Earnings Labs

Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings Inc. (KNX)

Q3 2025 Earnings Call· Wed, Oct 22, 2025

$65.39

+1.07%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

-7.13%

1 Week

-6.12%

1 Month

-6.79%

vs S&P

-5.48%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Ina, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Knight-Swift Transportation Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Speakers from today's call will be Adam Miller, Chief Executive Officer; Andrew Hess, Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. Brad Stewart, Treasurer and Senior VP of Investor Relations. Mr. Stewart, the meeting is now yours.

Brad Stewart

Analyst

Thank you, Ina. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our third quarter 2025 earnings call. Today, we plan to discuss topics related to the results of the quarter, current market conditions and our earnings guidance. We have slides to accompany this call, which are posted on our investor website. Our call is scheduled to last one hour. Following our commentary, we will answer questions related to these topics. In order to get to as many participants as possible, we limit the questions to one per participant. If you have a question, a second question, please feel free to get back in the queue. We will answer as many questions as time allows. If we are not able to get to your question due to time restrictions, you may call (602) 606-6349. To begin, I will first refer you to the disclosures on Slide 2 of the presentation and note the following. This conference call and presentation may contain forward-looking statements made by the company that involve risks, assumptions and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Investors are directed to the information contained in Item 1A, Risk Factors or Part 1 of the company's annual report on Form 10-K filed with the United States SEC for a discussion of the risks that may affect the company's future operating results. Actual results may differ. Before we get into the slides, I will hand the call over to Adam for some opening remarks.

Adam Miller

Analyst

Thanks, Brad, and good afternoon, everyone. The third quarter saw freight markets still grappling with uncertainty with many shippers hesitant to take much risk and freight demand trends that continue to deviate from normal seasonal patterns. However, the third quarter brought more proactive customer discussions around peak season projects than we have seen since 2021. Some of these involve customers who did not express any such needs last year. Some peak projects are already underway, while our base level of normal demand through the first two weeks of October have remained stable and have not yet begun a seasonal build. Last year, some peak projects developed almost overnight during the fourth quarter, and we still do not have visibility to forecast that, that will happen again this year with still some uncertainty around how volumes will build during the quarter, we are taking a more cautious approach to our expectations for the fourth quarter. Despite some of the uncertainties in the present environment, we see a number of factors that make the opportunities of the next cycle more compelling for our businesses. First, on the demand front, despite all the noise from tariffs and the shift in freight ordering patterns, demand has remained relatively stable throughout our different truckload brands. We believe the value we deliver through our scale, flexibility and service has allowed us to maintain most of our volume in a challenging market. Early in the new bid season, we are seeing less churn of incumbent lanes and growth in awarded volume with low single-digit rate improvement. This contrasts against last bid season, where a similar pricing approach produced more churn in incumbent lanes and lower volume awards as some shippers were still pursuing discount offerings, especially through brokers. In recent weeks, more customers have been upfront about…

Andrew Hess

Analyst

Thanks, Adam. The charts on Slide 3 compare our consolidated third quarter revenue and earnings results on a year-over-year basis. Before getting into the comparisons, it's important to note that our GAAP results from the current quarter include $58 million of significant unusual items. Included in our GAAP results are $28.8 million of trade name impairments as a result of our decision to combine our LTL brands under one trade name, $6 million of real property lease and software impairments, a loss contingency of $11.2 million related to the 2024 exit from the third-party carrier insurance business, and $12 million of higher insurance and claims costs at U.S. Xpress, primarily driven by settlement of two large 2023 U.S. Xpress auto liability claims, one of which occurred prior to our July 2023 acquisition and the other shortly thereafter. The impairments have been adjusted out of our non-GAAP results as shown in the reconciliation schedules following this presentation. However, the loss contingency and the claim settlement accruals have not been adjusted out and negatively impacted our adjusted operating income by $23.2 million and our adjusted EPS by $0.10. Revenue, excluding fuel surcharge, increased by 2.4% and operating income declined by $31.1 million or 38.2% year-over-year, largely due to the $58 million of unusual items noted above. Adjusted operating income improved by 14.2% year-over-year as earnings growth in our LTL warehousing and leasing businesses more than offset the loss contingency and U.S. Xpress claims costs in the current quarter. GAAP earnings per diluted share for the third quarter of 2025 were $0.05 compared to $0.19 for the third quarter of 2024. Adjusted EPS was $0.32 for the third quarter of 2025 compared to $0.34 for the third quarter of 2024, a 5.9% year-over-year decrease, primarily as a result of the $0.10 negative impact…

