Conference Transcript - RXO 2026-02-19

Operator

For our last session of the conference, we have RxO with us, which we're thrilled to have you guys. I actually think it's, from my perspective, it's actually worked out great because you guys have such a broad, deep view of the trucking market that I think it will be a nice way for us to bring together a lot of the concepts that we've heard. So we have Jared Weisfeld, Chief Strategy Officer, and Kevin Sterling, who is a market strategist. What did you? Jack of all trades. Exactly. Kevin wears a lot of hats within RxL. So thank you both for joining us. Thrilled to have you. Maybe let's start on just the broader demand environment. There's been a lot of confusion, certainly a lot of optimism, I think it's fair to say, right, that the supply side is tightening a bit. At the same time, some questions around demand. And even this morning, we heard Walmart come out with an outlook that I think is a little bit tepid on the consumer. Just help us square that, because, again, you guys have a really broad view of the U.S. freight landscape.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

Absolutely, and thanks for having us, Ari. Glad to close us out here. So from an overall market environment standpoint, from a freight perspective, it's really been a tale of two cities where when you think about just the intersection of supply versus demand. On the demand side, hit that one first, because I think that's in some ways a little bit more straightforward. It's been a soft demand environment for a while now. We've been in a freight recession for three and a half years. You have goods versus services mix has been very low, actually at 15-year lows, a lot of questions on consumer confidence and the impact associated from Liberation Day, given tariffs and the impact of high inflation. So we've been dealing with a muted soft freight environment from a demand standpoint for quite some time. And to your point, I think there are certainly reasons for some cautious optimism out there. We had the highest ISM reading two weeks ago that we've had in four years with the new order component flashing at 57. I'd like to see a few more of those. That's generally a very good leading indicator for the freight economy. You've had consumer confidence over the last couple of weeks start to bounce back. You've got some optimism in terms of potential stimulus ahead of the midterms. And you've got benefits associated from the one big beautiful bill as it relates to both bonus depreciation and tax refunds. And if there's any type of stimulus associated with housing, given the impact that has on the freight economy, those are all reasons to be optimistic and I think very different from the last few years. On the supply side, I think that's where it gets really interesting, because if you look at the freight economy as a whole, industry-wide tender rejection six months ago, we're sitting at mid-single-digit percentage. As of this morning, they're at 14% in the middle of February. February is the softest freight market of the year. Demand remains soft, yet tender rejections have more than doubled. And why is that? We've had enforcement occur based on new policies and regulations from government as it relates to non-domiciled CDLs, English language proficiency, that have really taken out a significant amount of supply. So you think about, I think, the words we used on the earnings call a few weeks ago was the fragile state of the market from a supply demand perspective, where any incremental demand could really go ahead and move the overall market balance just given how much capacity has come out.

Operator

So that's a really good setup, and there's a lot to talk about in there. Let's start just kind of continue to push on the demand side. You gave an outlook for volume to be down 5% to 10% year over year in first quarter. Is that a reflection of that demand weakness or at least the demand uncertainty? How should we think about the opportunity to kind of outperform that number? How much of that is a reflection of the broader macro versus things that are kind of unique to RxO?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

So that's pretty consistent in terms of the underlying trends that we saw in the fourth quarter. In the fourth quarter, overall volume was down 4%. And to your point, Q1 Outlook calls for volume to be down 5% to 10%. But if you unpack that a little bit in terms of the brokerage business, truckload volume in Q4 was down 12% year over year, our Q1 outlook calls for a very similar decline in terms of low double digit year on year. So really similar trends on most of the business on the truckload side. The real big difference from the Q4 to Q1 decel really is just tougher comps in LTL. In Q4, LTL was up 31% year over year. We onboarded a lot of business in Q1 of 25, and we're facing those tougher comps in Q1. So we are going to be, we talked about up about mid single digit percent year on year on LTL. So it really is just the tougher comps that yield that down 5 to 10. But the second part of your question is why we're really excited in terms of specific to RxO. We talked about, if you look at RxO over the last 10, 15 years, we've always outgrown the truckload market in terms of brokerage is taking share from the asset-based carriers and RxO is taking share within brokerage. When you look at the strength of our late-stage sales pipeline within brokerage, with the integration of Coyote materially complete and behind us. We are in growth mode, and that late-stage sales pipeline is up more than 50% year over year. And that's what really gives us confidence to start to resume our outperformance versus the broader market as early as the middle of the year.

