extended, several new dynamics have been introduced over the last few months that are definitive catalysts for the removal of excess capacity after several years of expecting but not seeing more significant supply-side rationalization. This includes dynamics such as English language proficiency enforcement and the impact of non-domicile CDL renewals, but importantly, it also reflects self-regulation driven by the mere threat of enforcement. At the same time, we are seeing a pickup in carrier bankruptcies and the industry is now approaching a year of Class 8 truck production below replacement levels, a trend that may accelerate given tariff considerations. Collectively, we believe these have the potential to drive more supply-side rationalization than the impact we saw in 2017 from requiring ELD mandate for hours of service enforcement.
Against this backdrop, we continue to press on our efforts to drive structural improvements in our business, especially in three main areas. First, when it comes to our revenue strategy, we saw further traction on our continued efforts to lean into our areas of differentiation. Second, we are also continuing to execute on our productivity actions, which are driving asset efficiency and lowering our cost to serve in any cycle dynamic. Relatedly and third, capital discipline is driving our focus on doing more with less, which leaves us well positioned for strategic investment and the ability to act opportunistically on ways to add shareholder value. I’ll provide a bit more detail about each of these efforts, starting with the progress we have made on our revenue strategy by leaning into our areas of strength.
In doing so, we are creating growth opportunities, and it has the added benefit of enabling us to stay more broadly disciplined. More specifically, Dedicated experienced some sub-seasonal demand in select areas such as consumer products and food and beverage, which weighed on volumes. However, wins from new and existing customers were realized at a rate three times the level we’ve seen in the first half of the year. We ended the quarter with our fleet count in line with the end of the second quarter as implementations are ongoing, and we continue to see productivity gains. Looking forward, our Dedicated pipeline remains robust with a strong skew to our targeted areas of specialty equipment, which has historically been sticky and required a high level of execution and equipment capability.
The strength of this pipeline will add accretive business in the coming quarters, and we plan to leverage this growth into upgrading the overall portfolio by moving away from select lower-yielding operations as the new startups come online. This shift plus continued traction on our productivity efforts will be reflected primarily in revenue per truck per week gains as opposed to just fleet growth, and it will contribute to our efforts to restore truckload margins within network. While we finished the bid season achieving low to mid single digit contractual rate increases, we continue to believe the rates are not yet at a level that supports the service we deliver and the cost needed to achieve it. As a result, our spot exposure remains elevated to historical norms.
While this was a headwind to our mix, having continued price discipline will position us to maximize our leverage as market trends improve. We continue to see a wide range of approaches to the market from our customers, but retention rates of incumbent business jumped 10 points quarter over quarter in Intermodal. The strength of our win rates throughout 2025 is translating to market share gains, which was a driving force behind our 10% volume growth in the quarter, several times the industry rate in Mexico. A solid track record for our service offering that is one to three days faster than our competitors continues to resonate with customers. Third quarter volumes grew over 50% in the region. We also have seen the highest growth rate in the eastern U.S. since 2022. This volume strength allows us to effectively navigate the choppiness of the environment.
In the third quarter, rate renewals were flat in the quarter with revenue per order negatively impacted by mix. The mix reflected softer outbound volumes from the West Coast, shorter length of haul, and relatedly more modest peak surcharges. This was intentional as we chose not to chase incremental transcon volume and rates were not commensurate for the service. By continuing to lean into areas of differentiation, we were able to grow operating income and even modestly improve margins while overcoming select cost headwinds, which I will discuss shortly. In Logistics power-only, revenues grew for the sixth quarter in a row driven by resilient volumes which remain at 98% of peak levels.
Net revenue per order also showed high single digit % improvement year over year, and this strength is helping to offset continued pressure in our traditional Brokerage volumes as shippers remain inclined towards asset-based solutions as they anticipate a cycle turn. While we look forward to transitioning to a more supportive market, we are, as I mentioned, continuing to press on productivity actions which will improve asset efficiency and lower our cost to serve. These actions will help drive the enterprise back to our long-term margin targets faster and in a wider range of market conditions. Third quarter saw progress on our established cost reduction target of over $40 million, including synergies from Cowan Systems, which will continue to ramp into 2026. Beyond synergies, the bulk of our savings will be driven by productivity enhancements.
This includes targeted headcount reductions, though the full benefit is likely to be more pronounced next year as the run rate builds. Since the start of the year, we have reduced non-driver headcount by 6%. In truckload, we saw Cowan margins improve even with revenues remaining roughly flat as synergies continue to ramp. Network represents the bulk of our productivity initiatives. These include reducing unbilled miles and improving tractor-to-driver ratios. The majority of headcount actions to date were concentrated in truckload. The quarter saw short-term noise related to the timing gap associated with the previously highlighted Dedicated churns and startups for Intermodal. Third quarter saw impact from aforementioned claims-related costs and headwinds in third-party maintenance costs associated with trailing equipment. As it relates to the latter, actions are already underway to address this, and these challenges were combated by ongoing efforts to balance the network and reduce repositioning costs.
