C.H. Robinson Worldwide Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

AlphaStreet
Provided by AlphaStreet
January 29, 2025
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Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CH Robinson 4th-Quarter 2024 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the company's prepared remarks, we will open the line for a live question-and-answer session. To ask a question, please press Star-1 on your telephone keypad. If anyone needs assistance at any time during the conference, please press star 0. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Wednesday, January 29, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ives, Senior Director of Investor Relations.

Chuck Ives
Senior Director, Investor Relations at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thank you,, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today is Dave Bolsman, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Michael Castignetto, our President of North American Surface Transportation; Arun Rajan, our Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer; and Damon Lee, our Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind you that our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. Slide 2 in today's presentation lists factors that could cause our actual results to differ from management's expectations. Our earnings presentation slides are supplemental to our earnings release and can be found in the Investors section of our website at investor.chrobinson.com. Our prepared comments are not intended to follow the slides. If we do refer to specific information on the slides, we'll let you know which slide we're referencing. Today's remarks also contain certain non-GAAP measures and reconciliations of those measures to GAAP measures are included in the presentation. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.

Dave Bozeman
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thank you, Chuck. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'd first like to acknowledge the challenges that many people are facing due to the severe weather and natural disasters in certain regions of the country, including the recent wildfires that damaged and destroyed many homes and businesses in the Los Angeles area. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted and we extend our gratitude to the first responders who worked tirelessly to keep people safe. I'm proud of the support that our company and our employees provided to help those in need as well as our customers. Turning to our 4th-quarter. We've talked extensively over the past year about our new Robinson operating model and the disciplined execution that the model is enabling, as well as how we're leveraging our industry-leading talent and technology to raise the bar in logistics. The benefits of these efforts were never more evident than in the significant year-over-year improvement in our Q4 financial results. And what continues to be a historically prolonged freight recession with market growth in 2024 that did not materialize as had been projected. The difference in our execution versus last year is start. Our people are embracing the discipline needed to generate higher highs and higher lows across market cycles, resulting in a higher-quality of volume, greater productivity and expansion of our gross profit and operating profit margins. In a trucking environment where the cost of purchased transportation increased in Q4 due to a decline in industry capacity, our dynamic costing and pricing tools, our revenue management practices and our cost of higher advantage enabled us to provide greater value to our customers and at the same time, improve our NAS gross margin both year-over-year and sequentially. In our Global Forwarding business, the team has debunked the thesis that Robinson couldn't continue to improve productivity when volumes are growing. Throughout 2024, I've been impressed with and highly appreciative of the team as they continue to be nimble and highly engaged with our customers to help them navigate various market disruptions and to provide differentiated service and solutions. As a result, our ocean and air shipments grew each quarter on a year-over-year basis and each grew more than 5% for the full-year. Through improvements in-process standardization and automation and embracing the rigor of our operating model, the forwarding team decoupled headcount growth from volume growth, reduced their average headcount for the year more than 10% and achieved productivity improvement of greater than 15% for the full-year. Over the two-year period of '23 and '24, we delivered compounded productivity growth of 30% or more in both Global Forwarding and NAST. And as we said at our Investor Day in December, we view our productivity as evergreen improvements that we do not expect to give back. Enabled by the operating model disciplines and tools that are being applied across our company, we expect to further advance our productivity as we grow our businesses, including both NAST and Global Forting. The productivity improvements have lowered our cost-to-serve and increased our operating leverage. Combined with our expanded gross margins, this resulted in a 79% year-over-year increase in our enterprises Q4 adjusted income from operations. I want to thank our people, one of our greatest competitive advantages for their relentless efforts to embrace our new operating model and execute in a fit, fast and focused way as we keep pushing the bar higher on exceptional service to our customers and carriers and on a -- on financial performance across market cycles. Our new operating model has changed how we discover and inspect root cause issues and quickly implement countermeasures to improve the level of our operational execution. The reliability of our operating reviews continues to increase as we leverage our data-rich environment to inform our decision-making and enhance our competitive differentiation. This is showing up in improvements such as more disciplined pricing and better decisions on the volume that we're seeking. We are still early in our journey, but the operating model is helping us execute a solid strategy even better and we expect further improvement as the accountability that the operating model demands is embraced deeper in the organization. I'm confident in the team's ability to drive a higher and more consistent level of discipline in our operational execution. As freight markets continue to fluctuate due to seasonal, cyclical and geopolitical factors, we continue to remain focused on what we can control, including deploying our operating model and lean principles across the company, providing best-in-class service to our customers and carriers, gaining profitable share in targeted market segments and leveraging game-changing generative AI to improve our service, workflows and cost at-scale, not in theory. We also continue to focus on ensuring that we'll be ready for the eventual freight market rebound with a disciplined operating model that responsibly grows market-share, further decouples headcount growth from volume growth, drives additional operating leverage and generates incremental operating income. I'll turn it over to Michael now to provide more details on our NAS results.

