Welcome to the XPO Fourth Quarter 2025 earnings conference call and webcast. My name is Shamali, and I will be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you have a question, please dial star 1 on your telephone keypad. Please limit yourself to one question when you come up in the queue. If you have additional questions, you're welcome to get back in the queue, and we'll take as many as we can. Please note that this conference is being recorded. Before the call begins, let me read a brief statement on behalf of the company regarding forward-looking statements and the use of non-GAAP financial measures. During this call, the company will be making certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, which by their nature involves a number of risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statement. A discussion of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially is contained in the company's SEC filings as well as in its earnings release. The forelicking statements in the company's earnings release or made on this call are made only as of today, and the company has no obligation to update any of these forelicking statements except to the extent required by law. During this call, the company also may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined under applicable SEC rules. Reconciliations of such non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures are contained in the company's earnings release and the related financial tables or on its website. You can find a copy of the company's earnings release, which contains additional important information regarding forelicking statements and non-GAAP financial measures in the investment section on the company's website. I will now turn the call over to XBO's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mario Herrick. Mr. Herrick, you may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm here with Kyle Wismans, our Chief Financial Officer, and Ali Fagri, our Chief Strategy Officer. This morning, we reported another quarter of strong execution to close out the year. Company-wide, we delivered fourth-quarter adjusted EBITDA of $312 million and adjusted diluted EPS of $0.88. cents excluding real estate gains in both periods adjusted evita increased 11 percent and adjusted ebs increased 18 percent year-over-year in north american stl we generated adjusted operating income of 181 million dollars which was up 14 from the prior year and we improved our adjusted operating ratio by 180 basis points significantly outperforming normal seasonality we've now expanded our LTL margin by 590 basis points since 2022 which marked the start of one of the most prolonged trade downturns in history this speaks to the resilience of our strategy and it will continue to serve us well this year and in the long term regardless of the cycle the key components of our strategy are fully within our control and i'll start with our most important level customer service in 2025 we reduce damages and improve service quality to new company records reflecting our focus on providing a superior customer experience we're achieving this by balancing our network more precisely reducing the number of freight re-handles and implementing tighter operating processes at the service center level And critically, our stronger service performance is translating directly to better commercial outcomes. As a result, we've been able to earn higher prices and gain market share by providing consistent, world-class service. When we make ongoing investments in the business, we're strengthening the connection between service quality and value creation. For example, we've deliberately invested in the network ahead of the up cycle to create more than 30% excess door capacity. This has given us the flexibility to operate more efficiently in the current environment and we're positioned to respond quickly in a recovery. On the equipment side, our average tractor age at year end was 3.7 years, giving us one of the youngest fleets in the industry. This improves reliability and safety while reducing our maintenance cost per mile to the lowest level in our history. From a labor standpoint, we're staff to support any near-term increases in demand while maintaining our high service levels. Combined with lower employee turnover and the national scale of our driver training schools, we're well positioned to flex labor efficiently as volume grows. Each component of our capacity has a role in making sure we realize significant upside from our operating leverage when demand recovers. Next is pricing, which has a direct correlation to margin performance. Throughout 2025, we saw customers place more value on our service, as reflected in the pricing gains we earn. For the full year, we grew yield-excluding fuel by 6%. It was also the third consecutive year that we improved revenue per shipment for every quarter. In addition, the expansion we're driving with local customers and premium services is contributing to our above-market pricing growth. These revenue streams come with higher margins, and we see long runways for both as core parts of our business. Another highlight of 2025 that contributed to margin was our improved cost efficiency. this was underpinned by productivity gains and a lower reliance on purchase transportation productivity improved roughly one and a half points for the year with the ramp in the second half from our latest technology rollouts these are proprietary applications that use ai for planning freight flow management and network operations importantly we've completed a successful pilot of our AI-driven route optimization tools for pickup and delivery. And now we're expanding this internally developed technology to nearly half of our service centers this quarter. We expect this to further reduce overall miles and improve stops per hour across a cost category of nearly $900 million. And on purchase transportation, we exited the year with the lowest level of outsourced miles in our company's history at 5.1% of total miles. This has given us greater control over service quality and a more flexible cost structure. These cost efficiencies will scale with volume, and we expect the benefits to margin to grow over time. To sum it up, we've entered 2026 from a position of strength, following a year of significant progress and outperformance. While we're pleased to have reported above-market results for another four quarters, we have multiple drivers to improve our MTL operating ratio well into the 70s in the years to come, as a substantial expansion of our operating margin. Number one is pricing, when we see a double-digit opportunity to surpass the market and pricing grows over time by continuing to enhance service quality and revenue mix. Another key is our investment in capacity ahead of the cycle. We've built excess capacity across our network, positioning us for profitable share gains and operating leverage as demand recovers. And we have a long runway to improve cost efficiency and productivity through network applications of AI at scale. These are all high-impact initiatives that are already driving results. Importantly, our progress will be amplified by the billions of dollars of cumulative free cash flow we expect to generate in the coming years starting with a meaningful acceleration in 2026. This will fund an increase in share repurchases and debt reduction to further compound our earnings growth. With that I'll turn it over to Kyle to walk through the financials. Kyle over to you.

