Well, good morning. This is Jordan Alliger and I'm pleased to kick off the transportation logistics portion of the Goldman Industrial Conference with Ryder's EVP and CFO, John Diez. We look forward to hearing about Ryder's ongoing plan execution that sets the company up well for long-term growth and in particular opportunities in its high return supply chain dedicated solutions business. Before we get into the Q&A, however, I believe John has some opening remarks. Yeah. Good morning. Let me give you a little bit of background on Ryder. Ryder is a $12 billion company that serves the outsourced logistics and transportation markets. We're a B2B company. We serve small and medium and large businesses alike. We're organized around three business segments. Our fleet management business provides truck leasing and rental in the U.S., and Canada. Our dedicated business. That's supporting about 250,000 commercial vehicles in the U.S., and Canada. Our dedicated business, which is not only the outsourcing of the equipment, but the equipment and the driver. We provide transportation services for a number of customers. That accounts for about 15% of the business. That's the smallest of the three segments. Our supply chain business, which provides broad-based supply chain solutions to businesses. If you think about distribution and warehouses, today we operate about 95 million sq ft, about 300 distribution centers in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. We've made a few purchases in the supply chain businesses acquisitions that have expanded our capabilities. We like to think of ourselves as a port-to-door solution now. We just purchased a company called Whiplash, which provides e-commerce solutions for the U.S. market, so we could deliver directly to people's homes as well as to storefronts as well. The company, the last 3 years, has been through a transformation phase. 3 years ago, we established our balanced growth strategy. There's 3 anchor tenants to our balanced growth strategy. One was to de-risk the model. If you think about our fleet management business, we were looking to really reduce the dependency on residual values on the backside of a lease to get the return. We reduced the pricing, the price residual values, which actually lifted pricing to the end customer. We've also been focused on improving returns and cash flow profile of the business. In that area, we've gone through a multi-year maintenance cost reduction initiative, where we've been able to hit our target of $100 million of annual maintenance cost savings from 4 years ago. We reached that target last year. We've also been able to increase the spread and the pricing profile of the lease portfolio, and right now we're about 65% through that. We think that's gonna deliver at full scale, $125 million of incremental profitability for the business. We have also looked to the third component of our balanced growth strategy to accelerate the growth in our higher returns business. That's the supply chain and dedicated business, which are asset light. We've been acquiring businesses as well as growing those businesses organically. Supply chain last year grew about 45%. Half of that came from organic growth, the other half came from acquisition. Over the last couple of years, if you look at our revenue profile for the business, supply chain and dedicated in 2018 used to be about 37% of the business. Today, it's 54% of the business. Lots of changes in the business. We've changed the business model to make it a more resilient and a business that's gonna perform through the cycle. Last year, we had a record level of performance, both on the revenue side as well as on the bottom line. We had a record year for EPS, $16.37. Our previous high was $5.95 of EPS. Significant changes in the business model, which are playing out and performing quite well today. Great. Well, thanks for that intro. Maybe kicking it off with a bigger picture question, you mentioned optimizing or maximizing returns over a cycle and free cash flow. Can you maybe talk a little bit more on what that means? Like, how are you thinking about returns, and do you mean that free cash flow will be less cyclical than prior cycles? The way we had the business set up, we were looking to grow our fleet management business. That's a business that's very capital intensive. As you grow that business, it actually, you need to draw on cash flow, and it became a negative free cash flow story for us for a number of years. We've moderated the growth in that business, and as a result, we expect that the overall business will perform with positive free cash flow in most years, and then certainly positive free cash flow over the cycle. If you look at that profile, cash flow profile, much different from a returns perspective. Jordan, if you look at the business five, six years ago, even during the best of times, it would perform at a return on equity of mid-teens. Today, we're targeting that in the bottom of the cycle. It's gonna deliver mid-teens, and then over the cycle, it should deliver high teens performance. That's reflective of the actions that I mentioned earlier. Got it. Maybe thinking a little bit more near term, you know, FMS obviously has had great margins of late. Some of that has been helped with the used truck markets. How do you think about the balance of this cycle, margin stability against the used trucks? Mm-hmm. Maybe some color on that. If you think about our fleet management business, we've given that target out there of low double digits. The