Logistics has a long history of being a testing ground for our latest technology applications, and AI is no exception. For example, our overall orders per day per broker in third quarter were up double digits from levels seen in 2023, and in areas where we have more actively deployed our AI tools, productivity is several times better. This technology is helping our brokers move away from routine, less fruitful workloads and enabling them to spend more time on value-added activities. As we have seen success in our Logistics offerings, we are also rolling out agentic AI to all of our other service offerings in a variety of support functions. These efforts dovetail their ongoing use of our decision science platform, which has been deployed for some time, which enables automated decision making and enhanced productivity while effectively balancing customer and network needs.
Finally, we will remain disciplined but nimble in our capital allocations as we look forward. Darrell will discuss in more detail in a moment, but I’ll say that our continued efforts to do more with less, the strength of our balance sheet, and the tactical decisions we have made related to our fleet equipment leave us with ample firepower to execute our strategic initiatives. Let’s now turn over to Darrell for his insights on the third quarter and our 2025 guidance.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Darrell, thank you, Mark, and good morning everyone. I’ll review our enterprise and segment financial results for the third quarter and provide insights on our updated full year 2025 EPS and net CapEx guidance. Summaries of our financial results and guidance can be found on pages 24 to 30 of our investor presentation available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Starting with the third quarter results, enterprise revenues excluding fuel surcharge were $1.3 billion, up 10% compared to a year ago. Adjusted income from operations was $38 million, a 13% decrease year over year. Enterprise adjusted operating ratio increased 80 basis points compared to the third quarter of 2024. Adjusted diluted EPS for the third quarter was $0.12 compared to $0.18 for the third quarter of 2024.
Third quarter results also include the impact of claims-related costs that were $16 million more than anticipated, which, as Mark referenced, was primarily as a result of unfavorable developments of three prior year claims. Regardless, we remain committed to our ongoing investments in safety performance, including recently enhancing the camera technology we deploy with AI-enabled features, not just because frequency remains a lever most in our control to combat these costs, but also because it’s the right thing to do. We previously announced a $40 million structural cost savings target, which will continue to build in the fourth quarter, and we’re focused on pursuing additional opportunities that will structurally lower cost to serve to improve our performance in all stages of the cycle going forward. From a segment perspective, truckload revenue excluding fuel surcharge was $625 million in the third quarter, up 17% year over year.
This growth was primarily due to the Cowan Systems acquisition as well as modest growth in network truck count, partially offset by Dedicated churn and network spot rate headwinds. Truckload operating income was $20 million, a 16% decline year over year. Operating ratio was 96.8%, an increase of 130 basis points compared to last year. The majority of claims-related costs discussed earlier were reflected in our truckload segment. Restoring profitability in network remains a key focus of our cost initiatives, including efforts to improve equipment ratios, consolidate facilities, streamline non-driver headcount, and reduce on-bill miles. Dedicated operating income benefited from the addition of Cowan but was also adversely impacted by the claims-related costs as well as churn that was highlighted in the second quarter.
The latter dynamic was exacerbated in the short term as a result of retaining equipment in areas where we had line of sight to new startups, though this was partially offset for the segment as a whole by deploying some equipment into network. Intermodal revenues excluding fuel surcharge were $281 million for the third quarter, up 6% year over year. This reflected volume growth of 10%, which more than offset the mixed impact in revenue per order. The third quarter marks the sixth consecutive quarter of year over year volume growth in the segment. Intermodal operating income was $17 million, a 7% increase compared to the same period last year, reflecting the strong volume growth which more than offset headwinds from claims-related costs and maintenance expense. Operating ratio was 94%, an improvement compared to the third quarter of 2024.
Logistics revenue excluding fuel surcharge totaled $332 million in the third quarter, up 6% from the same period a year ago driven by Cowan acquisition and growth in power-only. Logistics income from operations was $6 million, down 16% year over year. Operating ratio was 98.1%, an increase of 50 basis points primarily due to lower Brokerage volumes, partially offset by productivity gains. Turning to our balance sheet and capital allocation, as of September 30, 2025, we had $522 million in debt and lease obligations and $194 million of cash and cash equivalents. Our net debt leverage was 0.5 times at the end of the quarter, an improvement from 0.6 times at the end of the second quarter. In the third quarter we paid $17 million in dividends and $50 million for the year.
Net CapEx was $108 million compared to $93 million last year due to the timing of purchases of transportation equipment. As a result, free cash flow declined in the quarter. As we continue to grapple with macro uncertainty, disciplined capital allocation remains our focus. Our organic growth aligned with our strategic initiatives is our first priority, but our asset productivity efforts enable us to execute on this growth in a capital efficient way. In Dedicated we have the bandwidth to meet new demand by leveraging our productivity initiatives and reallocating resources away from lower performing operations in Intermodal. Our investments to date have left us well positioned to grow up to 25% with our current trailing equipment. We now expect net CapEx to be approximately $300 million for the full year compared to $325 million to $375 million previously.