Operator

So I really want to dig into that kind of longer-term outlook, but let's stay on Q1 just for a little longer. The Q1 outlook calls for adjusted EBITDA in the range of $5 to $12 million. dollars. Give us some context for how we should think about that. To what extent is that reflecting some of the pressures? Especially, I think, one of the things that I think is starting to be well understood, but in the early cycle of an inflection, when tender rejections start to go up, obviously, it tends to squeeze broker margins. Talk about how significant that is and what's baked into that $5 to $12 million EBITDA projection.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

To your point, that's how the business model works. So in some cases, it's largely mechanical. If you think about how the unit economics of our brokerage business work, we've got, for most of our business, contracts with our customers. Contract, as a percentage of our business on the truckload side, is 72% of our business in Q4. So we've got 12-month contracts with our customers, and we procure transportation on the spot market. And what we saw, based on the enforcement actions that I was just talking about, late Q4, you saw a supply shock and you saw spot rates from November to December, industry-wide, move up by 15%. That's the largest move we've seen in industry-wide buy rates from November to December in 16 years. So when you have that kind of supply shock and a business that is largely contractual, brokerage risk margins get squeezed. And unlike typical cycles, there was no demand component to help relieve that, where when you get squeezed historically, there are spot loads to help offset that squeeze. We didn't have that. So what you see and reflected in the Q1 outlook of $5 to $12 million of adjusted EBITDA, not only do you have a typical sequential decline from Q4 to Q1, but you're really talking about those tighter market conditions persisting for the entire quarter that materialized late in Q4. Got it.

Operator

So let me follow that with maybe a little bit of a tough question, but just a realistic question as we look at the environment where supply is being squeezed, that puts pressure on your purchase transportation costs. At the same time, the demand seems a little more uncertain. How does that flow through and how does that not create kind of a challenging operating environment that could extend then beyond Q1? Should we be worried about that? And then within that, Talk about kind of what's the process for resetting contract rates higher, what's the timing for that, and how much of an offset can that add to some of these pressures?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

So obviously, I can't control, we can't control when demand is going to return. But this kind of plays back into what we were talking about earlier and why we're so excited. Irrespective of the market backdrop, we are in growth mode and we are growing our pipeline in a pretty large way, being up more than 50% year on year. So this is a late stage pipeline, all incremental growth, new growth with existing customers, new growth with new customers, and that is up more than 50% year on year. So could the software demand environment persist throughout Q2 and all those reasons for optimism that we just talked about not come to fruition? Sure. But if you think about what is within our own destiny in terms of the pipeline that we've built now that we are back in growth mode and where we have that line of sight to resuming truckload outperformance, that's a lot of opportunity to capitalize on. And what we're also seeing in this environment, which I think is a huge opportunity for a large-scale broker like RxO, and Kevin can certainly chime in on this as well, we're seeing customers continue to consolidate the amount of carriers that they're working with, especially in light of the new regulatory environment where you have to go ahead and make sure that you as a shipper are dealing with highly qualified carriers that have access to significant capacity.

Kevin Sterling, Analyst — Market Strategist, RxO

Yeah. And Ari, think about it too. What's happening with the government regulations and the changes to supply, it's leveling the playing field for large brokers like us. And so there's probably 17,000, 18,000 brokers in North America. A lot of them are small and a lot of them may have relied on this fringe capacity, if you will. Well, us as a publicly traded company dealing with Fortune 500 companies, we can't. We've got to make sure we have a very strict compliance and vetting process. You know, so we're, you know, we're, we're using high quality carriers already. And so what the government is doing, taking up some of this fringe capacity, it could hurt some of these smaller brokers who may have relied on that. And now we're all for because it levels the playing field, so to speak. Does that make sense?

Operator

It absolutely makes sense. And I definitely want to dig into that point about industry consolidation. But let me ask about the pipeline first. It's up 50%, you mentioned. More than 50%. More than 50%. So that's a big number, right? What is driving that number? Is that you guys proactively going out and pursuing business? Is that customers saying, hey, I'm kind of de-emphasizing the smaller brokers that I've maybe relied on in the down cycle? How should we think about kind of what's driving that number and then what it implies for kind of earnings and top line as well, as we kind of move through the year?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