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thanks, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. In Q4, we delivered further optimization of our NAS volume, our gross profit margin and our adjusted gross profit per shipment, resulting in a 40% year-over-year increase in our adjusted operating income. From a volume standpoint, the market continues to be in a prolonged freight recession, as Dave mentioned. The cast freight shipment index in Q4 was down 3.2% year-over-year and down 4.8% sequentially. And it was the lowest Q4 reading the industry has seen in the last 15 years. At the same time, the truckload linehaul cost per mile, excluding fuel surcharges increased due to a decline in industry capacity. Our resilient team of freight experts responded to the challenging freight environment by improving the quality of our volume with pricing discipline and a cost of higher advantage delivered by our procurement teams and the growing usage of our digital brokerage capabilities. All of this led to an improvement in the AGP yield within both our transactional and our contractual truckload business and 170 basis-point year-over-year improvement in our NAST gross margin. Supported by our operating model and armed with innovative tools, our team also delivered a sequential improvement in NAST gross margin and truckload AGP dollars per shipment, despite the rising cost of purchase transportation. But from a volume perspective, our total NAS volume declined approximately 1% year-over-year, outpacing the index for the seventh consecutive quarter. This included a 2.5% increase in LTL volume and a 6.5% decrease in truckload volume. Our team is continuously testing the best combination of volume and margin to improve our earnings. We know we have the optionality to increase our volume when the conditions are right, and we are ready to pivot when it makes sense to do so, but we're going to maintain our discipline. From a market balance perspective, we continue to be in a drawn-out stage of capacity oversupply. Although carrier attrition is occurring and moving toward better balance each quarter. Due to a seasonal decline in capacity, the drive-in load to truck ratio and spot rates experienced some upward pressure during the holiday season and the subsequent winter storms similar to last year. But the load to truck ratio and spot rates are expected to return to pre-holiday levels once the storms abate. What stands out is that our execution is markedly different than last December and January. As we're making better decisions on the optimal freight for us and making better use of our proprietary digital capabilities. In our LTL business, the 2.5% year-over-year increase in our Q4 shipments was driven by strength across several of our LTL services. By leveraging our vast access to capacity, our broad range of LTL services and solutions and our high-level of customer service, our LTL team continues to onboard a solid pipeline of new business and build-on our existing LTL business that exceeds $3 billion in annual revenue. Looking ahead to-Q1, it is typically a seasonally weaker quarter compared to Q4, with the 10-year average of the cash freight shipment index reflecting a 2.5% sequential volume decline from Q4 to-Q1. As Dave said, regardless of market conditions, we remain focused on what we can control. Our people and their unmatched expertise enable us to deliver exceptional service and greater value to our customers and carriers. In-line with a disciplined and focused approach to capture growth opportunities in targeted customer segments such as small and medium businesses, we have invested in our sales organization and we will continue to deliver industry-leading solutions to customers and carriers. As recently-announced, one of those solutions is the introduction of CH Robinson Financial, an innovative digital payment solution for carriers that is aimed at setting a new standard of speed and efficiency unmatched by any other freight provider. It marks a significant leap forward in fostering financial stability and streamlining operations for carriers. As Dave called out earlier, I also want to take a moment to thank the NAS team for their incredible work-in 2024. Our performance and improvements throughout the year reflect their commitment to our customers, carriers and each other. Through their continued engagement with the CH Robinson operating model, our people are delivering improved results in a very difficult marketplace, and I am proud to lead this team. I'll turn it over to Arun now to provide an update on the innovation we're delivering to strengthen our customer and carrier experience and improve our AGP yield and operating leverage.