Thank you Mario and good morning everyone. I'll walk through the fourth quarter financial results followed by our balance sheet liquidity and capital allocation. For the total company revenue increased five percent year-over-year to two billion dollars revenue in our LTL segment was 1.2 billion dollars up 1% from last year and their increase in yield more than offset the decrease in volume turning to cost we continue to make progress in key areas that relate directly to margin on a year-over-year basis our salary wage and benefits expense decreased 1% or 7 million dollars driven by strong productivity gains and our purchase transportation expense decreased 46 percent or 20 million dollars as we continue to insource line-haul miles and optimize the network this is a structural cost reduction that will help support stronger incremental margins as truckload rates rise when the freight market recovers depreciation expense increased 11 percent or nine million dollars reflecting our ongoing investments in equipment and capacity to support long-term growth. Moving to profitability, total adjusted EBITDA was $312 million for the quarter with $285 million generated by our LTL segment. Excluding gains on real estate transactions, adjusted EBITDA increased year-over-year by 11%, both for the company as a whole and for the LTL segment. In Europe, adjusted EBITDA was $32 million, while corporate adjusted EBITDA was a loss of four million dollars total company four was 143 million dollars net income was 59 million dollars and diluted earnings per share was 50 cents net income includes 14 million dollars of gains on real estate and equipment as well as 33 million dollars of restructuring expense this was primarily from previously granted equity awards related to the transition in board leadership on an adjusted basis diluted EPS was 88 cents excluding 8 cents per share of real estate gains in the fourth quarter of 2025 and 21 cents per share in the fourth quarter of 2024, adjusted EPS increased 18%. Turning to cash flow in CapEx, we generated $226 million of cash flow from operating activities in the quarter and deployed $84 million of net capital expenditures. We ended the quarter with $310 million of cash on hand after repurchasing $65 million of common stock and paying down $65 million on our term loan facility. Combined with available capacity under our committed borrowing facility, total liquidity at year-end was $910 million. Net leverage ratio at year-end was 2.4 times trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA for 2025, down from 2.5 times for 2024, and significantly lower than the three times we reported for 2023. As we look ahead, we expect to meaningfully increase free cash flow generation this year and over the years to come. This will enable us to accelerate share repurchases while also continuing to strengthen the balance sheet through debt paydown. Before I close, I'll summarize this year's planning assumptions to help you with your For 2026, we expect total company gross capital expenditures of $500 to $600 million, interest expense of $205 to $215 million, pension income of approximately $14 million, an adjusted effective tax rate of 24 to 25%, and a diluted share count of approximately 118 million shares. These assumptions are included in our latest investor presentation. And with that, I'll turn it over to Ali to cover the operating results.

I'll begin with our LTL operating performance, where we continue to execute well and expand margins despite the challenging freight environment. On a year-over-year basis, our shipments per day declined 1.6%, and weight per shipment was down 3%, resulting in a 4.5% decrease in tonnage per day. These trends reflect ongoing softness in the industrial sector, but importantly, we're continuing to take share in the most attractive parts of the market. We're growing our business with more profitable local customers and by expanding our premium service offerings. Local shipments now represent approximately 25% of revenue, up from 20% just a few years ago, while premium services are now about 12% of revenue, up from less than 10% previously. These are deliberate shifts in our mix that will make increasing contributions to volume, price, and margin performance. Looking at the quarter month by month compared with the prior year, October tonnage was down 3.8%, November was down 5.4%, and December was down 4.5%. On shipments per day, October was down 1.4%, November was down 2.2%, and December was down 1%. In January, however, we saw an improvement. Our January tonnage was roughly flat year-over-year, which outperformed normal seasonality. We saw this positive trend, even with the impact of the major winter storm at the end of the month, which we estimate had about a three-point impact on tonnage. Turning to pricing, our yield performance in the fourth quarter continued to be strong, increasing 5.2% year-over-year, excluding fuel. Both yield and revenue per shipment improved from the third quarter, and revenue per shipment has now increased sequentially for the 12th consecutive quarter we're gaining price due value delivered supported by strong service quality continued growth in the local channel and our premium offerings moving to profitability our fourth quarter adjusted operating ratio and ltl improved by 180 basis points from the prior year accelerating from the third quarter and significantly outperforming normal seasonal patterns we're driving this margin expansion through a combination of pricing, cost initiatives, and productivity improvements enabled by our proprietary technology. Even in a soft-demand environment, these structural advantages are allowing us to outperform our peers and keep elevating that performance over time. Turning to our European business, our results continue to trend favorably. On a year-over-year basis, revenue increased 11%, supported by our eighth consecutive quarter of revenue growth in Europe on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA increased 19% year over year, and performance tracked better than normal seasonality relative to the third quarter. To wrap up, our fourth quarter performance highlights the strength of our strategy. We're managing through a soft freight market while continuing to improve mix, deliver consistent pricing gains, and expand margins. We're also making targeted investments in the network to generate high returns over time, and our proprietary technology is leveraging AI for cost and productivity improvements. Together, these capabilities position us to outperform in the current environment and accelerate results as demand recovers. With that, we'll take your questions. Operator, please open the line for Q&A.