It's both of those. And it's also shippers who wanted to, in some cases, maybe just, let's see how the integration went. And we're 12 months out, more than 12 months out in terms of the completion of Coyote. Service levels have been great. We've finished the integration materially in terms of technology and pricing and people and operations. And the service levels are there. So customers are awarding us new business. Existing customers are awarding us new business. New logos are coming into the pipeline. So we talked about, you know, 12, 18 months ago, one of the largest opportunities for one RxO post-Coyote was to go ahead and take that existing book of Coyote business, stabilize it, and then grow. And when you look at just how large the four-hire truckload market is, and to be fair, it did certainly take us a little bit longer than we expected to stabilize the legacy Coyote volume. But we've seen that stabilization now for the last couple quarters. Truckload volume for the combined company, Q2 versus Q3 was sequentially. Q3 to Q4 was up sequentially. It'll be down seasonally into the first quarter off of that stabilized base. But then we look forward to Q2 and the rest of the year in terms of that commentary that I gave on being able to resume outperformance versus the broader market. And then you start deconstructing that pipeline. It's largely led by full truckload. And there's not one customer that composes a disproportionate percentage of it. So it's very broad based. And it's new logos, it's existing logos, it's really encouraging to see. And just the level of interactivity and connectivity with our customers is quite strong. So going back to your earlier point, because I think this was part of your first question or your prior question, building off of that Q1 base, how do we sort of build from there, right? So Q1 is typically our slowest quarter of the year. It's our lowest from a percent contribution standpoint with respect to full-year EBITDA historically from Q1 into Q2. Every line of business is seasonally stronger from a volume standpoint. Managed transportation will have better automotive volumes, and that business has stabilized. We've talked about that. We've talked about last miles. Strongest quarter of the year is typically the second quarter. Brokerage, we're going to have all of those new awards that we talked about in terms of onboarding combined with positive seasonality from Q1 to Q2. So we've got some, I think, pretty strong momentum hitting from Q1 to Q2. The one thing we can't control, obviously, is broader industry-wide demand and how to think about when that returns and the impact that'll have on gross profit per load.

Operator

How should we think about the incremental profit opportunity or what the margin profile looks like or kind of however you want to frame it on those new business wins versus the existing book of business?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

Sure. So the way we think about pricing is we price in line with market and we go ahead and procure transportation more effectively to go ahead and deliver a great solution for our customer and strong contribution margins for RxO. And the way that manifests itself is for every dollar of incremental gross profit that comes into the P&L within the brokerage business, it can be anywhere from, you know, call it 50% to 80% plus incremental margins, depending on whether or not there's headcount associated with respect to the addition of that type of growth. So the incrementals are quite strong on a business that right now is doing low single-digit percent EBITDA, right? So the leveraging clearly has been hard on the way down, but when you start to think about the cycle potentially turning and think about what the re-leveraging of that P&L looks like based on how strong the contribution margins are, right, it doesn't take much to move the needle when you're dealing with a business that's at low single-digit EBITDA margins right now.

Operator

So let's dig deeper on that. With the understanding that there's still a lot of uncertainty out there on the macro demand, what is the normal seasonal step up look like? You mentioned first quarter is usually kind of the weakest quarter of the year. What is the normal seasonal step up look like from first quarter to second quarter? How should we think about kind of longer term if the cycle inflection is real? And weigh in on like how real or what's your level of confidence on like the cycle turn being real this time? Because I know we've had a lot of head fakes in that regard.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

I'll take the second part first. And if anyone's coming up here with any level of confidence on this being real, I mean, you know, I think I left my Magic 8 ball at home and my Crystal ball at home. I don't know, right? What I do know is we can just look at the facts. Spot rates are up from $1.55 to $1.90 on XFuel in terms of line haul. Tender rejections are sitting at 14%. Load-to-truck ratio this morning was approaching 10. These are all positive cyclical indicators that a year ago were materially lower. So all the freight KPIs flashing in the right direction, but we're still in a soft demand environment. So, you know, I would sort of flip back to the question in terms of, you know, what do I need to see to have confidence that it is real? I want to see improved demand. I want to see another two readings of industrial ISM above 50. I want to see improved consumer confidence, improved trade clarity, restocking on behalf of retailers, improved automotive demand, and improved housing sector. You start seeing that, then I think the confidence will be there that there's a true demand recovery. On the first part of your question, I've certainly come to appreciate over the last couple of years, there's no such thing as seasonality in this business, because you're going to be, or we are going to be at subject of what's going on in the overall freight economy. But what I can certainly tell you, just to help frame cyclicality and how fast this business can move. I mean, we've had years where one quarter could be mid-single-digit percentage of total year EBITDA, right? So I'm going to refrain from giving typical seasonality from Q1 to Q2. Certainly, it's up, the magnitude of which is going to be a function of the broader demand environment. But depending on how steep the demand curve looks like, you could have a very sharp recovery to the point where on a full-year basis, one quarter can be just mid-single-digit percentage of the full year.