Arun Rajan
Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thanks, Michael, and good afternoon, everyone. As I mentioned at our Investor Day in December, CH Robinson is in prime position to disrupt from within to lead the industry forward in a way that others cannot match. The innovations that we bring to the industry and our customer supply chains, such as automation powered by Gen AI have a market-wide impact due to our size and scale. And we are not just talking about doing this. We are already doing it for thousands of global customers. As an example, with our proprietary technology that reads, classifies and responds to incoming emails, we've been able to automate more than 10,000 transactions per day. This automation across the quote-to-cash life-cycle of an order, whether it be quoting, order entry, load tenders, appointment scheduling, manual tasks, enables us to reduce our response times and provide a better and more uniform experience for our customers and carriers. It also creates business model scalability, thereby enabling us to decouple headcount growth from volume growth and to create greater operating leverage. In the 4th-quarter, as throughout 2024, we continued to scale our process innovations at our use of Gen AI. After utilizing Gen AI to automate orders that are tendered via email, the automation of our order tenders increased 1,150 basis-points compared to Q4 of last year and 440 basis-points sequentially. And while the automation of this process has now reached nearly 90%, the other points in the order life-cycle have more runway for improvement. The increased automation in our order entry process and other points in the order life-cycle enabled us to increase our NAST and global forwarding shipments per person per day-by more than 30% over the two-year period of 2023 and 2024. And although our productivity improvements won't continue to compound at these levels, we expect to continue increasing our productivity in 2025 and beyond to create further operating leverage. We also continue to increase the rigor and discipline in our pricing and procurement efforts, resulting in improved AGP yield across our portfolio. With continued innovation in our digital brokerage and dynamic pricing and costing, we're responding surgically and faster than ever to dynamic market conditions by performing more frequent price discovery and enhancing the quality of the pricing that we deliver. Along with our operating model, this was a major contributor to the year-over-year improvement that we achieved during the seasonal market tightness and throughout 2024. But as I also said at our Investor Day, a digital-only approach has proven to be ineffective in the logistics industry due to the level of complexity and variation in freight characteristics that necessitate human expertise. The active role that our people play from a human in the loop perspective leverages their deep domain expertise and drives feedback to our algorithms on a regular basis in the form of export market adjustments. And through our revenue management discipline, our teams are armed with intelligence on targeted countermeasures that they can take to implement a disciplined pricing strategy based on individual customer value propositions. Ultimately, we are innovating and disrupting from within to deliver on three items that are key to our strategy: transforming the customer and carrier experience to drive growth, delivering business model scalability and driving gross margin and operating margin expansion. With that, I'll turn the call over to Damon for a review of our 4th-quarter results.

