J.B. Hunt (JBHT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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DATE

Wednesday, April 15, 2026 at 5 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

- President — Shelley Simpson

- Chief Financial Officer — Brad Delco

- Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing — Spencer Frazier

- Chief Operating Officer — Nick Hobbs

- Executive Vice President, People & President, Dedicated Contract Services — Brad Hicks

- President, Intermodal — Darren Field

Full Conference Call Transcript

Shelley Simpson: Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon. I want to begin by thanking our teams for the work they continue to do every day for our customers. The year-over-year improvement we delivered both financially and operationally is a direct result of the focus, discipline, and commitment across this organization. We delivered strong results relative to the market in a still challenging environment, reflecting disciplined execution against the strategy we laid out. We are taking share driven by the strength of our execution and consistent service for our customers. As we moved through the first quarter, the freight environment felt meaningfully different than what we have operated in over the past several years.

When we spoke last quarter, I described the truckload market as fragile, and that we are testing the elasticity of supply. And that assessment proved accurate. Continued regulatory enforcement to improve safety in our industry has removed non-compliant capacity, and when combined with early signs of improved demand, resulted in a tighter truckload market throughout the quarter. While predicting inflection points is never precise, we believe we are on a path of recovery. We feel confident about how we are positioned. The operational discipline we have established over the past several years is showing up in year-over-year financial improvements and enhanced customer responses, enabling us to shift from a defensive posture to playing offense from a position of strength.

This confidence is grounded in results. We have delivered exceptional performance in safety and service, surpassed expectations on lowering our cost to serve, and maintained very high customer retention. Our strong execution has earned the company multiple Carrier of the Year awards as customers increasingly choose J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. This opens doors to growth opportunities, and we are approaching them with intentionality and discipline. Let me close by outlining our key priorities for the year, and how they position us for success in this dynamic environment. First, we are focused on disciplined growth driven by operational excellence.

Customer conversations during bid season have become more constructive, though there is still work to do to fully restore pricing and margins to expected levels. We are pushing where appropriate and remain confident in the value we deliver. We are seeing increased traction in ICS and JBT, consistent with early cycle market shifts, and there remains opportunity in intermodal, which Darren will discuss. Second, we will continue to leverage our investments in people, technology, and capacity to drive sustainable, competitive advantages in our business. We consistently invest in our people who represent J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. to our customers and are central to our operational excellence.

Our technology connects and empowers our people and helps us optimally utilize our capacity. And we are building on our innovative foundation to drive greater automation and productivity. We have prefunded our capacity needs, particularly in intermodal, at the bottom of the cycle. These remain the core foundations in our business and we expect to see future benefit from these investments. Third, we remain focused on repairing margins and driving long-term shareholder value. We are a disciplined growth company and equally disciplined in how we deploy capital. We have momentum in the business and we will continue to build on our strong start to the year. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Brad.

Brad Delco: Thanks, Shelley, and good afternoon. Let me start with the first quarter results. On a GAAP basis, revenue was up 5%, while operating income improved 16%, and diluted earnings per share improved 27% versus the prior-year period. We experienced strong demand for our service offerings as a predominantly supply-driven freight recovery continued to gain steam, coupled with some modest improvements in demand. During the quarter, we executed well across our service, safety, and cost-to-serve initiatives which continue to gain momentum. As we discussed during the first quarter conference circuit, this momentum was partially offset by the impact of weather, which negatively impacted incremental margins in the quarter. We also saw volatile fuel prices.

Our business and our industry have fuel surcharge programs that protect our operations from fluctuations in fuel markets. Admittedly, intermodal is a very fuel-efficient solution for our customers, so higher fuel prices enhance the value proposition of our leading intermodal franchise. It is worth reminding our investors fuel is generally a pass-through expense and typically has a small impact on profit dollars quarter to quarter; however, it is dilutive to overall margins. Let me turn to our lowering our cost to serve initiative. We have given an update each quarter since we announced our $100 million target to remove structural cost from our business.

In the first quarter, we continued to make additional progress, eliminating over $30 million during the quarter. Again, our intent is to make sure these cost initiatives are visible in our results and, despite further investments in our people, higher insurance premiums, medical cost, and fuel prices, and worse weather, we were able to expand margins 70 basis points year over year in the quarter with pricing that still did not cover core inflation. Going forward, we will continue to challenge ourselves on our structural cost without sacrificing our ability to capitalize on market opportunities to compound our growth ahead. The discipline across our company also extends to our capital deployment.

We continue to prioritize reinvestment in the business and will reiterate our guidance of a $600 million to $800 million net CapEx plan for the year. Success-based growth opportunities in Dedicated will continue to be the main catalyst to influence this range. We retired $700 million of notes that matured on March 1 and ended the quarter with 0.8 turns of debt, below our stated target of one turn. We repurchased 380,000 shares of stock in the quarter, approximately $80 million. Finally, back in January, the Board authorized a 2% increase in our dividend, which is also the 22nd consecutive year of increasing our quarterly dividend. Let me close with this.

First, we are executing extremely well across the organization on operational excellence in service, safety, and lowering our cost to serve. Second, without any meaningful tailwinds from price driven by this recent market inflection, we have already put ourselves on a path to restoring our margins, which we think is a differentiator in the market. Third, we have prefunded a lot of our growth while maintaining a significant amount of flexibility to deploy capital to drive long-term value for our shareholders. We are operating from a position of strength. That concludes my comments, and I will turn it over to Spencer.