Kevin Sterling, Analyst — Market Strategist, RxO

And Ari, let's take it a little bit step further, kind of talking about the cycle dynamics and what we're seeing on the supply side, it's probably going to be a permanent reduction in supply. The supply is not going to come back. So if you think about 2017 when the ELD probably took out about 4% to 5% of industry capacity, 18% was a phenomenal freight year, great freight year, great freight year, great stocks. But then what we did know, we know now a lot of capacity came flooding back in the market and killed it. But if you kind of look at cycles of the past, 04, 05, 06, that was a three-year cycle. Cycles 20 years ago used to last three and four years. Truckers would tell me all the time, in the mid-90s, cycles would last three and four years. There would always be a supply response, but it would be more gradual. I think whenever this cycle does turn, we may get back to cycle of yesteryear when you could see a multi-year cycle because supply will come back in, but it'll come back in a more rational pace, not like it did in 18 where it just flooded the market. That's exciting too, I think, looking forward.

Operator

Yeah, the supply contraction feels real, right? That doesn't seem like it's referring. I think it's more of a demand question. So let's talk about some of those different scenarios, right? If supply constricts, but demand remains kind of soft, what are the implications there for RxO in terms of, you know, if you want to talk about an EBITDA standpoint or an EPS or free cash flow standpoint, and then in a slightly more favorable environment where ISM continues to flow through at kind of, you know, let's say low 50s, mid 50s, what could that imply for RxO? And what are kind of the metrics that investors should be looking for, right? Like with the understanding it's been a challenging down cycle. You've had a lot of obstacles with, or maybe obstacles is not the fair term, but there's been a lot of uncertainty over the last 12 to 18 months, right? And we've seen it put a lot of pressure on earnings relative to what I think people were hoping for. Where could that go in an upcycle under those different scenarios?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

So on the first scenario where supply remains tight and there's no improvement in demand, that's going to squeeze our brokerage gross margins and you're not going to have enough spots to offset. But what we will have is certainly some of the self-help associated with the new books of business that we're onboarding, given the pipeline strength that I talked to you about. So I think that's a really important point. We're not just sitting here waiting for the cycle to turn. It's like a really bad strategy, right? The playbook is it's a $400 billion for hire truckload market. We're the number three player and still the share that we have is so small relative to the most, to the rest of the market, we can add value to our customers every single day. There's a huge opportunity to grab profitable market share and do so within a soft market, especially given some of the dynamics that I talked to you about earlier, where shippers are looking to consolidate the amount of brokers that they use. So I think that's a significant tailwind for us, even if it's a softer demand environment, but no doubt about it, if that's the broader backdrop that we're talking about, that'll be, you know, pressure on gross margins. And the question is then how much incremental business can you bring on to help offset? The second scenario is certainly an easier one to get your arms around because it's basically the current environment, but then you start to see an increase in volumes from here. And then you start to see spot volumes increase as a percentage of the mix and provide relief in terms of the overall profitability in the business. You asked the question of this one or the prior one in terms of just the renewals and the contract rates. And I think that's a really important point We talked about, on the earnings call, contract rates being up low to mid-single digits year on year, 2026 versus 2025. And that'll be staggered, as you can imagine. The pricing conversations that we're having now versus 60 days ago are clearly more inflationary, just given how strong the market has been from just an overall freight KPI standpoint. And what's fascinating to watch is we're sitting here third week in February, the effects of winter storm fern are behind us, and all the weather are behind us, and tender rejections are moving lower. And in some regions of the country, you'll see tender rejections anywhere between 20% and 30%. These are levels that we haven't seen since 2021 and 2022, which further reinforces the notion that so much capacity has come out. So I do think that when you start to think about the overall contract pricing to the book of business, that'll help provide relief on the contract gross margin per load. But then from there, the question becomes, does the market tighten? And if it tightens, how do we think about bringing on the spots?