The reduction was primarily related to our decision to pause tractor orders originally planned for November and December, bills which had been included in our previous capital plans. This decision was driven by the actions we outlined related to productivity and asset efficiency, and it allowed the enterprise to manage the impact of new tariffs as we reevaluate our total cost of ownership model. This will drive higher free cash flow without placing an undue burden on our fleet age. We continue to be well positioned to act opportunistically to enhance shareholder value, including through accretive acquisitions and share repurchases. Moving to our updated full year 2025 guidance, our adjusted diluted EPS guidance for the full year 2025 is now approximately $0.70 which assumes an effective tax rate of approximately 24%.
The new guidance incorporates the impact of higher than expected claims-related costs in the third quarter, the majority of which we assume will not repeat in the fourth quarter, though insurance remains inflationary overall. As such, excluding this impact, the new guidance is aligned with the low end of our previous range which had assumed more temperate seasonality in the second half of the year. For our Regional and Long-Haul Truckload network business, we expect volume trends to remain sub seasonal and spot rate conditions will be an important swing factor. Dedicated earnings are expected to benefit from the pickup in new business implementations, though startup friction costs will be felt as they ramp up. For Intermodal segment, we continue to expect roughly flat pricing for the remainder of the year which assumes minimal peak surcharges.
Similarly, we believe there was some degree of pull forward in the third quarter which could drive an earlier end to peak season than is typical. Though we continue to expect our volume growth to be above market. Our Logistics segment outlook reflects continued pressure on truckload volumes which is likely to continue to weigh on operating income despite solid execution in managing net revenue per order. In closing, while market conditions have yet to materially improve, there are clear catalysts on the supply side that have emerged which have the potential to significantly shift market dynamics. Regardless, we’re not standing idly by. We’re offsetting certain areas of tepid market conditions by leaning into our areas of strength, which is helping to drive incremental volume opportunity and enabling us to remain disciplined on broader strategies.
At the same time, we continue to execute on our acquisition synergies while looking to do more with less across the enterprise, a reflection of capital discipline and our efforts to lower cost to serve in any market condition. With that, we’ll open the call for your questions.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thank you.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press Star one. Again, we ask that you limit yourself to one question and one related follow up question. Your first question today comes from the line of Jordan Alger from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah. Hi. Morning. I wanted to ask about Dedicated. You said that the win rate, I think, had accelerated three times or considerably versus the first half. Just sort of curious, would you say those wins are sort of Schneider specific, you know, taking business from other carriers, or is it more industry driven demand, you know, such as private fleets deciding they want to move back to Dedicated, et cetera.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thanks.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Good morning, Jordan. Thank you for the question. The vast majority of those wins were in our pipeline. Our pipeline started to convert at a more accelerated rate in the second half, which we’re really pleased about because it really does set us up well against our strategic intent, which is to grow predominantly in the specialty segment, which is what we consider to be our most favored target because of its characteristics of durability and unique special services that we can bring with the strength of our Dedicated offering, our balance sheet, et cetera. It’s where we can really offer our most differentiation. We’re pleased.
Of course, when you have some churn that we outlined in the second quarter and when you have the new startups, you have some friction that goes on because all those things don’t perfectly sync up between some accounts that are going away and the new ones that are coming onboarded. We expect that we’ll still have some of that in the fourth quarter, but are looking at least at this juncture that we’ll have that largely behind us as we go into 2026. Our pipeline remains strong. We expect that we’ll still have great opportunity to continue our momentum in Dedicated, which is at the heart of our truckload strategy. Just a follow up, the friction you mentioned in the startup costs, it sounds like that’ll be behind you. I guess you just said in 2026, but is there a sense for timing?
I know you’ve mentioned also you’ll start to see gains in revenue per truck per week. Can you maybe talk about the timing of the friction easing and the ramping?
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thanks.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: When you’re growing Dedicated, Jordan, you’re always having some element of startup and friction that’s associated with that. We also identified how we can best serve our margin restoration actions, which will also include working on some of our lower operating performing margin accounts. Our primary objective there is to work with the customer to come up with a collaborative way for both organizations to win. When that’s not possible, either because their business changed, their strategy changed, or it’s just not possible, we’re going to look to upgrade and use that capital to redeploy to more favorable margin profile business, which is what’s in our pipeline. We’ll always have some level of that.
We just had an extraordinary amount in the third quarter because of the magnitude of the new business startup and the timing sometimes of when you exactly expect the timing of the startup and exactly expect the ramp down is not always perfectly predictable. We had an inordinate amount of that in the third quarter. Thank you.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from a line of Tom Wadowitz from UBS. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Good morning. I guess one quick follow up on the Dedicated and then I wanted to ask you about kind of broader truckload market view. Mark, I think you mentioned to be qualified on Jordan’s question. Tom. No, just kidding.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Go ahead.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: I think of, you know, like trailers being specialized. Maybe some of what you got from Cowan, that is, you know, it’s like sticky. How do you think? You highlighted that, right? You like the sticky Dedicated business. How much of the current book of Dedicated is, you know, specialized trailing equipment or whatever other kind of, you know, dimensions you would use to say, oh, it’s really specialized.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Can you give us a sense of?