Spencer Frazier: Thank you, Brad, and good afternoon. I want to start with what we are seeing from customers and across our network. Throughout the first quarter, there has been an evolving narrative from customers that tightening in the truckload market would be temporary in nature. Today, most customers understand there has been and continues to be a shift in industry capacity that is impacting the truckload market, and this is a structural change. Customers have not seen a capacity-led cycle change with the exception of when the industry implemented ELDs or experienced a constrained market since 2022. What we are seeing is a freight market that has fundamentally less slack than it did in prior cycles.

Capacity has been steadily exiting for an extended period driven by regulatory enforcement, rising costs, and financial performance that does not support capital reinvestment. Even if spot rates increase, capacity continues to leave the industry. You can look at most industry KPIs and they are either at their highest or lowest levels since 2022. Truckload rates, tender rejections, the ISM PMI, and several others are all at their highest levels since 2022, and trucking employment is at the lowest levels since 2022—all proof points of structural change. At the same time, customers' supply chains are leaner, agile, and more synchronized than they have ever been while their demand is solid and increasing. This combination matters.

It means the system is far more sensitive to even modest changes in volume or disruption. We saw that dynamic clearly late last year. As volumes increased around peak, conditions tightened quickly. Service became more valuable, and customers leaned into partners they trust to execute—partners who can honor commitments when it matters. This dynamic continued into the first quarter. For J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., that environment plays directly to our strengths. We are seeing strong customer retention, continued share gains across all our services, an expanding pipeline, and much more disciplined pricing conversations. We are not chasing volume, but we are taking market share.

We are focused on freight that fits our networks, creates value for our customers, and at the right rate to generate durable returns. What is also different this time is how customers are behaving. We are seeing far less price-led decision making and far more focus on execution quality. They are adjusting to capacity challenges with frequent mini bids, they are consolidating freight with fewer, more reliable providers, and they are prioritizing scale, visibility, and execution. So while we remain mindful about the macro and recognize today’s risks, we are confident in our positioning. We built this company for environments like this, where operational excellence, reliability, and network depth matter.

Our focus remains the same: execute at a high level, honor commitments when the market tightens, and use our platform to help customers manage volatility. That approach has driven share gains in the past and we believe it will continue to do so well into the future. I will now hand it over to Nick.

Nick Hobbs: Thanks, Spencer, and good afternoon. I am going to start with safety. We are coming off of three consecutive years of record safety performance as measured by DOT preventable accidents per million miles. I am proud to say that we continue to lead the industry and set new records for ourselves, besting last year’s first quarter result by 14% despite a materially more challenging weather-impacted quarter versus prior year. This performance directly reflects the commitment of our drivers and broader teams to operating safe and secure every day. As we continue to grow with customers and take market share, we will bring on drivers and operations-focused employees to maintain our operational excellence our customers expect.

In fact, our current driver need is the highest it has been since June 2022. As the driver market has tightened, we have begun to execute various strategies that allow us to recruit to meet our needs and support our growth. As these new drivers are onboarded, our emphasis on safety starts day one, with our more tenured drivers reinforcing our culture through training and the sharing of best practices. Moving to the business, I will start with Final Mile. End-market demand has shown signs of stabilization across furniture and exercise equipment, with appliance replacement demand remaining solid. We continue to see strength in our fulfillment business driven primarily by off-price retail channels. Going forward, our focus has not changed.

We are committed to providing high service levels for customers and being safe and secure while continuing to lead the industry in background verification standards. Last quarter, we spoke to an expected $90 million revenue headwind this year from some lost business. Since then, we have secured new wins and see a strong and developing pipeline as we work to offset as much of that headwind as possible without sacrificing returns for the unique value we provide. Moving on to our highway businesses. Overall demand was better than normal seasonality with more spot opportunities as tender rejections remain high and routing guides were breaking down. Capacity remained unseasonably tight as market factors continued to pressure capacity.

We believe the market tightness was driven primarily by shortage of supply but with some positive elements of demand, which is a slight positive development from Q4 which seemed to be mostly supply-driven. In JBT, we reported our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit volume growth as our focus on operational excellence is leading to additional opportunities for growth and market share gains. Execution remains strong as we continue to grow revenue while effectively managing controllable cost. However, the tight truckload market and rapid rise in fuel prices late in the quarter created challenges for independent contractors, leading us to source more third-party capacity to cover loads in the first quarter.

To put this in context, our revenue increased 23% on 19% load growth, but our gross profit declined 5%, primarily due to the higher purchased transportation rates. Going forward, our focus remains on disciplined growth of our trailing network while continuing to improve the utilization of our assets through improved box turns. I will close with ICS. We have positive momentum in this business that has not yet translated to improved financial performance due to continued gross margin pressure from higher purchased transportation costs. This margin pressure is normal at this point in the cycle as we balance honoring customer commitments and working with customers to reprice freight as needed.

So far in bid season, we are winning more volume and securing rate increases. While spot market opportunities have increased, they were not enough to offset the margin pressure on our contractual business. Going forward, we are encouraged by the momentum we have and remain focused on leveraging our cost as we scale the business. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Brad.

Brad Hicks: Thanks, Nick, and good afternoon, everybody. I will provide an update on our Dedicated business. Starting with the quarter, at a high level, our first quarter results continue to highlight the resiliency of our Dedicated business. Weather did negatively impact our operations duri