Operator

So we've seen the largest broker in the industry kind of posting mid-single-digit EBITDA margins. Do you think that's a feasible target or kind of in and up cycle? Is that something that we could realistically expect from RxO and talk about the process of getting there? Yep.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

That was the last part of your question. That's right. So no doubt about it, They've been executing well, so hats off to them for sure. I think it's also important to think about various mixed differences between RxO and other brokerages in the industry, where some brokerages can have 50%, 60%, 70% of their volume in LTL, which runs at higher percent gross margins, highly automated. You can ramp up productivity very nicely. We love the LTL business. It's grown significantly for us, but it's still only about a quarter of our brokerage So I think there's a huge opportunity to grow that business. When you think about RxO long-term, as the broker that is the third largest in North America, there is no reason mid-cycle, we're not talking about at least 5% to 6% type EBITDA margins. And when you start thinking about normalized earnings, it's not just taking current revenue levels and putting a 5% to 6% EBITDA margin on the business. I think you need to back up and think about how we are below trend line for volume. We're below trend line from an industry from a volume standpoint. Goods versus services is sitting at 15-year lows. Gross profit per load for RxO in the month of December on the truckload side was 30% below our five-year average. So revert all of that to the mean. And then you take a, God forbid, Kevin's right, and you talk about a multi-year upcycle. And then you give credit to the $155 million of cost outs that we've taken out of the business over the last three years post-spin from XPO, there's a lot of operating leverage in the business.

Operator

Can we put some more specific numbers on that? And again, I understand it's not like a 2026 target or even a 27 target, but what should we think of as the mid-cycle earnings potential of the business?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

We haven't refreshed a dollar figure in terms of EBITDA level in terms of what mid-cycle can be. Hopefully it gave you some of the inputs in terms of how we think about for the business, but, you know, goes without saying that we're talking about a level of profitability, you know, from an EBITDA standpoint that is multiples of where we are right now. So there's a lot of leverage in the model. And then the free cash flow aspect of the story is where I think we get quite excited because whether or not we're doing 200 million of EBITDA or doing $600 million of EBITDA, when you think about the cash outflow that we have as a business, that $30 million of interest expense, and $50 million of CapEx. That $50 million of CapEx will certainly move a little bit higher as the business grows, but not materially. So the ability to generate significant free cash flow, especially if it's a multi-year cycle and you're in quote-unquote normalized earnings for a longer period of time, can be quite significant to the enterprise.

Operator

Fair. So I can respect that. And I'll put numbers on it. So is there anything structurally, I guess, that keeps RxO from being able to achieve kind of a mid-single digit EBITDA margin kind of in more normalized trucking environment? And in terms of the free cash flow impact, then it sounds like, given the numbers you just gave, Jared, we're talking about $100 million plus of free cash flow in that environment that seems very reasonable to expect.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

So on the first part of your question, I would take the opposite perspective in terms of what can we do in terms of leveraging technology and operating efficiencies to go ahead and make sure that mid-cycle, when we are operating as efficiently as we can, we can be doing north of 5% EBITDA margins. I think there's opportunity to structurally improve the profitability of this business, leveraging technology, leveraging AI, and doing it in a more efficient way that I think is a long-term tailwind for EBIT and EBITDA margins in terms of the math that you were doing on free cash flow. I mean, if the math works out such that the only cash outflows that we have are, you know, 50 million of CapEx and 30 million of interest, you know, the free cash flow generation can be quite powerful. The only thing to keep in mind is that, you know, during an upturn, we are an initial user of working capital as the business grows. And then as the balance sheet shrinks during a downturn, you have a release of working capital. So you do get that one-time use and the one-time release. But through cycle, you know, it's pretty powerful in terms of the free cash flow generation of the business.

Kevin Sterling, Analyst — Market Strategist, RxO

Or we talk about even a free cash flow conversion of 40% to 60%.

Operator

Okay. So use that as your guide. And that's a pretty reasonable number to think of as kind of a mid-cycle number that doesn't change with kind of where we are in the cycle.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

Look at 2025, we did a 43% adjusted free cash flow in 2025, despite these levels of profitability. So when you start thinking about the business getting to the point where we're doing multiples of what we're doing from an EBITDA standpoint for cash flow generation, to Kevin's point, is quite hot.

Kevin Sterling, Analyst — Market Strategist, RxO

And then, just to piggyback on all this, Jared, you're talking about us growing our LTL business, growing our SMB business. That's going to make, over future cycles, it's going to make our business less cyclical, too.

Operator

So that's a great point, Kevin. That's one of the things I wanted to talk about. So the LTL business, you grew that 31% year over year in fourth quarter. I understand maybe there was some kind of idiosyncratic RxR-specific things there, but we saw, again, one of your big public competitors also growing LTL volumes in excess of truckload volumes. Can you talk about the different dynamics between those two segments? Obviously, you know, the truckload market is much larger, but is there actually in some ways more opportunity on the LTL side from a profitability standpoint? or how should we think about kind of how those two markets differ and how RxO would like to be positioned between truckload and LTL?