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Just how much of that is in the kind of, you know, stickier category? I don’t know if that evolves over time or just how you think about that. Yeah, that’s our focus around our pipeline and the things that we’re most targeted towards, Tom. We do and we always think that standard equipment will have a place in our portfolio. Some of it is not only our standard equipment, but it might be what the customer brings to bear. There’s a spectrum of Dedicated solutions across the board and they’re all important. What we’re really focused on is we want over time more % of our book, which we believe is again more sticky. The renewal rates are much, much higher because you’re getting into more specialty services beyond just delivering product from point A to point B. Our new business and our portfolio is skewed, especially equipment.
We still have, and we will always have, standard equipment solutions as well, particularly around the retail support, DC to store, and some of those operations that are critical to our customer base.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Tom, this is Jim, just one add on to that. As we’ve made acquisitions, specifically we’ve been focusing in on our growth there and acquiring companies that have more of a specialty lens, something that they are able to help us differentiate out there in the market. It’s just become a larger percentage of our total pipeline.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: If you say skewed, I guess it implies maybe over half would be specialty, something like that.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: I don’t know. I don’t want to.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah, well over half. Well over half.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Yep.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Over half.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Okay.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah, thanks for that. Just on broader truckload market, I think this topic’s been coming up for the different providers and you obviously have a great look at broad look on the market. The regulatory actions seem like they could have a really large impact, right. You’ve got that, but then you got kind of October freight seems poor, worse than normal seasonality. You said August, September, sub seasonal. It’s like you got two factors to supply demand and which is the more visible or more dominant driver when you look into 2026. I don’t know how you kind of set those up. If you get 200,000 trucks out of the market and freight demand is still poor, is the market a lot tighter?
How do you think about those pieces and how much we should focus on one or the other when we look at the truckload market in 2026. Thank you there, Tom. We’ll have full discussion about 2026 just yet. I would look at where we’re going to finish this year and let’s maybe look back a year ago to this time. We do believe that the supply picture is much more constructive going into 2026. For all the notes that you just related there, we can see obvious impacts in our power-only Logistics business. We can see obvious impacts to non-domiciled CDL in some of our Brokerage carriers. We can see it really across the spectrum and it’s real and it’s having an impact now and we only think that that’s going to continue to ramp.
The constructive nature of the supply side going into next year is in our view much different than what came into 2025, which also wasn’t a necessarily overly robust demand environment. I think we have different factors at play. You throw in the lack of new Class 8 truck builds, the pipeline there, the tariff impacts are yet to come and be felt. I think all of that puts more pressure on the supply side. A dynamic that we really haven’t had for a number of years, which I think is going to be quite constructive. Of course, the wildcard is a demand side, harder to predict that. I think I’m confident that Schneider National Inc. is going to be able to better handle those dynamics across our portfolio with our optionality of offering and services.
I think that’s going to be a more positive setup for the Schneiders of the world heading into 2026.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Mark, this is Jim. I just want to add on to that. This is something our customers are already talking to us about because they are concerned about the mix of carriers that they’re running with, coming into this changing marketplace and seeking to get ahead of this.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Great, thank you.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from the line of Ravi Shanker from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Great. Thanks for the comments on the supply side here. How is that influencing your bid rate conversations for 2026, the early conversations you’re having? If customers are concerned, can you try to be opportunistic here and maybe go for mid to high single? Thanks, Ravi. Thanks for the question. As you look at 2025, even without some of those factors, we were able to achieve mid to low single digit increases in our network business truck business in 2025. We do believe we need to have, and the industry needs to have, more rate recovery in 2026. At this juncture with customers, we’re predominantly just in the strategy phase of the allocation season for 2026. We’re in a series of discussions just where their priorities are, what their strategies are, and how we might best align with those.
Don’t have a lot to report yet on what 2026 renewals look like. We do believe that the environment, as I mentioned, because of the supply side, is more constructive as we go into next year.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Understood.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Maybe a follow up there. Obviously very weird environment with demand continue to remain reasonably soft, but then supply may be tightening up a little bit.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: How does that influence power?
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Only in particular on the Logistics side going into next year, do you think supply alone will be able to drive rates and market tightening next year or do you really need to see the demand side also? Thank you. Yeah, I think we have to ultimately see both. Again, being more constructive on the supply side I think will help. I think there will likely be more flight to quality from a customer standpoint. We are seeing impacts in certain elements of our power-only carrier base who may have more reliance on some of those capacity types that are most under fire here based upon the increased regulation or regulatory enforcement. So far we’ve been able to adapt and adjust with others and continue to see that being a very viable part of our truckload network offering to our customer base.
There are going to be challenges there and that’s why we’re confident that this is a kind of a real effort. What we’re going to lean into is how we just help ourselves become more productive with our assets, how we use emerging tools in AI and others to help us be more effective in our cost to serve, in our people costs, and our investments there. We’ll continue to adapt to the environment. Overall, I do think the supply side issue is real. We’ve been talking about it on this call for several quarters that I thought it was an underappreciated fact and now I think it’s becoming more visible to more players throughout the industry, particularly our customers. Very helpful, thank you.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Chappelle from Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thank you. Good morning.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Hey, Jim.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: As it relates to Intermodal, obviously really strong load growth or order growth, but the sequential move in revenue per load is down, which kind of bucked the trend of most IMCs and the rails themselves. Just wondering if that’s a mix and kind of a shorter haul issue. You mentioned, I think Darrell mentioned kind of flat RPU through the rest of the year. Are you trying to manage for volume, throughput, and potentially efficiency at this point of the cycle and kind of worry about the price element of it later?