Damon Lee
Chief Financial Officer at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thanks, Arun, and good afternoon, everyone. As covered by Dave and the team, we delivered significant year-over-year improvement in operating income in Q4, driven by an increase in AGP, while reducing cost through our operational discipline and productivity initiatives and thereby driving higher operating leverage. In the face of continued soft market volume and rising spot cost due to declining capacity, disciplined procurement of capacity and revenue management improved the quality of our volume and our AGP, which was up $66 million or 10.7% year-over-year, driven by a 25.6% increase in Global Forwarding and a 6.2% increase in NAST. On a monthly basis compared to Q4 of last year, our total company AGP per business day was up 9% in October, up 6% in November and up 12% in December. From an expense standpoint, our total operating expenses, excluding restructuring charges, declined $15.3 million year-over-year. Q4 personnel expenses were $354.4 million, including $3.7 million of restructuring charges related to workforce reductions. Excluding restructuring charges in the current and prior year, our Q4 personnel expenses were $350.6 million, down $12.5 million due to our continued productivity and cost optimization efforts and despite an increase in incentive compensation-related to our improved financial results. Our average Q4 headcount was down 9.5% compared to Q4 of last year. Moving to SG&A. Q4 expenses were $146.4 million, including a $12.6 million decrease in the loss related to the planned divestiture of our European surface transportation business and $9.5 million of other restructuring charges, primarily related to reducing our facilities footprint. Excluding these, SG&A expenses were $149.6 million, down $2.7 million year-over-year with the expense reduction across several expense categories. Turning to our 2025 annual operating expense guidance, we expect our personnel expenses to be $1.375 billion to $1.475 billion. This includes some headcount decline, including those related to the planned divestiture of our Europe surface Transportation business and driven by continued productivity improvements, partially offset by investments in our team as we reward the talented people that fuel our progress. We expect 2025 SG&A expenses to be $575 million to $625 million, including depreciation and amortization of $95 million to $105 million. Although most of our SG&A expenses are subject to inflation, we expect continued cost improvements to partially offset the inflationary impact. Shifting back to Q4, our effective tax-rate for the quarter, excluding the tax impact of restructuring charges was 12.4%, resulting in a full-year tax-rate of 18.7%. We expect our 2025 full-year effective tax-rate to be in the range of 18% to 20%. Our capital expenditures in Q4 were $15.2 million, bringing our 2024 total to $74.3 million. For 2025, we expect capital expenditures to be $75 million to $85 million. From a balance sheet perspective, we ended Q4 with approximately $1.2 billion of liquidity comprised of $1.04 billion of committed funding under our credit facilities and a cash balance of $146 million. Our financial strength continues to be a key differentiator in our industry as it enables us to continue investing and improving our capabilities. Our debt balance at the end of Q4 was $1.38 billion and our net-debt to EBITDA leverage at the end of Q4 was 1.61 times, down from 2.08 times at the end of Q3. This was primarily driven by the improved performance of the business and the resulting increase in our trailing 12-month EBITDA as well as a decrease in our net-debt balance. Overall, our Q4 financial results are a testament to our disciplined execution and our focus on profitable growth, and I am optimistic about our runway for further improvement. With that, I'll turn the call-back to Dave for his final comments.

Dave Bozeman
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thanks, Damon. As I reflect on the noteworthy progress that we made in 2024, I'd like to thank the Robinson team for all the work they've put in to get to this point. I don't take their efforts and dedication for granted, and I commend them for helping us get more fit, fast and focused and for embracing the discipline that the new operating model demands. Our improved execution at the bottom of the freight cycle is delivering improved financial performance. We're making better and faster decisions on capturing the right freight at the right price to deliver a higher-quality of volume. I believe the disciplines and practices that we have implemented at Robinson can endure through a prolonged freight recession, through a market inflection and through any part of the freight cycle. As I've mentioned during the past year and at our Investor Day in December, all the changes we're making are aimed at our North Star of generating incremental operating income by focusing on growing market-share and expanding our gross and operating margins. We expect to continue growing market-share by reclaiming share in targeted segments and by leveraging our robust capabilities to power value-added services and solutions for our customers and carriers that drive new volume to our four core modes and expand our addressable market. We're optimizing our gross profit by monitoring key input metrics and responding faster to air estates and changing market conditions with countermeasures and innovative technology that improves our execution, such as our dynamic costing and pricing tools and our digital brokerage capabilities. And we're improving our operating leverage and operating income margins by embedding lean practices, removing waste and expanding our digital capabilities, such as leading the logistics industry on implementation of the game-changing capabilities of Gen AI. We are armoring our people with better tools and moving with greater clock speed and urgency to seize opportunities and solve problems in order to win now and to be ready for the eventual freight market rebound. On my first earnings call-in August of 2023, I said that I look-forward to leading this great company to new heights and sharing our progress with all of you along our journey. While there is still more grass to cut, I believe we're on the right path, and I'm pleased with the progress we've made on evolving our strategy and improving our execution by instilling discipline with our new operating model. This concludes our prepared remarks. I'll turn it back to the operator now for the Q&A portion of the call.