Kevin Sterling, Analyst — Market Strategist, RxO

Well, I think so. I think LTL is going to be a very nice growth story for us for many years to come. If you look at some of the large public LTL carriers, who are some of their larger customers? It's a 3PL, 4PL. And so we aggregate a lot of smaller LTL shipments, but really our growth, it's an RxO story. And so how that story goes is we do such a good job with our large truckload customers and maybe a small part of what they do is LTL. So let's assume you take a large customer where 90% of their business is TL, 10% is LTL. Well, guess where they spend 90% of their time? It's LTL. LTL pricing, it's like the eighth one in the world. You know, you got to deal with damage claims. It's just very difficult. And they come to us and be like, Jared, please help me take this headache off my plate. We do it for them. It's a fully automated transaction and so we make their life easier they can focus on their core which is truckload you know where and take really save them a lot of time and so that business will continue to grow as we grow our truckload base you'll see us continue to grow that ltl base that's where it stems from and um and you know we're very excited about it because to jared's point it's it's higher gross margin it's less cyclical it's just a stable business and you know, we probably use 50 to 60 different LTL carriers. We use a lot of smaller regional carriers. They provide fantastic service. And so we can go to our customers and probably get better pricing than they could on their own. But main thing is we're taking, we're solving a big problem for them taking a headache off their plate.

Operator

That's really helpful, Kevin. Thank you for that. Let's talk about industry structure a little bit. You had mentioned the long tail of smaller brokers. For years, I think people who have been following the industry have been talking about there's going to be consolidation in the industry. At the same time, and we've heard this actually from a number of the asset-based guys who we've spoken with over the course of the week, they say, well, things like cargo theft, things like certainty of delivery, partnering with an asset-based carrier. Some shippers right now are kind of shifting their business more towards wanting to partner with asset-based carriers. I don't know if you guys would agree with that or not, but how do you think about both in the near-term and kind of over a longer-term multi-year horizon, what the kind of consolidation in the industry might look like?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

I can start, and Kevin, if you want to come up from the top, I would say that we fundamentally believe that this is a winner's take most market-type structure. The top nine players post the acquisition of Coyote represent about half the market. You saw some more M&A activity in the space over the last couple of weeks with larger players acquiring more larger players, continuing to scale up. So I do think that, you know, the advantages of scale in terms of decreasing your cost to serve, being able to offer services and solutions to your shippers that small to medium brokers can't is pretty beneficial. And I think you're going to continue to see further consolidation in the space organically and inorganically, where you'll see further M&A and you'll see smaller, medium brokers that just can't compete and can't invest go away. And to Kevin's earlier point, when you think about some of the brokers that are out there that were leveraging some of this non-domiciled CDL capacity and shadow capacity, those business models now completely go away based on new regulations. So I think that'll help clean up the industry structure when we think about just who the winners are longer term. In terms of your other question, in terms of shippers, you know, thinking about leveraging assets more versus 3PLs, you know, typically you'll see, depending on where you are in the cycle, shifts from brokers to assets and vice versa. But if you look over the long term, brokerage penetration was at 5% 20 years ago. That 20% now, industry projections have that going to mid to high 20% in the next five years. Within longer term, there's probably headroom up to 40% because the reality is we as RSO, given our scale, can offer the same services, if not more, than a lot of the asset-based carriers. But we do it with more flexibility, given access to effectively infinite capacity.

Kevin Sterling, Analyst — Market Strategist, RxO

And think about this, just to build on that, you know, dreaming of when the market turns, we can all dream, you know, so when the market turns, an asset-based carrier, they're going to struggle with capacity because they're just not going to have any more drivers. There's kind of a seal in there, right, because they're going to have a hard time just getting more drivers, whereas a large brokerage like us with access to 120,000 carriers over a million power units, you know, if a shipper needs 50 trucks next week in Miami, we can be there with 50 trucks. Where an asset-based carrier might say, hey, we've only got 10 in the area. So that's when you're going to see, particularly when the market turns and things get chaotic, and we love chaos and volatility, that's when we shot it. We'll be there. We're going to solve, once again, solve those problems for that shipper.