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah, John, first of all, we’d say that if you adjust for mix, our rate didn’t change. We were no different than anyone else. We were flat as we went through renewals this year. The growth that we’re seeing is really a function of the strategic actions we’ve taken over these last couple years that’s differentiating our business. We’ve been able to expand in new verticals like automotive, improve service levels, and that’s what really drove the larger allocations as we went through the first half of the year that we had been talking about. This quarter, what you’re really seeing is the realization of those awards that we had in the first half of the year. We think that really positions us well when the market starts to recover that we’ll grow that business even further. It’s not just a reflection of price.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah. Year over year. Jonathan, the impact on mix is less Transcon and more east and more Mexico. Whereas where the growth overcame some of the contraction in the west, just because of some of. We expect some of the pull forward was most prominent there, but also trying to stay disciplined, not to overextend our repositioning costs beyond how we could adequately have yields in the business. We tried to be smart about how we allocated our resources, and that meant more Mexico and more east. Okay, yeah, that makes complete sense and 100% related. A lot of talk this quarter about moving chess pieces as it relates to share shift in Intermodal, I guess, particularly in the Southeast. You mentioned, Jim, some of these are wins that you’d had before that are starting to come through now.
Are you also a beneficiary of some of the disruption around the potential merger that seems to be happening among the rail partners?
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: I think it’s still a little bit soon to say that there’s a bunch of disruption related to the merger. I think really what you’re seeing is what I talked about earlier, that we’ve had this differentiation and we’ve been able to leverage that differentiation to grow our business.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Okay, thanks, Jim. Thanks, Mark.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Thanks, John.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thank you.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from the line of David Hicks from Raymond James. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Great. Thanks for taking the questions.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: I wanted to follow up on Intermodal.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah, it’s obviously been three months since the announced UNP and NS acquisition.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: At the time, you’re taking a wait and see approach, kind of where we sit today. Are you positioning the network any differently?
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Ahead of any potential combination, what have your customers been saying on the subject?
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah. David, this is Jim, really, it’s still very early in this process and you know, we’re very engaged with the Rails. As the process is evolving, there’s still a lot more details that need to reveal themselves, and when they do, we’ll be able to start saying more about that. You know, we’re really confident our Intermodal team, our customers have a lot of confidence in our team. We’ve navigated two of these changes over the last couple of years, and obviously we came out of it stronger than we went into those, and that’s what really enabled our market share growth.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Great.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thanks, Jim. Box terms obviously inflected up pretty sharply here in Q3, and you’re also taking containers out.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: The Intermodal network.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Where do you see those box turns ultimately going as we kind of launch into 2026? Obviously, you have a lot of excess growth potential. Do you see any need for—
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Investment into your container fleet from here?
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah, we really don’t see a need to make additional investments into our trailing equipment. It was a nice improvement here in the quarter based on the volume growth. The reduction in trailing equipment is really just a function of normal salvages coming out of our business. There’s nothing planful of reducing that any further. In terms of where box count or container turns go, it’s really just a function of our ability to continue to onboard more customers, get greater allocations going forward, grow in our areas of differentiation, and with a more supportive truckload market, believe that will enable growth in terms of Intermodal. Ultimately, we’re seeing better and better performance from the rails. Our company Dray is very effective and that tells me we can get back to container turns that we’ve had historically or even better.
That’s where Darrell had mentioned 25% volume growth with this current trailing equipment.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Yep.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Appreciate it.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thanks.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from Brian Ossenbeck from J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Two ones more, Mark. The two ones on, I guess, the strategy and how you’re balancing the assets during these times. Mark, first for you, in terms of the spot exposure you mentioned, there’s still a little bit more of that than I guess you’d normally like or plan to have in the network business. Maybe you can put a bit more context around where that is, how it’s trended through the year, and if you think you’re kind of at the high point of that spot exposure, or if there’s other things you might need to do to address that heading into next year. On the network side, we historically and typically, because of our contract focus, have been in the 5 to 6% range just on, you know, repositioning normal market imbalances, et cetera.
This has been a bit more purposeful as we’ve gone through allocation and looking at where we can get operating leverage as we do not sign up for business that we don’t think long term is in our best interest and really have two options at that point in improving, leading into an improving spot market because of some of the other items that we made we’ve talked about here earlier, or we redeploy it on future better contract business. As we sit here today, Brian, we’re double what we typically are because we want to make sure that we leave ourselves to optionality and leverage into the business to redeploy in where the returns will be more favorable, and double what we would historically be is where we’re presently at and we’ll likely carry that into 2026. Okay, thank you.
Jim, I guess a similar question on Intermodal network balance and you made some comments about the focus and where the growth was and I guess where it wasn’t. Again, was that purposeful from a rate and return perspective or was that more of a network balance when you think about east and west and balancing out some of the lanes across the network?