We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing these star keys. Again, please limit yourself to one question when you come up in the queue. If you have any additional questions, you're welcome to get back in the queue, and we'll take as many as we can. One moment, please, while we pull for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Ken Hexter with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, Greg, good morning. So I guess you mentioned Ali there at the end, X-Storm, it sounds like tonnage would have been up about 3%, and you're outperforming seasonality. Given the thoughts on ISM, maybe your initial thoughts on how significant we can see this outperformance versus your normal trends. Talk about what your normal trends are for first quarter for both revenues and OR and what you think that indicates for the year if you keep this seasonal outperformance.

Hey Ken, this is Mario. So when you look at January for us, tonnage was flat on a year-on-year basis, and shipments were up by about the point for the month. And when you look at that on a relative basis compared to December, that was a couple of points better than normal sequential seasonality from December into January. And this was after December being roughly about a couple of points also better than seasonality relative to November as well. Now, as you mentioned and Ali mentioned earlier, we did see an impact from the winter storm, but we do estimate that to be three points for the full month. So that outperformance would have been even higher versus seasonal trends. Now, what's driving that, we are seeing both from a demand perspective a bit more strength, especially on the industrial side in the month of January. But a lot of it was the company-specific initiatives that we have been driving in terms of gaining market share and higher margin and accretive business. from one perspective, we continue to grow in our local account segment or the small to medium-sized businesses that we are growing. Through the course of 2025, we added about 10,000 of these customers to our book of business. And similarly, we are growing in new verticals that in the past we were not growing in. Examples are grocery consolidation, where through the back half of last year we nearly tripled shipments in that segment of business. And we're also growing in areas like healthcare, where we onboarded a few large customers in that space as well, that are very service-sensitive, and obviously they're seeing all the great progress that we are making there as well. So it's a combination of underlying strength and market share gains in more segments of the business is what we're seeing here. In terms of our outlook, if you look at typical seasonality for us from the fourth quarter to the first quarter, If you look over the long term, we typically see OR deteriorate by about 50 basis points sequentially. And we do expect overall outcome and cost efficiency in AI and obviously the volume environment here being a bit.

Thank you, Mario.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Scott Group with Wolf Research. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, thanks. Good morning. So, Mario, helpful caller on Q1. I know, you know, last year you gave some thoughts about how to think about full year margin improvement. I'm wondering if you have similar thoughts this year on the LTL side. And then maybe if you can just give us an update on where we are on the local penetration and where you think that can go. Thank you.

Thank you, Scott. Scott. First of all, for the full year, we do expect another strong year for both margin improvement and earnings growth in 2026. Starting with OR, we'd expect our OR to be in the 100 to 150 basis points of improvement for the full year, which, Scott, would be an acceleration relative to what we saw last year. And that's without a meaningful macro recovery. So this is assuming that, again, we're not going to see the market pick up, although we're obviously with ISM earlier this week, if that strength continues, that would change the outcome. So if we do see the macro recover, we would expect to drive upside through to our results. And the primary drivers for that is that we do expect another year of above market yield growth driven by all the initiatives that we are driving in that arena. And similarly, we also expect another strong year in cost efficiencies, and that's driven by our AI initiatives. I mentioned earlier that we are in the process now of launching our new internally developed AI route optimization technology for pickup and delivery, and we expect to roll out half our network here in quarter. So as these build momentum through the course of the year, we do expect more cost efficiencies as well. And a lot of these are still early innings. On the volume side, it's still tough to predict. Again, there are good signals here, good signs as we kick off the year, but we'll see how this kind of progresses from here. In terms of local accounts, so last year we've added approximately 10,000 new local accounts to our book of business. If you recall, Scott, initially when we started targeting that segment of business over the years to come, as you can see.

Appreciate it. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Fadi Shamoon with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. Good morning. Mario, I wanted to go back to the comment that you made about the cost efficiency. I think you said 1.5 points of productivity gain, I think it was last year. And you talked about technology and AI optimization and some of the things you're implementing affecting 900 million cost base. I just wanted to kind of dive into what kind of productivity target, like we want to think about cost savings opportunity as we go into 2026, what does this envelope look like? And just one clarification on the prior couple of questions, discussion. It seems like you're attributing a lot of the kind of January improvement or your volume performance to the uh xpo initiatives that you are doing and not necessarily to any meaningful uh improvement in the end market or in the in the uh in the demand environment we saw one of your peers talk a little bit more favorably about the demand and talked a little bit more favorably about the progress and the weight of shipment which we didn't see in your numbers and i'm just wondering if there's if there's a more clarification you can provide on that. Thanks.