Operator

I don't think there's anything more polarizing in the transport world right now than talking about tech and AI and its role in brokerage. We saved that for the end. We've still got a couple of minutes. We can drag this out. Was there news in the space? Yeah, there's a little bit of news. Give me your take on that. Obviously, we saw a lot of noise last week around that. I think most people have kind of come to the conclusion it was probably an overreaction. But kind of taking a step back, right, it does seem like there's a lot of disruption underway. How is RxO positioned? So I guess really kind of two parts. What have you been able to achieve through AI? What's still left to go? And then how do you see that kind of playing out in a broader sense? It seems like that is one of the major drivers of consolidation in the industry. But even among the large players, there seems to be some differentiation between who might be the winners and who might be the losers or who might be the laggards in that sense. Give us a sense of where RxO is positioned there and kind of for people who are invested in RxO, how do they get comfortable with that risk and that RxO can be a winner in environment.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

I think the fundamental question that you're asking is, how do we think about the potential disintermediation risk associated with our AI and how does it impact the business? And the reality is that this business is fundamentally built on relationships and service. Our top 20 customers have been with us for 16 years on average. They trust us to make sure that we are servicing their freight throughout all market cycles. And that is something that we take extremely seriously. At the end of the day, you think about the moats that we have around the business. We're operating a two-sided network across our carrier community and our shippers. And how do we think about enabling that service, thinking about all of the solutions and services that we provide to be incrementally more sticky to that shipper, whether it's modal conversion between TL and LTL and intermodal, whether it's leveraging managed transportation sale, whether it's leveraging last mile, middle mile, whether it's customs brokerage, whether it's warehousing, domestic services. There's so much that we offer and the stickiness of that relationship is so important. So I think that's critical to just understand at the core of our business, it's relationships, it's trust, it's service, and it's proprietary data. And then you think about how we go ahead and leverage all of that with aggressive investing in technology. We are a tech-enabled organization. We've said that from day one since our spin, we are not a tech company. We are a tech-enabled company. So taking those services that we offer, the relationships that we have, the trust that we've built, and then applying the $100 million a year that we spend on technology across the four pillars that we talk about between volume, margin, productivity, and service, and doing so not just through typical technology investment, but through transformational AI capabilities. That goes back to the earlier comment that I made when we think about long-term earnings power and the ability to actually add upside to longer-term margins because we're investing so heavily in technology, that's where things get really excited. So you think about some of the capabilities that we're deploying across the organization from a generative AI standpoint, from an agentic AI standpoint. This business is all about incremental margins. So when we think about last 12 months' productivity being up 19%, productivity defined as loads per person per day within our brokerage business, on a two-year stack up almost 40 percent? How can we decouple headcount growth from volume growth over the long term so we can add 20, 30, 40 percent of volume for the network with adding a far less rate from a headcount standpoint and having those incremental margins drop for the P&L from an EBITDA standpoint? That's where the math is very powerful. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of flavor in terms of how we think about things. Do you want to add anything? No, I think it sums it up well. So it sounds like the technology is really important, but you see the role of relationships still being kind of paramount within the industry? A hundred percent. This industry has built on a relationship. Everyone in the organization, at least at RxO, we sell. We build relationships with all of our top customers because our customers have such complex needs. It's not transactional. I think that's another key point. This is not a transactional sale. That's not what we're looking for. We're looking to build long-term, holistic, deep relationships with our customers so we can make sure that we're delivering service and solutions throughout all market cycles. And you think that's durable five, 10 years out? Not only do I think it's durable, I think that AI is going to help in terms of the competitive moat with respect to the top players of the industry. When we talk about that long tail of brokerages going away and the large brokers that are remaining leveraging their proprietary data in a way that could help from a profitability standpoint, that could help from a sourcing a capacity standpoint. I mean, the application of that data can be so powerful. So I think it's absolutely durable in terms of how we think about it.

Kevin Sterling, Analyst — Market Strategist, RxO

I just think about when the market turns, you know, and things do get chaotic and crazy. Shippers are going to want that salesperson, they know they can call 24 hours a day, text 24 hours a day. You know, they're going to just give them reassurance.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

And it's one other thing to mention on that point, because I think it's sometimes forgotten. When you think about AI risk and you think about digital brokerage risk, what I saw last week reminds me a little bit of 10 years ago where digital brokers are going to go ahead and disintermediate the industry. And we've obviously seen what's happened over the last decade. And that only reinforces our view that the way we think about the business long term is the right way. And it's being proven out time and time again that this is the through cycle economics work because this is all about relationships and service. But one other thing to keep in mind, and this ties directly into the regulatory environment that we're in with respect to sourcing and capacity. You start up a brokerage and you try and go ahead and envision in a world where it's purely digital. You start onboarding carriers purely digitally, and you think about not really knowing who you're doing business with on the other side. You talked about theft and fraud. I mean, that's something we take incredibly seriously at RxO. So you got to be, you can't go ahead and join RxO as a new carrier and book your first load digitally. We want to know who we're doing business with. I think that's a really, really important fact where if you think about anyone that's trying to create a digital brokerage, et cetera, and they're just onboarding from a digital perspective, especially in light of the current regulations, you really know necessarily which carriers you're actually working with.