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah, thanks Brian. It was intentional in terms of growing into our areas of strength, growing into Mexico where we have a lot of differentiation both in terms of our velocity and really superior claims ratio there. We want to be able to grow there. In terms of what’s going on with the west, we had an opportunity to take more backhaul freight and earn more backhaul freight. That also had an impact in terms of our overall pricing as it shows here in our results. In the east, we were able to work with some customers that we knew we’d be able to provide a superior service and that enabled us to grow as well.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah, I would highlight on the Intermodal margin business with not only growing the volume 10% but having some of the headwinds that are associated with the claims expense and what we would anticipate as more short-term set up issues on maintenance of the trailing equipment. We still improve margins, and I think we continue to lean into having an effective, balanced network. Playing to our differentiators, you know, again, should allow us to accelerate our margin performance in an improving truck market as we’re already starting to see some over-the-road conversion. We think there’s much more ahead of the U.S. relative to what we can adequately and effectively serve for our customers that is present in moving over the road. Okay, thanks for the time. Appreciate it.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from Bascome Majors from Susquehanna. Your line is open.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Mark, early on in your prepared remarks, you made a somewhat provocative comment about.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: The supply-side rationalization.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Not just the English language and immigration enforcement, but also what’s happening with new.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Truck orders could be more impactful too.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: The market than the ELD mandate saga of 2017.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Can you high level walk us through.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Looking back, what is Schneider’s view on how.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Much capacity exited the market because of.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: The ELD mandate at the time.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Maybe if you’re willing to bottom up.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: These two or three factors affecting the market into next year just help us size those up in a really.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Thank you. Sure, Rascomb. I’ll try to do my best at a very, very high level. We would assess back in 2017 that the ELD mandate or the electronic logging device had somewhere in the 3% to 4% impact on capacity coming out of the industry. As we look at the confluence of factors that we’re talking about presently that we outlined, we think it’s north of that. How far north? It’s hard for us to predict, but we can see it already evident in certain parts of our business and our trade partners. It’s our belief that it is real and it’s manifesting, and it should only accelerate from here.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from a line of Reed Shea from Stephens. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Hey guys, this is Joe Ederlin. I’m for Reed. Thanks for taking the question. It sounds like you have a more positive outlook on the supply side for 2026, given the regulatory changes. Could you maybe just give some additional thoughts on the demand environment for the network business, Dedicated or specialized? Are you seeing any green shoots, better demand from those customers as more pivot to asset based offerings and your value proposition, and then looking to next year, what do you view as the biggest potential demand catalysts or are you more so just expecting more stable demand with capacity rationalization to drive an acceleration from here?
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Sure.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: We would obviously characterize the demand picture as being fairly steady, if unspectacular. I think the consumer has held in there very well. All the metrics that you see associated with the consumer have been fairly steady. What has not been much of a catalyst to date for us has been the industrial side of the economy. As you look at the ISM and other indexes, we’ve been in the contraction phase there for a very, very long time. Can the big beautiful bill, some of the rate cut activity, the project work that’s going on in the building side of the industrial economy, can that be something that finally turns into a demand catalyst in 2026? We think it’s again a more constructive environment for that. The question is how firm is the consumer and how does that portend for next year?
We are obviously in conversations with our customers. They’re in various levels of optimism and concern based upon which segment of the economy that they serve. It’s a little bit of a mixed bag. We don’t have a great prediction at this juncture about the demand picture yet, but it’s been incredibly steady. Even though it’s sub seasonal, it’s increased in the third quarter a little bit. We see some improved demand as compared to September here in October, but we would still consider it less than what would typically be a building period for a peak holiday season.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: So.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: That’s as we look in the short term next year. Jim, I don’t know, maybe some other comments you have as our recent conversations with customers.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: This is Jim. The first thing we think about is having a really broad portfolio of customers that we’re operating with within each one of these segments. We’re specifically targeting who are those customers and those segments that are most likely to grow. That’s where we’ve been allocating our assets just to prepare us for any market change that’s ahead of us.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Got it. Thank you, guys.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from the line of Ken Hexter from Bank of America. Your line is open.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Hey, great.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Good morning. Good afternoon, Mark, Darrell, Jim, Christyne. Maybe following up on that talk about the speed of change. Right. What’s happened? You’ve cut estimates a couple times this year, but it sounded like you were building into July or the, and then into the second half and then August, September, things really changed. It sounds like you’re still talking subseasonal into October. Maybe just understand the backdrop here with the fading demand being sub seasonal.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: This is Darrell, I’ll start here. If you recall when we gave our guidance in July, we talked about varying levels of seasonality that could play out. On the low end of the range, which was $0.70, $0.75 at the time, we described that as a scenario where we saw subdued demand. That’s largely how the third quarter played out. If you adjust for the claims-related costs that was a $0.07 headwind that I talked about in my prepared remarks, we’re pretty much aligned with the low end of our previous range. It’s really a function of what did seasonally look like, which was more subdued, which was one of our scenarios in terms of downside.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: You’re not, again, if you add the $0.07 back and you get closer to the bottom end, you’re not saying things are deteriorating faster in October. It’s just a little subseasonal. I just want to understand the magnitude of your commentary. Yeah, absolutely. It’s improving from September but still at a sub seasonal level to a typical October is what we would frame it as. Ken, not suggesting it’s getting worse in October and Mark maybe or Darrell, just digging into that. Right. Normally at this point you’re seeing some project business, is that what you’re talking about? Kind of sub seasonal. Still not. I think you mentioned that in the opening comments. Right. Still delayed on those conversations. I just want to understand how peak season kind of pans out from here. You know, the pre shipping versus the just. It’s not happening. Yeah, peak season.