business the last couple of years has been approaching 20% of EBT as a percent of operating revenue. We think that's gonna normalize, right? Last year, we did about $400 million of vehicle gains. That number will come down. We expect that business now in the softer freight environment will deliver more the low double-digit performance. The business is still performing better than ever with regards to those metrics. We do expect gains on used vehicles to continue to decline as we get through the 2023 year. Okay. on the lease business ChoiceLease, let's say. Yep. Obviously the freight markets have been slow, broadly. I mean, we've seen that in a lot of tonnage numbers that have come out this earning season. Has there been much impact on the demand for your longer term lease services? You know, right now we've got about a 9-11 month backlog on our leases. Most of the fleets that we're gonna be introducing over the next year have already been signed up for. I think if you look longer term beyond the next year, we do expect some softness. I think we're seeing customers take a little bit longer in this environment to make decisions. They may not be as confident in their business conditions to sign up for longer term leases. That may be something that will impact us when you look at 2024 and into 2025. Nevertheless, we're still seeing good activity in the marketplace, and we do expect the business to continue to grow despite those headwinds. Renewals of existing business, you'd say those generally track- Those are steady. Right. They've the renewals have been steady. We've got a good portfolio of customers. I think where we see the biggest risk on renewals is in the transport space. Mm. We serve that market, we have seen a number of bankruptcies amongst the transports, the over-the-road carriers. That's not as big a component of the portfolio of what it used to be. We've intentionally made that smaller. We will see some pressure there in the tractor space. Broad-based, we're seeing good renewal activity across the board. Okay. Then, you know, you mentioned the repricing, which has been an ongoing strategy. Mm-hmm. Is that tougher to do in this environment or not really? You know, what we saw early on was, everyone's feeling the inflationary pressures. Early on in the cycle, we also saw where labor shortages were impacting those that wanted to own their own fleets or wanted to provide their own maintenance, and that made them even more challenging. We continue to see a propensity for folks to really outsource and not be in the maintenance game. And with that, we're still able to bring compelling value to our customers. We have not seen, from a pricing point of view, a significant change in that climate. We do expect, though, as economic conditions continue to get softer, you may see where decisions are gonna be more price sensitive than what maybe we've seen over the last 3-4 years. But again, 65% of the portfolio has been repriced. We got another 20% that's been already contracted for. The majority of the portfolio now has been pre-repriced at higher returns. Is the competition generally pricing well, would you say? Yes. I think we still compete, in the local markets with various local competitors. Then on a national level, there's one other, large competitor, and we compete head-to-head, and we're not seeing anything changing there. Okay. When you think about the economy, just because everyone's trying to. Mm-hmm ...find the inflection or the bottom, is it the commercial rental that you would get the best sense for what's going on in the economy today and when things may be bottoming? Maybe talk a little bit about that part of the business. We have two businesses that are transactional in nature, one of which is the commercial rental business, the other is on the used vehicle side, and I'll speak to both. The commercial rental business supports 50,000 businesses in the U.S. and Canada, so we get a pretty good view of what's happening in the broader economic environment. That's kind of the canary in the coal mine for us. Typically, when we see softness there, then we continue to see a continuing degradation in other parts. What we saw there last year was the housing market clearly started impacting our housing sector to some degree. Even as we got through the end of last year, it was quite strong. We saw record levels of utilization for commercial rental fleet. As we stepped into the first quarter, we did see more of our seasonal drop-off, that you see from Q4 into Q1, and we expect that to continue. We are seeing softness in the freight side. Those looking for tractors, heavy Class 8 vehicles. That market has softened a bit. On the consumer staples, you're still seeing good demand. Mm-hmm. We do expect freight conditions to soften as we get deeper into the year as well. Okay. You had mentioned sort of slowing growth in FMS over time. What does that mean for your fleet plans, like, as you think about it longer term, trucks per year? However you look at it. Yeah. What we look at is the growth in our overall fleet, especially our lease fleet, which is the majority of it. We're targeting about 2,000-4,000 unit growth a year. This year, we expect the fleet to grow about 5,000-6,000 units. It's heavier growth than normal, and that's a function of, one, the OEMs have had a tough time producing vehicles, and they're just catching up, so we're starting to see some of the growth that we had signed up, a year ago come through. We do expect this year, we're gonna be able to