Operator

We only have a couple of minutes left. I want to make sure we hit on this. You recently restructured your revolving credit facility. Give us some color on to why that was done and kind of what's enabled by doing that.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

Sure. So we went ahead and we replaced our existing unsecured revolver with our new secured ABL revolver. So went ahead and which are securitized by the receivables of the company. Reality is it just increases the flexibility of our capital structure throughout all market cycles. So we're going to go ahead and with this new structure, we're going to save about 35 basis points from an interest expense perspective relative to the prior structure. And then importantly, when we think about the prior unsecured revolver, they had maintenance covenants. It had maintenance covenants such as our leverage covenant ratio and our interest coverage ratio. Those no longer exist. So the availability actually under the new ABL is almost 2x that of the prior unsecured revolver, whereby we have full access to the $450 million ABL, whereas prior under the revolver, we had lower access because of those covenants. So we're really excited in terms of what that provides in terms of increment for liquidity and flexibility for the company.

Operator

That's helpful to understand. So we don't have a ton of time left. Jared, Kevin, I want to give you guys an opportunity to give some thoughts that bring this all together, how you're thinking about the opportunity going forward at RxO. What are you most excited about? And maybe it would be helpful, and I apologize because it's on my list of questions that I wanted to get to, but we just didn't have time. The last mile business, the managed trans business, those seem to have a lot of momentum. How does that weave into the kind of broader RxO story?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

Yeah, we didn't even get to the complementary services. So to boil it down as a takeaway, when you think about how RxO is positioned into 2026 and for the long term, I think it's really exciting right now. When you think about the fact that the Coyote integration is materially done, and the operations, the technology, the pricing, it's all on one system, and we are looking at a market opportunity that is $400 billion in terms of its size with us as the number three player. we're entering in 2026 with renewed momentum. We are all about growth, profitable growth. That's what we've been doing for the last 15 years. But now we've got the pipeline to support that heading into 26 with pipeline up more than 50% year on year within brokerage. I think that provides us a ton of momentum in terms of new business wins. We're operating more efficiently. We've taken out over $155 million of costs. So we're going to go ahead and have significant operating leverage, managed transportation within complementary services. We onboarded more than $300 million of freight under management last year, and the automotive business has stabilized and is no longer a headwind. And in Last Mile, while we're dealing with a soft environment from a big and bulky perspective, we continue to take share, and there are significant opportunities within Last Mile in particular to go ahead and just improve the profitability as we think about leveraging the hub network more effectively across the organization. So, you know, we then combine that with, you know, a new ABL facility and a refinanced capital structure. We just refinanced our notes last week. I think we are set up to win for 2026 and beyond.

Kevin Sterling, Analyst — Market Strategist, RxO

And I would just wrap up by, you know, the integration of Coyote is largely complete. We're going to market as one RxO ready for the turn.

Operator

Just if I could ask or squeeze one more question in there. So just as we think about some of the pressures that you're facing on, again, that margin squeeze that could happen, And are we really looking at, you know, I think Jared, you'd said kind of tail of two halves, like, are we looking at like a second half that looks materially better than first half? And then does that does that create runway into 2027? Is that what we should really be like excited about? Is that is that kind of from an investment standpoint, what we should be focused on as analysts, as people observing the company?

Jared Weisfeld, Other

What you should be focused on from an investment standpoint is the normalized earnings power for this business is materially higher from current levels. and we've got enormous tailwinds based on the pipeline, based on our operating structure and how we think about growing this business. And when we think about the business, we think about it long-term. We don't think about it quarter to quarter. We don't think about it from, I mean, we'll obviously think about it, but when we think about how we're running the business and what we're striving for in terms of long-term goals and how our top investors think about it, they think about it through cycle, normalized earnings power. And from that standpoint, you think about the ability for this then to potentially be a multi-year cycle to the extent that that supply high capacities coming out. I think there are a lot of exciting opportunities ahead for RxO.

Operator

That's wonderful. Well, we're certainly excited to see what the upcycle brings, and not just for RxO, but for a lot of our companies, we think there's a lot of excitement around what the potential could look like there. So, Jared, Kevin, thank you both for joining us, and I'm thrilled to have you as always.

Jared Weisfeld, Other

Thank you. Appreciate it.