A component of that generally is project work, specialty seasonal business. It’s not the entire definition of seasonality because there’s a number of customers that ship additional volumes that aren’t necessarily project based. We’ve had a series of discussions with customers, we have a series of structures in place with customers to address seasonal project work. The question is how prominent will they actually have to have the demand to utilize those structures. We’re prepared, we’re ready to pivot. We have the capacity, particularly in our network business, ready to go to those type of yield opportunities.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: So our.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: The question just becomes how prevalent are they through the season in which customers find themselves in a position to deploy them, and then just totally big picture. If I can step back for a sec, autonomous is not something we’ve heard about much yet. We’ve got now, you know, two companies in the public market. What’s your relationship and your testing phase? Where are you and where do you think it’s developing at this point? All right, you’re breaking our rules here. We did really well on the three question rule today. Ken, take it offline. Real quickly on the autonomous vehicle, we’ve been aligned really since the get go with and looking at assessing who we think the winners are going to be ultimately in this space.
Our belief continues to be those who are best aligned with OEMs, who are engineering from the ground up, have the best mousetrap. Presently we are testing actively with both Aurora and TORC, our two primary, and those are the folks that we’ve aligned to and continue to advance the process with. I’ll leave it at that. Thanks.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Thanks Mark.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: you. Thank you.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from a line of Chris Weatherby from Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys. I just wanted to ask a question about the current environment. Have you guys seen the spot market in October get stronger sequentially? I think there’s been a little bit of debate around that. We see the load boards and what they tell us, but when you talk to companies, you get different answers about what they’re seeing. Maybe some perspective on what you’re seeing actually in the spot market in the month of October.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: Yeah, thanks, Chris. This is Jim. You know, you’re absolutely right. You’re seeing a lot of variety here across different markets. Part of that relates back to what we were just talking about. There are parts of the country where there are carriers avoiding those states where there is additional enforcement. We’ve seen some bankruptcies that creates pockets of demand that are popping up. At the same time, we mentioned that while there’s some seasonality, it’s a little bit more normal than what we normally feel or what we normally experience here. You put those in, it’s a little bit choppy out there right now. We’re focused on deploying our assets to where we get the best returns.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Okay, so sounds like maybe geographically isolated, there are some pockets, but not widespread in terms of improvement sequentially. Okay, that’s super helpful. Appreciate. Okay, super helpful. And then just really quick on the Dedicated side, revenue per truck per week, I think you talked about a little disruption. Just wanted to get a sense of the drivers of the sequential decline in that number. And then I think, Mark, you noted that that probably gets better as we move. Is that a fourth quarter comment? Just want to understand some of the moving parts in revenue per truck per week and Dedicated. Yeah, Chris, part of what, when you were in the state of flux, of ramp down, a ramp up, you had just underutilized assets.
So the truck count is in the denominator, but the revenue isn’t as clean because you’re in various stages of ramp up and ramp down. It’s an inefficient period, and that really gets manifested in the revenue per truck per week. It’s not so much a pricing element as there are some elements of price, obviously in revenue per week. When we’re talking about the friction, it’s just the underutilized asset because of that gaseous state, as I call it.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: We had clear visibility to these new businesses that are ramping up. Want to make sure that we have that equipment available ready to go and just not perfect timing between when we’re taking equipment off of one operation and then moving it over to another. Expect that as we go through Q4 that we’ll have that business starting up and that’s ultimately what’s going to enable us to drive margin improvement.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Okay, very helpful. Thanks so much. Thank you.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from the line of Bruce Chan from Stifel. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Hey, good morning everybody. Maybe want to touch on your productivity improvements and especially some of the early efforts in the AI that you talked about. Certainly a lot of discussion about that this earnings season. You mentioned the $40 million cost opportunity. How much of that is assumed for this year? How much do you have budgeted for next year? Maybe just some general thoughts around how you’re thinking about the incremental opportunity from there. Especially in an upcycle. I imagine it’s a little bit more pronounced in Logistics. Maybe you’ve got some routing and utilization opportunities in Dedicated, so any color there would be great.
Darrell Campbell, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Sure. This is Darrell, so I’ll start. The $40 million is an annual target, but it includes synergies, including Cowan. In our opening remarks we talked about just the sequential improvement in margins for Cowan. That’s just the impact of the synergies coming through in the numbers. A big part of that $40 million is productivity based, as you mentioned, not just people productivity, but also asset productivity. From a people standpoint, Mark mentioned some headcount reductions that were targeted in the non-driver side. From an asset perspective, we’re tightening asset ratios as it relates to tractor to driver ratios, continue to tractor trailer to tractor ratios as well. That’s coming through also in our CapEx spend. We’re reducing on-bill miles, we’re looking at third-party spend, we’re looking at facilities. We’re on track for that $40 million.