Yes, so Paddy, when you look, I'll start with a second question and then come back to AI and cost efficiency. On the volume side, we did see both. So when you look at our outperformers in January, it was a component where if you take a step back, in December centers like retail store rollouts through the course of December, that also helped our results outperform sequential seasonality from november into december and then the outperformance in january was a combination of both from one perspective demand environment for the industrial economy but it's still overall early inning study so if you look at the ism when new orders were at 57 the ism itself was at 52 these are very strong numbers we are still not seeing that level of ism performance materialized in the underlying demand. However, the industrial demand in the month of January has strengthened of the performance of the ISM and the industrial complex. Beyond that, we were able to drive all of these initiatives, which we have been working on through the course of all of 2025 and prior to be able to continue to onboard highly profitable business to the overall mix. I think that performance was driven by a combination of both company-specific, but also early signs of life in the industrial economy, which is very positive. In terms of your first question on technology and AI, we are very excited about the opportunity ahead of us. And if you look at last year and over the last few years, last year specifically, we were able to improve productivity by about a point and a half for the full year. And that was driven by our tech initiatives. And that accelerated of the year to above two points of productivity improvements. Now, when you look at 26 and beyond, there are multiple levers where we are using AI to improve our cost structure. The first one is around line haul and line haul efficiency. We've discussed this in the past, where for every point of improvement in line haul, we get approximately $16 million of profits for the full year. Now, for every point of P&D efficiency improvement, it's now slightly higher than what we discussed in the past, about $900 million worth of cost. And this is where we piloted our new technology across 12 service centers in our network last quarter in the rollout here in 2026. It's $9 million to the bottom line per year. Then on the dark side, for every point, it's about $4 million of improvement per year. So this kind of gives you the magnitude of impact. Now, in terms of our expectation, what we currently expect is a low single-digit improvement in productivity as well. But based on what we're seeing with these initiatives and what the run rates we're exiting at last year, there is a case where the upside could be all the way up to mid-single digit. But we're still early innings at this point, and we'll see how these start compounding over time as we launch those capabilities. And, of course, we're using AI in pricing and in supporting our sales force as well. So we have multiple other initiatives to continue to improve our operating performance through technology as well.

Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Chappelle with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Thank you. Good morning. Mario or Ali, on the revenue for shipment side, 12 to three quarters is sequential improvement, which is obviously really good. It feels like the year-over-year rate of change is starting to decelerate. Now we're down to 3% in 4Q. Can you help us think about what you're assuming for 26? And also, is that a commentary, maybe that slowing rate of change on now that you've reached 12% accessorials, it's maybe a little bit harder to get incremental accessorial impact? Or is that more indicative of maybe a pricing environment that doesn't have the same momentum as it may have had last year?

Sure, John. This is Ali. So we expect a strong year from a pricing improvement standpoint here in 2026. For revenue per shipment specifically, we'd expect revenue per shipment to be up somewhere in that mid-single-digit range, similar to our expectation for overall yield growth. From a weight per shipment standpoint, we'd expect weight per shipment to be roughly slattish on a year-over-year basis. So that's going to help drive an improving trend year-over-year for our revenue per shipment here in 2026. The other way you can think about it, John, is you mentioned the 12 consecutive quarters that we've improved revenue per shipment through the fourth quarter. We expect that trend to continue here through 2026, so we expect to continue to grow revenue for shipment sequentially each quarter as we move through the year, and that's going to be driven by all of the initiatives that we're executing on the pricing side. In particular, there's a lot of runway for us on local customers. Mario Tapp talked about it earlier in terms of getting those local customers up to 30% of our overall book of business, and a similar trend on premium services. A few years ago, we were about 10% of our book of business was premium services. We're at 12% currently, however, we see a path to 15-plus percent over time. So there's a long runway there for us to continue to expand our offering and continue to drive that above market yield growth and pricing growth here in 2026 and beyond.

Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jordan Allager with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, hi, thanks. I'm just sort of curious. You know, obviously, you guys are doing a good job from an XPO perspective. I'm thinking, though, out over the next several years or a couple years, if we do, if some of these demand indicators do wind up becoming more fulsome and we get an inflection across the LTL industry, Can you talk a little bit about overall LTL industry capacity relative to what sort of price or yield reaction would occur if the industry itself went from down volumes to positive volumes? And again, in the context of overall industry capacity, thanks.