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Operator

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick-up the handset before pressing the start keys. One moment please while we poll for questions our first question comes from the line of Chris Wetherbee with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Chris Wetherbee
Analyst at Wells Fargo Securities

Hey, great. Thanks. Good afternoon, guys. I guess I wanted to kind of just make sure that I understood sort of the approach that you're taking to the market as it stands today. So at the Investor Day, you outlined gross margin opportunities, also sort of productivity opportunities on operating margin expansion. And I think while you outperformed sort of the market from a volume standpoint in NAST, I guess TL was down sort of in that 6.5% range. So I guess I just want to make sure I can I get some clarity on how do you think about those separate opportunities of the gross profit margins and then ultimately the operating margins as we're in this type of market. So I guess, how should we expect you to try to balance those priorities, particularly as we turn-over into 1Q and 2Q where maybe we're seeing some recovery, maybe we're not, it's still a little bit unclear.

Dave Bozeman
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah. Hey, Chris, this is Dave. Good to hear from you and good to see you at Investor Day. A number of things in what you said there. It certainly still is a very tough market out there for us, which is why I'm -- I'm really proud of the team and how they're really navigating the waters here within NAST. I'm going to have Michael go a little bit deeper into the team and where you're getting that and then we can also circle back to it as well when he's -- when he's done it, we don't double-click enough on it. But Michael, let's go a little bit further on that one.

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yes. Thanks, Chris. I think you called out really what we're trying to make sure we accomplish, which is the quality of volume that we manage and execute for our customers and carriers. And Q4 continued to be a very competitive marketplace where demand is just not where the market needs it to be. And with that in mind, we're prioritizing making sure that we hold the right freight, that we deliver a very-high level of service. And through the tools that we've implemented, we were able to expand our gross margins in a rising cost market, which was a challenge we really set-out for ourselves during some of the work you saw us talk about at Investor Day. And so really to Dave's point, proud of the work the team did. Certainly as we head into Q1 and Q2, we would want to share the same sentiment that you have that hopefully those shoots of volume start to come forward. But even then, we're going to still maintain that discipline that we -- we price things correctly, we haul the right freight, we meet our customer service expectations and we deliver strong bottom-line numbers as a result.

Dave Bozeman
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, Chris. And then again, just kind of put a period on that, it's really about that flexibility with our model and where we're going, if we start seeing this thing inflect, Michael and team and the rest of the team across Robinson, as we said at Investor Day, we are prepared with the flexibility for when this market starts to come back. And again, driving that higher lows, if it's steadier throughout the year, we're prepared to continue to deliver what you're seeing here. So thanks for the question.

Chris Wetherbee
Analyst at Wells Fargo Securities

I appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vascom Majors with Susquehanna International Group. Please proceed with your question.

Bascome Majors
Analyst at Susquehanna International Group

Thanks for taking my questions. We're a couple of months removed from when you put the plan together to share with us in December. Just curious if you could walk-through some of the cyclical puts and takes on the path to '26 as you feel today and if there's any other leanings in either direction in any of your businesses compared to what we heard in early December? Thank you.

Damon Lee
Chief Financial Officer at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Hi, Bascom, this is -- this is Damon. Look, certainly, Investor Day was a good event for us. I think our message came across loud and clear. We feel-good about the targets we laid out in Investor Day and the mix of those targets between businesses and initiatives. So I would say there's not been any pivot or change from our position on how we laid out Investor Day in December and what we see -- what we see today. So again, we feel-good about the targets we laid out. We feel-good about the path in which we will deliver those targets. And you're touching on an exact reason on why we gave a range for the market, right? No one knows what the market is going to be between now and 2026, but we're going to control what we can control and keep the discipline. And as Michael mentioned, the focus on the quality of volume. And I think all of that will certainly line-up to delivering those 2026 goals the way we laid them out in December?

Bascome Majors
Analyst at Susquehanna International Group

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ariel Rosa with Citigroup. Please proceed with your question.

Unidentified Participant
at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Hi, yes, this is Ben Moore on for Ari. Thanks so much for taking our call. Great to see you guys at the Investor Day. On your two key areas for revenue growth, you mentioned enterprise versus SMB markets. What would you say you're in terms of inning for both of those? Is it more like seventh inning for enterprise, but a whole lot more like third inning for SMB? And then on your cross-selling opportunity, as your second area, you've noted 20% of Global Forwarding AGP growth comes from relationships that began at NAST and there could be more runway. How much opportunity is left from this cross-selling across your segments? Would you say you're in the third inning there? Would love to hear your thoughts on both these areas of growth piece?

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, Ben, this is Michael. Thanks for the question. I think the broad answer to.