transition some of the rental equipment, moving into lease applications and get customers into vehicles faster, than putting them in new equipment, which they're gonna have to wait 9-11 months. Typically, what we would expect is more in that 2,000-4,000 unit growth. We're gonna outperform this year. Next year, it's still early to tell, but we do expect that to be kind of the more normalized growth rate for us. To put it in perspective, back in 2018 and 2019, we were growing at 8,000-10,000 units, which was significant, which also created headwinds from a free cash flow perspective. Before we move on to the other business segments, just on the used markets, well, I guess used and new, I guess, are you getting your equipment easier, the ones that... your new equipment, if the industry itself is seeing a better flow of new trucks being delivered, does that impact the used truck markets and the inventory levels that you're seeing in that? Yeah. As the OEMs produce more trucks, that creates more used truck inventory because the replacement cycle gets accelerated. We have seen where the Class 8, the heavy-duty tractors, that flow's starting to pick up. Mm-hmm. You are seeing on the used vehicle side, tractor prices come down as more inventory gets introduced to the market. On the truck side, the straight truck side, and even trailers, you're still seeing significant tight capacity and that is, continues to be strained. We haven't seen the same levels of decline on the used vehicle side for truck pricing. They're still elevated relative to historic levels, whereas the tractor pricing on used vehicles is starting to approach historical levels. That's what we forecast and then guide it to. Right ... for the balance of the year. Okay, great. maybe flipping over to supply chain- Mm-hmm which I think is a pretty interesting part of the long-term story here. Before we talk about margins and things like that, I think one of the things people are kind of intrigued about broadly these days is the nearshoring or reshoring opportunities in Mexico. You know, with your warehouse capacity, I suspect that sort of potentially plays into your hands. I guess maybe give some of your thoughts around that and what it could mean for Ryder, and then how long will it take to start seeing the benefits of what could be an industrial renaissance here? Yep. We're really excited about the opportunities that exist today. We are seeing more and more companies looking at their supply chains and whether they're sourcing product or manufacturing from Asia and looking at Mexico as being a potential downstream for them. We've been in Mexico serving U.S., manufacturers for the last 30 years. We have a great portfolio there serving Fortune 500 companies. We do both transportation and cross-border activity to get their goods from Mexico into the U.S., market. We also do warehousing in Mexico to support U.S., consumption. That business has been a growing business for us for the last 20 years. It's about $250 million in revenue, $260 million in revenue relative to the $3 billion-plus in supply chain today. That's one that we think is gonna continue to accelerate the growth trajectory and can provide long-term value. The question that was asked around what are we seeing in the marketplace, you know, up until now, we've been getting a lot of inquiries. I think those inquiries are now becoming more real. Companies that are making decisions around where to set up their next manufacturing facility. These are large investments, usually take a little bit of time. I think we're hearing more and more, especially on the industrial manufacturing side of the space that we serve, that they're looking at setting up shop in Mexico, and the next plant they open- Mm-hmm ... will be in Mexico and closer to the consumer and here in the U.S. We are starting to see that. The industrial and the manufacturing side is where we're seeing the most of the activity there. We've heard maybe some of it could be more like this higher value manufacturing like batteries and things like that. Mm-hmm. I mean, would that be some of the early impression you're getting? I think that's some of it, but I think it's even broader than that. We are just seeing more and more folks are looking at manufacturing closer to home. With our capability, certainly, we could support those efforts for many companies, which we do that today, both in the automotive as well as in the industrial sector. Got it. Okay. I think recently you sort of reorganized some of your verticals. I don't know if that's the right word for it. Yeah. It seemed like omnichannel might be a particular focus area. Can you talk to that? Is that the area for the most potential growth, would you say? So in our supply chain business, we're organized around four verticals: automotive, consumer packaged goods, and then we introduced this omnichannel retail vertical, which is really capturing direct to consumer, direct to store delivery, which is our Ryder Last Mile of big and bulky, which primarily supports delivery of furniture, exercise equipment, just big items that we deliver to people's homes. You have e-commerce, which is the business we just acquired, which supports emerging brands in getting their product from the port. They usually source their product from Asia. With the technology stack that we have there, they could order online, and then we'll deliver straight to their customers' homes. We have a traditional retail business that does omnichannel as well, which is in support of, you know, big