Yeah, well, if you look at overall industry capacity, it has been relatively flat over the last decade. And while there were a few carriers besides us who have added capacity, others have been also reducing MTL footprints. And you also coupled that with the bankruptcy of Tielo a few years ago. You tend to see that capacity has gone down quite a bit. Now, in terms of how much has it gone down by, if you compare pre-COVID, so 2019, to where we are today on overall service center count, the industry is down 11 points over that period. And on door count, it's down six points. If you compare it to pre-COVID, to post-COVID, to where we are, I mean pre-Yellow to post-Yellow, so if you go 2022 to 2025, both service center count and door counts are down six points. You compare that to what volume has done over the same period. Keep in mind, we have been in for three years with all public and private. If what we're seeing here in the ISM continues to gain steam, which at some point it would, And usually the ISM will continue to decline, and you see the ISM start to pick up again to the private carriers and the public carriers. So the private carriers are currently more strapped on capacity than the public carriers. And obviously, in our case, we have more than 30% excess door capacity to be able to suffer whenever that recovery comes. So it's very fair to assume that when you start seeing the watermark of overall demand go up, And as capacity starts to dry up, you're going to see more and more customers go to the carriers that do have that capacity. And naturally, you will see the pricing dynamic of the overall industry continue to raise on average. And as Ali mentioned earlier on, we have multiple initiatives to catch up with our investing last year, where we see a double-digit opportunity of incremental pricing growth just to catch up to those pricing levers through the three levers that we mentioned earlier on. So it would be not only positive for the tonnage environment, but definitely very positive for the yield of pricing and value.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Stephanie Moore with Jeffries. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, good morning. Thank you. I guess I appreciate the color so far for January and your thoughts for the quarter. But, you know, clearly you guys have invested quite a bit through Network 2.0 and the like. So maybe as we think about what your incremental margins could look like in an upcycle, that might be helpful because clearly I don't think looking at historical results would be probably that relevant given the investments that have been made over the last several years. So any help you can give us, Mario, on incremental margins would be appreciated.

Hey, Stephanie. So, if you think about incremental margins, you know, we'd expect to be comfortably above 40%. And if you think about the contributors to that, the biggest is yield. So, we were talking about that earlier. But if you think about yield, it's going to have really strong flow from the bottom line. And we're going to have a lot of our initiatives really just coming through to fruition now. So, you think about local shipments continue to grow, as Mario mentioned. You think about accessorios continue to grow. That's really going to help us drive really strong incrementals from a yield perspective. And then if you think about where we are from a demand and a capacity standpoint, as Mario just talked about, we're in a great position to continue to deliver. If you think about the structural improvements we've made, not only in the count of service centers and our tractors and trailers, but also reductions in structural costs. So, again, we've been able to really improve our third-party line haul spend, get that down to 5%. And you think about the AI initiatives that continue to help us drive more productivity, both from a P&D standpoint as well as on the dock, we're in a great position to not only capture more of that revenue, but also do it with a high amount of productivity. So from our standpoint, we should be easily in the 40% range when you think about incremental margins in an upcycle.

Thanks, Kyle. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Chris Weatherby with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Yay. Good morning, guys. Maybe one quick clarification question, Mario. You talked about the assumptions for the operating ratio in 2026, and you noted no macro improvements. You want to get a sense of what the actual tonnage, sort of underlying tonnage assumption is in the 100 to 150 OR for 26, and then maybe zooming out a little bit and thinking about capex and cash flow. And so, you know, given the capacity that you have, you noted the tractor age is on the lower side, you know, maintenance per mile is low as well. How do you think about that going forward? And then as you balance that kind of cash out relative to returns to shareholders, how do you think about that?

Hey, Chris, it's all we have. I'll answer the first part, then pass it over to Kyle. In terms of the tonnage assumptions, if you just roll forward normal seasonality from January, that would put full-year tonnage roughly flattish year over year, and that would be supportive of that 100 to 150 basis points of OR improvement that we expect for the year. Now, to the extent that you see that above-seasonal volume performance that we've seen the last couple of months continue through the rest of the year, there would be meaningful upside to that OR outlook that we've talked about. So, ultimately, it depends how volume trends through the rest of the year, but overall, we expect a strong year of margin improvement with or without a macro recovery.

And then, Chris, if you think about CapEx, so when you think about CapEx for last year, we spent about, on the LTL business, about 12.4% of revenue on CapEx. And if you think about what we'll do this year, that's going to moderate a couple points. So, we're obviously lapping a year of CineKid network expansion, seeing what the service has been brought online. In addition, we had a lot of fleet additions that brought our third-party line haul down to 5.1%. So, if you think about this year, that number will come down probably more towards the midpoint of our long-term guided range, the 8% to 12%. What that's going to do for us from an overall free cash flow standpoint, it's really going to increase our free cash flow. So, if you think about 26% for us from a free cash flow standpoint, we should be up north to 50% yearly. And that's going to be a combination of both lower CapEx spend as well as a continued improvement from an income base, as Mario talked about with OR improvement. So when you think about what that can do for us, that's going to give us a lot of flexibility going into this year to do really two things. So not only will we be able to continue the effort on buying back shares, the last year we repurchased about $125 million in shares. That will accelerate as a free cash flow continues. But then we're also going to have the flexibility to help continue to pursue our long-term target being one to two times leverage. We repay about $115 million a term loan fee this year. Again, that will accelerate as well. So we're going to have a lot of cash this year, and that's going to give us a lot of flexibility moving forward, it's to find the highest return for our shareholders from that cash.

Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line, Rita Harnay with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks, operator. Yeah, one quick clarification for me and then a general question. But the clarification is the outlook for the quarter, Q1, to achieve margin expansion sequentially. What are you baking in as the assumption for tonnage? Do we expect this, you know, better than seasonal list that we saw in January to continue for the rest of the quarter? Are you assuming more like seasonal trends for, you know, February and March? And then, you know, the bigger picture question, Mario, you know, in the past, I believe you suggested that in the next up cycle, price is going to lead. Just wanted to get an update on that. You know, if you have this double digit, I think you said 30% excess capacity on a door level, why wouldn't you, you know, improve pricing consistently with what you've been doing, but have sort of volumes lead in driving revenue growth to effectively soak up that excess capacity, drive strong incrementals, which you guys are speaking about. And then that 30%, if you can translate that for us in terms of, you know, what that means in terms of how many shipments you can absorb, how many more shipments you can take on, I should say, without further investment in real estate, or maybe how much you can do without taking on more trailers and people, that would be helpful.

Sure, Richard. We all start on Q1, then pass it to Mario. So for Q1, from a tonnage perspective, if you just roll forward normal seasonality off of January through the rest of the quarter, that would imply full-quarter tonnage being flattish on a year-over-year basis. And keep in mind, that does also factor in the tougher comps through the rest of the quarter. And that's really what's underpinning the OR outlook that we talked about in terms of outperforming normal seasonality and also improving OR sequentially from Q4 to Q1. Ultimately, it is still early in the quarter. March does have the largest impact on the quarter as a whole, so ultimately that will be the biggest swing factor and probably a better indicator of whether this better-than-seasonal volume performance we've seen here in January is sustainable.

And, Risha, when you look at the overall pricing and in the context of an upcycle, so generally in our business and our industry, it's a capacity-constrained industry. So obviously for the last three years, we have been in a depressed industrial demand environment, which made the industry have enough capacity for the volume that we are seeing. But when that volume in the industrial economy starts recovering, you won't have enough capacity. And when you think about NLTL network, profitability and margin generally comes from yield, comes from pricing in terms of how we think about it. So naturally, typically in a down cycle, you tend to see the industry be up low single digit on pricing. In a good cycle, you would see it in the mid-single digit. And whenever you are in an off cycle, you could tend to see that being in that mid-to-high single-digit type increases in pricing. Now, given that we have initiatives to be able to bridge the gap from us, from where we are today, to where our best-in-class sphere, we have a double-digit pricing opportunity to go capture, and that's when you normalize our shipment characteristics in terms of weight for shipment and length of haul compared to our best-in-class sphere. So I would go through the initiatives we just mentioned, whether it's premium services, whether it's small to medium-sized customers, whether it's continue to get a more profitable mix of business. We're going to be driving those pieces to get a few points above market pricing to all of these components on top of the industry's pricing going up. Now, in terms of our ability to gain more tonnage, obviously, in an upcycle, we will also gain more tonnage. But we generally, we would want to get more price because that's going to have a higher flow through to the bottom line as well. Now, when you look at the volume side and how much we can handle, so typically in an LTL network, you need approximately in the mid-teens excess capacity to be able to handle the up and down cycles related with beginning of month versus end of month type volume fluctuations. Or what the Monday would do versus the Friday would do. Or what beginning of the quarter versus end of the quarter would do. So that fluctuation, typically you need about 15 points or so of excess door capacity so you can handle those up and down. So we see anywhere between the mid-team to the low 20% range of incremental volume we can get with our current door capacity. And beyond that, we would be expanding further and adding more physical capacity. Now, there are also other forms of capacity like rolling stock and obviously people as well. And on the rolling stock side, we feel that we are in a great, great position. Over the last three, four years, we have added more than 19,000 new traders to our fleet, and we have added more than 6,000 new trucks to our fleet, giving us today one of the youngest fleets in LTL. Our average fleet age is 3.7 years as we exited the year. So we're feeling great about being able to capitalize on that, and importantly, to be there for our customers when that upcycle starts, to be able to move that freight and provide great service for them along the way.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Tom Wadewitz with UBS. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, good morning, and congratulations on the momentum in the business. I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about underlying inflation. It sounds like you got some pretty helpful productivity opportunities related to the tech and AI initiatives. Odie had their call yesterday, Tech, and I kind of talked about higher inflation, I think five to five and a half percent, so maybe a bit higher versus 25. So maybe a thought on how you see underlying inflation. And then when you weave in productivity, does your kind of do you get maybe more overall cost benefit and into the margin in 25 or excuse me, in 26 or just how do we look at those different pieces together?

Yes, if you think about it in the long term, so we do think cost per shipment is going to be up somewhere in the low single digit range. And the way to think about that, so for us, quarter wage inflation is in that 3% to 4% range. And then on top of that, we see higher benefit costs of maybe a point or two. But as you imply, I mean, we can try to offset that with our productivity initiative. So from an AI standpoint, that's going to help us, you know, whether it's line haul, pickup, delivery, or dock, drive further improvements there. And then I think from a labor standpoint, just more broadly, in the fourth quarter, we delivered two points of labor productivity. We expect that to continue. So if you think about on a net basis, once you account for that productivity, we would expect our cost per shipment to be in that low single-digit range, despite having that core wage inflation and higher increase for benefit costs.