Unidentified Participant
at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

On a CH call are you on CH call? Have you switched? Are you saw CP? Okay, okay. I. I asked my question and then -- and I think and then he started answering.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, it seems like we may have technical difficulties, please standby.

Unidentified Participant
at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Technical difficulties. They're coming back.

Operator

All right, ladies and gentlemen, we do have the speakers back-in. We will now proceed with the Q&A session.

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Hey, Ben, I think we'll reanswer. I think we cut-off after your question and so we'll --

Unidentified Participant
at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thanks.

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

And your question was really what inning are we in our -- we gave some examples of verticals. You asked about SMB and then you also asked about the cross-selling opportunity. And overall, I'd say we're -- we're in early innings in all aspects of that business. We believe while we've done business in certain verticals for a long-time and SMB is something that is core to our history and something we've done for a long-time that we have a lot of runway in front of us in those areas to grow, but also to move-up the value stack and deliver more-and-more capabilities and services to our customers. As you think about then that next-stage of cross-selling, whether it's NAST to GF, GF back to NAST or the example we gave with our RMS announcement right before Investor Day of bringing those two teams together, we have a tremendous opportunity in front of us to maximize the value of One Robinson. And certainly, while we've seen the benefits of that, there's no way we could say that we've maximized that opportunity. And so we feel really good about what we presented back-in December and feel really aligned to those opportunities. And more importantly, we're going to hold ourselves accountable to maximize the impact of the different aspects of our divisions and make sure we bring the full-scale and capabilities of Robinson to all of our customers.

Dave Bozeman
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, Ben, and sorry for that interruption there. The only period I put on that on what Michael said. I just came off-the-road, I'm talking to the teams and they are -- they are really fired up on this. This certainly is early innings of this game. But from an SMB the perspective, these guys are going out and getting it. We feel really good to Damon's question-and-answer to earlier, we feel really good about what we've laid out on this growth trajectory and the team is really aligned and Michael and team are doing a nice job on driving that accountability. So thanks for the question. And again, I apologize to everyone for the disruption.

Unidentified Participant
at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thanks so much for the color.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Ossenbeck with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.

Brian Ossenbeck
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

Hi, afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. So I guess maybe for Michael, can you just give us some color, if you can, about maybe demand or indications of demand across any particular verticals and customers that you're speaking with? And then also along those lines, where do you think we're sort of starting off the year within -- within the bid season as things start to get ramped-up here. Thank you.

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Brian. You know, I think what we saw in Q4 was a continuation of a marketplace that had very-high adherence to route guides, a very, very competitive transactional space. And the team did a really nice job of really weaving through that for the best results we could deliver. An example of that is, we feel really good about the health of our contractual business. Our wins as we're going into those RFPs saw -- we beat the cash shipment index in our contractual space in Q4. So really lining up to that concept of the optionality we discussed earlier of making sure that when we're engaging customers directly on their business where we can bring the value proposition of Robinson to the table, we're winning. And then we're being really smart about the transactional business we're winning on a day-to-day basis where incumbency has less value, right? And we aren't going to see the long-term benefits of getting super aggressive in that space-based on the current market. You asked about kind of moving into Q1. Q1 is a traditionally heavy RFP space. And I'll just keep saying what I said about Q4 is we feel-good about the strategy we have from a -- how we're engaging customers, our pricing strategy for that space. But we're not -- I wouldn't say we're seeing uptick yet in the overall demand in those RFPs. It continues to be a marketplace that's -- we're seeing impact of carrier exits, but we're not seeing impact of demand increases at this point.

Brian Ossenbeck
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

Okay. I appreciate that, Mike. Thanks.

Operator

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

Thomas Wadewitz
Analyst at UBS Group

Yeah, great. Good afternoon. I wanted to see if you could offer some thoughts about -- and I apologize if I missed this earlier, but how -- how do you think about truckload volume growth in '25? Do you think that's something that you transition to in second-half? And I guess you have to have under maybe share your underlying view on how the market progresses. But do you think we should be optimistic that you get into that? And then I guess another component of that would be did have some weakness in truckload volume in 4Q focused on kind of the right loads and everything. When the market starts to tighten, do you think you get a bigger swing, you know, a significant swing in the truckload volumes? Or do you think that's going to tend to be gradual. Thank you.