retailers here in the U.S., that we support and some tech companies that we also support from an omnichannel perspective. That vertical now is the largest vertical. We wanted to highlight that because of, number one, we've done a number of acquisitions in that space. Number two, it is a growing market. We do expect the e-commerce market to continue to grow at double digits. That will be a bigger part of the story as we move forward. With the acquisitions that we've made, I think it puts it under the spotlight and give people visibility to how they're performing. Since you brought up acquisitions, you have been acquisitive. Mm-hmm. Is it an ongoing tuck-in type situation, would you say, bigger type of deals, or are you content with the package now? We are gonna continue looking at bringing in companies and businesses that add capabilities. We'll look at some tuck-ins, but mostly is to add capability. We added last mile big and bulky a few years back. We added a multi-client capability in the U.S., which we didn't have, through the Midwest acquisition two years ago. We added Whiplash e-commerce. We will continue to look at other opportunities, especially in the e-commerce space. We would love to add another vertical like healthcare, so someone that supports that healthcare business. Those would be capabilities we would look to add here in the near term. Okay. When you think, again, sort of switching more to the near term, is the freight environment, has it affected your pipeline much, or do you just have so much pipeline from last year that you're ramping this year? Is the current pipeline ebbing down? Obviously, if it slows today, that may impact how 2024 starts. I'm just trying to get a sense for the ebb and flow of how it's looking. Yeah. If you look at our supply chain business, the pipeline is actually very strong. It's actually up year-over-year. Within supply chain, you've got different components. The automotive side of it is more transportation-oriented as opposed to warehousing-oriented. That pipeline is starting to come down a little bit. That space, probably you do see some of the slow freight environment impacting that. If you look at the other verticals, whether it's CPG, which is predominantly on the warehousing side, that continues to grow. If you look at our e-commerce pipelines, those continue to grow as well. We continue to see pretty good activity in those sectors. If you step outside of supply chain, in dedicated, we have seen some slowness there. I'm sure we'll get to it. The freight environment has given, you know, customers options that they could buy you know, freight, and transportation at a lower price, and that will put some pressure on the growth rate for dedicated in the near term. You know, you mentioned the warehouse side of the equation. I mean, I don't know, does that give you direct visibility to how much destocking has occurred, restocking? That seems to be kind of the big debate going on. I think we saw some destocking, late last year, especially on the retail side. The automotive sector, they're continuing to really ramp production. Mm-hmm. There's still a backlog of production that needs to happen there. We do expect automotive to continue to perform pretty well over the next, over the next year. If you step outside of that, on the industrial side, we've seen pretty good strength there. That's a growing part of our supply chain business. Even though, you know, you are hearing about destocking, the manufacturing side of things on the industrial side still continues to perform quite well. Maybe the final one on supply chain, possibly, margins. Yep. you have long-term targets across all your businesses. I think supply chain has been under a little bit of pressure. Mm-hmm. What do you need to do? Is it really a function of the pipeline translating to revenue and EBIT? Is it a function of internal things you have to do from a cost standpoint to push margin to that level you've talked about? On the supply chain side, we've provided high single digit quality of earnings, which is our earnings before tax as a percentage of revenue. We've been below that level over the last year. I will tell you, the growth is there, and the pricing for the new business is quite strong. We have been making investments to expand our e-commerce footprint and network. That is putting some pressure on the cost side as we continue to expand that network. We also did see, you know, the end of last year, softness on the last mile business. That business has actually been shrinking over the last 2 quarters as opposed to growing. That's put a little bit of pressure, but we do expect as we get deeper into the year, Jordan, as we finish out the year, we're gonna approach those high single digit numbers. With the continued growth in that business, we should be at that level going forward after that. Just turning to dedicated, I know you mentioned the pipeline might have ebbed a bit. Yep I mean, how resilient though overall? I mean, do customers come to you and say, "Hey, freight's bad. Instead of 20 trucks, we need 18 trucks for the time being." I mean, like how resilient is the business? There's always customers will always carry some flex capacity, and we support them with that, whether it's through a dedicated network or if they need capacity, we'll give them commercial rental vehicles and support with extra drivers. We do see through the cycles that when the freight and the spot market comes down, some customers, and there's, you know, the majority of our dedicated