So do you think underlying inflation is much different from last year or kind of similar?

I think it's going to be similar. So if you think about wage inflation, it's going to be similar. I think what we're seeing, and I think others in the broad space are seeing, is some of the benefit costs, insurance costs are a bit higher this year than prior. But I think on a net basis, you're going to be pretty similar on a cost per shipment.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Ozenbeck with J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I just want to see if you can give a little bit more color on two areas of the market. First would be just the, what's called, the vertical or industry expansion into things like grocery and health care. What's the rate of change you expect in 26? and does that fall under the premium services or something else? And then just given the move in spot truckload market and worries about capacity getting a little bit tighter, have you started to see any truckload spillover to any sort of degree? I know it's not necessarily a big part of your business, but I'm curious to see if that's starting to happen.

Thanks, Ryan. Well, first starting with grocery, we see that as being a large market that we're going to continue to ramp in. We estimate the size of that market, Ryan, to be in the $1 billion market size range, and it does come with very good margins. Now, today, it's a small part of our business as we continue to grow our market share in it, and predominantly, there are two carriers that manage the majority of grocery consolidation business in the industry, and we're starting to make now more and more inroads into that part of the business. We have achieved preferred carrier status now with a number of large grocers, and we have nearly 200 incremental customers in our pipeline that we want to go after but if you look at it again today we are in the low single digit percentage of total industry size of the billion dollars worth of grocery and our goal is to continue to grow through that 2026 and beyond as we continue to gain market share now in terms of what that's it is a premium service from the perspective that you do get the base charges for the actual prey but then there's a service on top of that which is your consolidation service that you are offering to the grocers the way that business works is once you achieve preferred area status with a large grocer and we have a lot of these smaller companies that are shipping into the grocer and we consolidate that freight at a destination terminal before we actually do a trailer drop to that particular grocer where they can optimize their own docs by not having to deal with multiple shipments coming in through the course through the course of the day as a as an example so this has the benefit both on the overall volume size and then it's a given its charge through an accessorium mechanism as well. Some of that will come back to LTL. But we've always thought that this is a small number. When you look at direct conversions between heavy shipments that are, call it 14, 15, 16,000 pounds, this is where it's usually sub-1% of an LTL network. So we see some of that would be coming back to LTL with heavier weight of shipment as truckload rates go up. The second component is typically customers who are using a transportation management system, they can optimize multiple LTL shipments into truckload, granted if the service requirements can be met. We estimate that when truckload rates are lower, you see a bit more of that conversion, but we only estimate that to be a couple of points. So when you look at it on a full numbers basis, we estimate somewhere in the low to mid-single digit range of tonnage that has gone to truckload would be coming back to the industry. Now, with LTL, two to three points of industry volume, that's a decent amount that we would expect to come back into LTL whenever truckload rates start recovering. But one last thing, Brian, I would say, and that's more of a – that will help us with higher incremental margins in the next up cycle, is the fact that we have reduced our reliance meaningfully on purchase transportation. So you can imagine as truckload rates eventually recover by 20-30%, that's going to be a much lower headwind on our P&L because only mid-single digits of our line haul miles at this point are outsourced. And we're planning on taking that number even further down here in 2026, which would further isolate our P&L from any truckload rate increases through the course of the year of 27.

All right. Thanks, Mario. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Cicido with TD Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks, operator. Mario and team, good morning, guys. You know, I think a lot of questions have been sort of directed or dancing around sort of a longer-term outlook. You know, the last time you gave an update, it was from 21 to 27, and you looked at an OR improvement of at least 600 basis points, and you're tracking quite nicely to that. You know, given sort of hopefully an industrial recovery and, you know, a greater push into sort of your premium as well as your local services, how do you see sort of the next couple of years in terms of your OR improvement? You just had Old Dominion come out and not give a date around it, but talked about sort of a longer term sub-70 OR. So I was wondering where you think XPOs, North American targets, could sit?

Well, overall, on the long term, if you compare us to our investing class fear, I mean, we have all the levers to be able to get there from an OR perspective. It's just going to take time as we continue to execute. And as you said, Jason, in what was over the last three years the historic trade recession, we were able to improve our operating margin by nearly 600 basis points, while the rest of the industry took a meaningful step backwards on overall margin performance. So when you look at that, we do expect our award over the years to eventually get into the low 70s from an overall margin perspective. And it's all the levers we have discussed in the past. From one perspective, we still have a double-digit pricing differential between us and the best-in-class tier. Through the three levers that we mentioned, a better service product over a longer period of time has led to some of that outperformance. And our goal is to effectively get an incremental point per year on that over the years to come to continue to bridge the gap. On the accessorial side, when we started our plan three, four years ago, we were at 9% to 10% of our revenue was accessorial revenue. We're up to 12% now, and our goal is to get to 15%. So that's an incremental point per year over the next three, four years. And then on the small to medium-sized customers, when we started our plan, 20% of the book was effectively those kind of customers, and our goal is to get that to 30%, and we're halfway through. So we have another two to three years to be able to bridge that gap. So these are the kind of levers on the yield side. When you look at the cost efficiency side, we have been able to improve effectiveness across our network quite a bit, a combination of technology and AI, as well as the investments in capacity. By having larger service centers, we can operate our network more effectively. And we are assuming in our plans a low single-digit productivity improvement per year. But when you look at what AI is doing these days, I mean, there's more upside there as well. Then you couple that with, as the volume environment recovers and our ability to take market share in some of these new verticals like healthcare or grocery consolidation, that's going to further give us incremental tonnage as well. So if you add all these things up, if we, and again, we will see whether these are early signs of an upcycle or not. It's very tough to call the cycle. But without the cycle, we've been able to improve margin and have a long runway of margin improvement. And obviously, if we have help from the cycle, that's only going to accelerate our plans. and eventually we want to get our order went into the 70s.