We said previously that those costs were expected to ramp throughout the year and we’re seeing that more back half weighted savings. The savings would ramp, but we’re not done. Everything that we’re doing here is structural in nature to lower cost to serve. We’ve seen that coming through. We talked about Intermodal improving margin. We’re always looking for incremental ways to add to those savings targets. A lot of that is continuing on the asset productivity front, continuing on the people productivity front and just looking at things that are sustainable in nature going forward.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Certainly the AI, the agentic AI in particular, we think holds great promise. As we mentioned, our Logistics business and brokers generally becomes a great test bed for us to deploy new technologies. Very, very encouraged by it. We believe it’s going to be a key driver of our ability to grow our business at a much different rate than we have to grow our people to achieve that growth. We are presently deploying across multiple work streams in our business, both on support function, but our line of services that support either drivers that support customers or supports our third party carriers and ultimately just taking the work that’s less value added that we can get in a much more efficient way as opposed to deploying people resources against.
It helped us with certainly some of the numbers of the headcount performance that we’ve had this year, but we think it has great promise and we’re continuing to lean in and it’s a combination of what we’re doing in house and what we’re collaborating with others on. Okay, got it. That’s very clear. Just to follow up, any thoughts on how to quantify the tech based productivity benefit beyond the $40 million synergy target? It’s. We said double digit productivity on the people side and in some quarters it’s several fold that on very effective AI can, we’ve experienced 50% to 60% improvement. There’s a lot of leverage and operating leverage in our cost structure there and we increasingly will be looking to leverage that further. Okay, great, thank you.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Seidl from TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: Hey, thanks, Hepa. Mark, Darrell, Jim, Christyne, good morning here. Still wanted to go back, Mark, to your comments as you sort of compared this future capacity issue to back to the ELD mandate. Because you know, I think that’s probably the only really comparable event. It was a much different event, right, because you know, people were able to find workarounds with the ELD mandate that you know are still in existence to this day. Is the capacity that we’re expecting to come out, could that actually last maybe a little bit longer and give us more of an upcycle for the truckload sector? Also, are there anything that you’re starting to see in conversations with insurance companies and or clients around non-domicile drivers that could maybe accelerate this a little bit beyond the norm?
Hi Jason, Margaret, very insightful and we’re soon to be on our insurance circuit here, so might have more to discuss about that next time we get together. It’s a very logical extension of the issue relative to some of the very pronounced headline activity around this issue as it relates from a safety perspective. I think you’re right. This is not just adapting and changing. This is actually taking capacity out of the industry. Not only what’s in it, but it also stems the flow of backfill because it just changes the dynamic of the entire pool that gets associated with being a professional driver. Credentials are important. We do think safety is impacted by the quality of training, the quality of the infrastructure at a carrier. We think this is the right thing to do.
Certainly, we think it has a staying power relative to the overall capacity pool that’s available for professional truck driving.
Jim Filter, Executive Vice President and Group President of Transportation and Logistics, Schneider National Inc.: You know, maybe one more add here, Jason, was go back to the ELD mandate implementation. It was implemented and carriers were onboarding these, you know, matter of months or sometimes just weeks ahead of the requirement, and then everything was stabilized after that. This is something that’s going to play out over the next two years. Just because we get to a level of equilibrium, capacity will continue to come out. There isn’t a spot where it starts to regrow. That’s why it’s really important that we’re having our discussions with our customers. Customers are being strategic not just about what the market is right now, but through the lifetime of the allocation of that.
Mark Rourke, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schneider National Inc.: That makes sense. For my follow up question, I promise I’ll keep it at 2. Just wanted to talk about sort of the near term weakness that most companies are sort of calling out here in the marketplace because it doesn’t feel like the industrial market got that much worse. Is some of this related to the government shutdown? In that light, when you look at your food and beverage exposure, is there a potential exposure for the SNAP benefits running out to guys? Yeah, we’re not probably versed enough to understand the entire government impact here or seeing it. We have seen a trade down from our customer base relative to a big box retail, perhaps down to the discount retail, which is really a very healthy part of the segment base now and of our distribution of retail customers.
I think that possibly could be related, Jason, but again I would just caution it. I think the demand level has been relatively stable. It just hasn’t followed typical seasonal patterns. I think maybe that’s at least that’s our view. It’s the kind of the lift that you would normally see in September and quarter that. The lift that you would normally see perhaps to start peak season here in October doesn’t mean that it’s eroding. It just means it’s not growing at the kind of historic levels which we’ve been in the last couple of years, you know, quite frankly. Maybe before more supply driven, this one perhaps may be more demand driven, but I wouldn’t interpret everything to mean that it’s going, that it’s eroding. Fair enough. Appreciate the time as always, everyone. Thanks.
Christyne McGarvey, Vice President of Investor Relations, Schneider National Inc.: We have reached the end of our question and answer session, and this does conclude today’s conference call. We thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.
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