portfolio specialized transportation, where our drivers are assisting in unloading and delivering that product to their customers. There's a good portion that competes with the trucking companies and the over the road where you're just bumping docks and someone else is unloading the merchandise. That part of the business, which is, I would say, about 20% of the dedicated business, that usually comes under pressure, you do see softer volumes there. That's where we see some of the pressure there. However, if you look at the quality of earnings, the dedicated business, typically from a quality of earnings, is countercyclical in that they actually perform better during soft times because access to drivers is there. Your turnover comes down, your cost to serve comes down, then your ability to attract drivers is a lot quicker. Time to fill rates come down for us, which makes it a more productive and efficient network overall. We do expect, you know, that business will be in the mid single digits this year based on what we're seeing. As you get deeper into 2024, then the market will come back, and you should see that growth rate start coming back to the high single digits. Yeah. 'Cause I assume the demand, you know, when things are tight is when people want to. Yeah ... the capacity. Mm-hmm. Obviously people saw what happened the last couple of years. I imagine after this downturn, the expectation would be the supply chain security will become front and center again for this business. That's correct. That's correct. Right. There's more than enough capacity right now, and obviously people are gonna take advantage of the spot rate market and figure out a cheaper way of doing certain things. After service and capacity, as you mentioned, becomes the top of mind for everyone, for every shipper. Got it. We have a few minutes left. I don't know if anyone from the audience has a question. If not, I had a couple questions. Yeah. If you don't mind. I think we have a mic maybe coming right behind you. Thank you. This was really helpful presentation. A couple of things. You talked about cycle, the new to used. How long is the cycle? The cycles typically run 12 to 18 months. We start seeing a turn, that will continue through the end of the year, without a doubt, on the used vehicle side, and probably into the first quarter of next year, and it could get extended an extra quarter or so. That's helpful. Then do you see a conversion into electric at all? Do you see some of the kind of sustainability pressures and practices on the C-suite if you have long-term contracts that some percentage of that's gonna say you need we need to see some of that? Yeah, no, we look, we see that you've got the pressures of government, especially in California, they've got mandates and things that they're targeting. That's gonna push companies to look at it. We have a number of companies that are looking at electric. We're there to support them. We like to be able to support them on the transition to electric long term. We just introduced a new product, which is a bundled product, primarily in the light duty space. Where we see electrification really being introduced here in the near term will be in the lighter duty. A panel van that's often used by the e-commerce folks to deliver their product. We see the economics there play out, and you have better parity on the economics. I think on the heavier duty and Class A tractors or even a medium duty truck, that's going to be a little bit longer term. The infrastructure is probably a big hurdle that most people won't talk to, but that would probably be the biggest inhibitor to transition to electric over time. The panel vans use the same charging network that passenger vehicles use. I think that will get accelerated, and it'll be the first. When you get into the medium duty and heavy duty, the infrastructure is a lot different than passenger vehicles, and that will require significant investment. Thank you. Yep. There's a question up front. Thank you very much. Thanks for doing this, John. Sure. Couple questions on dedicated. For the mid-single digit growth that you're targeting for this year, is most of that CPI pricing that you have built into contracts? We started catching the tail, I would say, in Q1 and second quarter. Half the growth in Q1 was predominantly pricing. We still saw single digits of volume growth and just growth from the last year. That pricing uplift will come down in Q2, then in Q3, Q4, you're gonna see less of it. Awesome. Just as far as the pipeline softness, are you seeing that in any specific verticals or size of fleet or anything that you can kind of dimensionalize for us? Yeah, it's the smaller fleets. We have seen the number of large deals stay fairly consistent year-over-year on dedicated. The smaller deals, when you're looking at a 20-truck fleet or a 10-truck fleet, those have come down. Those are folks that are clearly looking at their own businesses and seeing what's gonna happen here in the next 12 months. I think they're holding back on making any decisions with their businesses in the near term. Great. Well, I think we've run out of time. Thank you for the audience participation. It's much appreciated. I've been told to remind people, right, lunch will be delivered if you have a meeting right after this. I did not forget. John, thank you so much. Yep. Thank you for coming to tell us about Ryder. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Yep. I thought I was gonna forget. Good job. You remembered somehow. Careful here.