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, Tom, thanks for the question. I think we want to make sure we continue to reiterate the optionality that we feel we have in truckload volume right now. We're taking a very disciplined approach for what volume is the right volume for us in the current marketplace. I don't think anyone on this call would give you a crystal ball of what we think is going to happen in 2025 from a volume perspective. I think everybody in our industry has been trying to predict that for the last 36 months and it keeps extending. But I feel really good that when the market inflects, we will have the tools and the talent to maximize the impact of that inflection. We saw it seasonally in Q4 and then with the storms that happened again this January, and we said it in our prepared comments that our performance was markedly different. And that I just couldn't be more proud of the team and how they managed a situation where seasonal cost increases, storm-related events and we're handling that in a much more disciplined and effective manner.

Thomas Wadewitz
Analyst at UBS Group

What about when you see the swing? Do you think that the way you're set-up, you might have kind of a big step-up in volume or you think it ends up being just more gradual?

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

I think, Tom, it would depend on the type of swing. And that's the part where we -- listen, we do mock-ups, we do testing of what we think will happen and we're prepared for it. But I think we all have to make sure we do the right thing depending on how that inflection happens and whether it's a gradual inflection or a very quick turnaround. Where I am confident is regardless of what it is, I think we have the tools and talent to execute against it.

Thomas Wadewitz
Analyst at UBS Group

Okay, great. Makes sense. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ken Hexter with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Ken Hoexter
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Hey, great. Good afternoon. Maybe just a little bit on the forwarding side. Can you talk about given how far, I guess maybe the squeeze we've already seen on rates and then what I guess could happen as maybe shipping starts to return to some normal shipping patterns, how that impacts the forwarding side? And then any side thoughts on headcount as well? Thanks.

Damon Lee
Chief Financial Officer at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

So hi, Ken, thanks for the question. So as we laid out in Investor Day, as part of our 2026 OI Walker or bridge, you know, we did have a an item in there related to rate normalization, right? And that was both rate normalization for truckload and rate normalization for Global Forwarding. So as the 40 market returns to, Call-IT, more normalized levels of rates, we have taken that into consideration as we've built our path forward for 2026. So I'd reference you as far as the net impact of that for the enterprise, I would reference you back to the net $10 million headwind that we showed by 2026 for rate normalization for the enterprise. And certainly, you've got tailwind coming from truckload in that -- in that $10 million and then you've got headwind coming from ocean rate normalization from our from our forwarding business. Specifically to your question around headcount, as Dave mentioned in his opening comments, the global forwarding team did a fantastic job in 2024, debunking the thesis that we can't separate headcount from volume growth. In fact, it's no longer a theory in our Global Forwarding business. It's actually a fact. And in 2024, that business demonstrated a decoupling headcount from growth throughout the year. And certainly, those lessons we've learned, those tools and skills that we've honed to execute that in 2024, what we'll carry-forward into 2025 to whatever market we see from a forwarding perspective.

Ken Hoexter
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

So just to clarify your comment on the rates going back to normalization on Investor Day, I totally remember the slides. But do you think that's kind of where we're settling out as things get is back to normal historical or do you think given the amount of capacity added on, we start seeing maybe additional pressure on those on the shipping rates?

Damon Lee
Chief Financial Officer at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah. So our view hasn't changed and consistent with what we laid out in Investor Day, we see the ocean rates normalizing back to the levels we saw in the second-half of 2023. So that's the math that supported our ROI bridge and market normalization assumptions at Investor Day, and we stick to that viewpoint as of today.

Ken Hoexter
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Sounds good. Appreciate the time. Thanks.

Damon Lee
Chief Financial Officer at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Thanks, Ken.

Operator

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

Jonathan Chappell
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Thank you. Good afternoon. I know we've touched on a lot here, but just kind of a bigger-picture question, thinking about the path forward. You're obviously very focused on profitability thresholds that you want to hit. You've done a great job on the cost side. At a certain point, the market will come back and you're going to want to get your share or better of volume. So how do you think about balancing this desire to win-back the Robinson share or again better while still keeping some of these profitability threshold that you set for yourself over the last year?