And eventually, such to your comments on what AI can do to your productivity measures, I mean, how meaningful do you think that could be? Could it sort of double your expected productivity gains?

Well, overall, as we roll them up, still in our expectation, because every time you roll out a new technology solution, you know, you have certain targets, but then as you roll it out and you keep on doing changes to it and you train the AI further And as it learns from the actual changes and the real freight that's seeing in the network, it keeps on evolving. And our current expectation, it's a point and a half. Back of half of last year, we had gotten to above two points of productivity. And some of these early solutions could have more upside, as I mentioned earlier on. But we'll see how these kind of get pulled out. We take them a step at a time and we keep on investing in them. And our team iterates on them. And the point and a half could be conservative. But we'll see kind of how that materializes here over the quarters and years to come as we launch some of these solutions That's fair.

Appreciate the time and color Thank you our next question comes from the line of Ravi Shanker with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question Great, thanks morning everyone.

Just a quick follow-up on the local accounts Can you just remind us again kind of who do you compete with? for those local accounts and how does the cyclicality or seasonality of those accounts maybe differ from national accounts, or maybe A great question, Ravi. If you look at the local accounts, generally, we estimate that the industry, roughly the third of LTL shippers in the industry, so about 30%, are small to medium-sized customers. And think of a small to medium-sized customer as being, say, a small manufacturer that is shipping five pallets a week as opposed to a large company that could be out of one location shipping 200 shipments in a given week. Usually they have less density and usually they operate at a higher margin because effectively as an LTL carrier, we don't get the same density that you get with a large customer where you might be doing things like trader pools or swaps that effectively make your cost structure a bit more efficient. Now in terms of who, as I mentioned earlier on we're halfway through our plan to catch up with the rest of the industry and we have more runway to go here in terms of who we compete with it's every carrier out there both the regional guys and the large national networks we are competing with every other carrier like we've always had on on capturing that that market share for these local accounts now growing with them is usually easier said than done and the reason why you need a great service product and you need great relationships with the customer and this is where our local sales force are doing a fantastic job growing their segment of business we have increased the size of the sales force by about 25 percent over the last few years and as they ramp and productivity they're being able to be out there meeting customers face to face and onboard more of that business again onboarding 10,000 year accounts through the course of 2025 which I They're going to be more fired up. Now, in terms of the cycle and how it impacts small to medium-sized customers versus larger customers, usually the larger the customer that use a TMS system tends to see in the downside, relatively flat, you see the shipment count come down more. For local customers, what you tend to see is a higher impact on weight per shipment because naturally if they had a customer who was buying three pallets worth of fasteners, Now, maybe they're buying two pallets worth of fasteners, subsequently having a lower weight for shipment. So, typically, there are seasonal changes. When the cycle is down, weight for shipment is down. When the cycle is up, weight for shipment is up. Versus the larger the customer, you tend to see when the cycle is down, you can see shipment count is down. And then when the cycle is up, you see shipment count being up. Very helpful. You go ahead, Shabby.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Bruce Chan with Stiefel. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, good morning, guys. Helpful commentary on the different target end markets so far. I was wondering if, you know, you can maybe give any comments on pricing trends or negotiating behavior at this point in the cycle between them, you know, like renewals or bid frequency for SMBs versus enterprise, for example. Yeah, so getting about renewals, what we're seeing in the fourth quarter is pretty consistent with what we saw in the third quarter. So, you know, we've been pretty consistent from that standpoint. And you think about the cadence of renewals, so typically we have about a quarter of a book that renews every quarter. But one thing to keep in mind is that when you think about local accounts, many of those are on our standard tariff arms, so they get impacted by the GRI. That's about a quarter of a book gets impacted by the GRI versus individual negotiations.

Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question and answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to Mario Herrick for closing remarks.

Thank you, operator. Operator, and thanks everyone for joining us today. As you saw from our results, we're outperforming the market based on our own initiatives and disciplined execution. Even without a recovery in the demand environment, we expect strong margin extension and earnings growth this year. And if the recent pickup in demand continues, we're well positioned to capitalize on it and accelerate our results even further. With that, Operator, please have the call.

Thank you, and this concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this We thank you for your participation.