Dave Bozeman
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, John, good to hear from you. The -- a couple of things on that question. One, it's everything we've been really discussing and that we laid out in Investor Day as well. We have put together our -- our operating model discipline that sets us up for the basis of that question. And that's with our people being at the forefront of that strategy and technology and giving them the tools to drive that technology. That's going to allow us to really drive growth that we've talked about in the in the verticals. It's going to allow us to drive and take share in our small-medium business segment. And on-top of that, when the market inflects, we have a history that will drive the transactional space as well. So we have optionality built into our model and we feel really good about that. So the key point is be it a slow-burn or be it an aggressive turn where we've set ourselves up to really be ready for either one. And our team is really attacking what we can control and the cars that are dealt with us. But we are prepared for either scenario. We can double-click a little bit more with that one.

Michael Castagnetto
President, North American Surface Transportation at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, I think the question you're asking is a good one. But where we feel comfortable is that each marketplace creates different scenarios in the current marketplace. Pricing is low, our advantage is really through our pricing and costing engines that we've been able to implement with our team and really, as we've said, increase the quality of our volume and making sure that we're getting that right combination of volume and margin. And in a different marketplace where costing is moving and pricing is moving, we think we still have the best tools in the industry to then provide us the opportunity to pick-up freight and win share. We need to be able to do both and our expectation of ourselves is we will do both. And we've consistently been able to do that throughout 2024. And I have confidence in the team that we'll do that when the market inflects and continuing into 2025.

Dave Bozeman
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, John. And hopefully at Investor Day, we laid out those physicals to show you why we feel confident about that. But thanks.

Jonathan Chappell
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Absolutely, Dave. Thanks. Bye.

Chuck Ives
Senior Director, Investor Relations at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Operator, next question please apologies everyone we seem to have lost our operator so given that we can't get the operator back on the line, I think we're going to have to-end the call. Apologies. Please feel free-to reach-out to me afterwards with follow-up questions and we'll answer those questions for you. Thank you we might have our operator back on a.

Operator

I'm sorry, we had some technical difficulties. If we're ready to proceed, we do. Our next question would be from David Hicks with Raymond James. Please proceed.

David Hicks
Analyst at Raymond James

Hi guys. Thanks for taking the question. I also just wanted to kind of head back on the Global Forwarding segment kind of just given the developments in the Middle-East. East and what are you hearing from the ocean liners on a return to the Red Sea and/Suez route? And how does that kind of change the pace or timing of ATV per shipment and forwarding coming back to those second-half '23 levels that you mentioned.

Dave Bozeman
President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Hey, David. This is Dave Boseman. Hey, listen, thanks for the question. When it comes to the ship lines, certainly, the situation of Red Sea is a situation that's still ongoing. I mean, mean it takes time for -- for the ship lines to really adjust back into normal operations. I think what we see from them is they are evaluating the situation. We don't see a full-out of sellings through the Suez yet. They're still on their normal sellings around the horn. And so we're monitoring that closely. And -- but at this point, it's still a situation of monitor. We don't know exactly the timing of when that will shift. When it does, we'll certainly be front and center there. Damon, anything on that?

Damon Lee
Chief Financial Officer at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Yeah, David, I would just add that, look, our viewpoint is that carriers won't immediately return to the Red Sea. I mean, we're seeing some activity there, but we believe for it to return to levels of normacy that it will take time for that to happen. So nothing happens quickly or overnight in the shipping world. And so as Dave mentioned, we're monitoring it. We're controlling what we control and we'll certainly service our customers based on what the market yields.

David Hicks
Analyst at Raymond James

Great appreciate it thanks.

Chuck Ives
Senior Director, Investor Relations at C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Operator, are you still connected? Let the next question through, please apologies, everyone. We seem to have lost our operator again. So this is the conclusion of our call. Have a great evening and we look-forward to talking to you again. Thank you.

Corporate Executives
  • Chuck Ives
    Senior Director, Investor Relations
  • Dave Bozeman
    President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director
  • Michael Castagnetto
    President, North American Surface Transportation
  • Arun Rajan
    Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer
  • Damon Lee
    Chief Financial Officer
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