Brad Stewart

Analyst

Logistics volumes were down year-over-year, but generally built throughout the third quarter after the lull seen during the second quarter. This segment experienced brief market tightening around the 4th of July and at the end of the quarter. Revenue for the third quarter declined 2.2% year-over-year, driven by a 6.2% decline in load count, partially offset by a 3.6% increase in revenue per load. Despite the decline in revenue and load count, our disciplined approach to pricing and cost management helped us drive slight improvement in the adjusted operating ratio to 94.3% and to grow adjusted operating income 1.9% year-over-year. We anticipate opportunities for further profitability gains ahead as we are early on in deployment of technology tools to drive better capture of opportunities and more efficient execution, which we expect will contribute to earnings beginning in 2026. In recent weeks, we are seeing what we believe are the early impacts that the renewed emphasis on regulatory enforcement is beginning to have on third-party carrier capacity availability. The impact is not yet consistently felt, but there has been a noticeable reduction in capacity availability and pressure on gross margin in certain lanes and types of service. If such trends were to continue, this could cause further pressure on gross margin in the near term as capacity erodes and it could cause pressure on brokerage volumes if shippers increasingly rely on asset-based relationships. However, given the relationship between our Logistics segment and our Asset-Based Truckload segment, we believe these dynamics would ultimately benefit both our asset and Logistics businesses. Now on to Slide 8 for a discussion of our Intermodal business. The Intermodal segment improved its adjusted operating ratio 160 basis points year-over-year to 99.8%, driven by a 3.5% increase in revenue per load and improvements in efficiency and network balance.…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Scott Group from Wolfe Research.

Scott Group

Analyst

So I have just a numbers question and then just a bigger picture. So am I just understanding this right, like the clean nonreportable is like $35 million in Q3 and you're saying breakeven in Q4, just that's a big drop. I just want to understand if I got that right. And then just bigger picture, like all like the regulatory stuff that you're talking about, like what's your view of how much capacity this takes out? How much of this we're seeing already in the market? How long does it all take to play out? And then maybe just with that, Adam, you made a comment about private fleet growth reversing, which I think would also be a big deal. Just what's telling you that that's happening, that would be helpful.

Adam Miller

Analyst

So Scott, I think that's three questions maybe. We'll try to wrap that together as one. I don't want to set a precedent here. Yes, on the all other, that is correct. You're reading that correctly. And I think we signaled that, I think maybe earlier this year, that's been the normal seasonal pattern. It's really driven by our warehousing business where we have a lot of work that we do that's somewhat front-loaded in the year, and there's a lot that just doesn't happen in the fourth quarter. And that's how that would have played out last year as well. We were trying to get that a bit more smoothed out, but that didn't happen this year. So that would be the case. And I think that's where -- that's how we've modeled that even in previous years. In terms of the regulatory question, I think there's a lot of unknowns there. We've seen several numbers out there. I think the FMCSA has projected that there was over 200,000 non-domicile CDLs that were issued. I think a good number of them were probably not issued correctly. I think the enforcement may vary by state. I know that we're seeing certain states revoke CDLs now, and we're seeing letters come in across our industry. We have a very small number of drivers that have non-domiciled CDLs. I'd say maybe a few dozen. And we've seen some activity there as well, even for those that were issued, we believe, correctly. And so I don't know, it's going to be interesting to watch, and we'll watch it very closely. I think you've seen a lot more enforcement on the English language proficiency. We've seen the violations ramp up quite a bit over the last couple of months when that's been really pushed.…

Scott Group

Analyst

Yes, that was -- I asked about the private fleet stuff, too, but if you want to maybe talk to that later...

Adam Miller

Analyst

I'll take that later. Yes. I think that's just been anecdotal dialogue that we've had with many of our customers who -- some of them have ramped up fairly large private fleets and others that built up a private fleet, not nearly as large as others during the pandemic. And they're just seeing that they're probably not optimizing the capacity that they have and that there's probably more value to outsource it than to do that internally. And so as these trucks hit the 4- or 5-year age and they have to determine if they want to refresh the trucks, we're finding that many of them are just shrinking that capacity and outsourcing it where it makes more economic sense for them.

Scott Group

Analyst

I think the data on the private fleet cost per mile, how it's been pressured over the last few years, if you compare that to the for-hire cost per mile, it's quite different than it has been historically. And so it's making an economic case for private fleets more challenging, especially as you're having to refresh the fleet. I think that the economics are changing a little bit. So we'll see how that plays out, still kind of to be determined, but we think that we might see a shift there.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Richa Harnain from Deutsche Bank.

Richa Harnain

Analyst

So I wanted to focus on LTL, I ask maybe a near-term question and then a longer-term one. Andrew, I think you said softer demand was noted for Q4, but also that your bid discussions are encouraging. And then you guided to flattish margins in Q4, but that would be significantly worse than normal seasonality. after you had very strong results in Q3, I think you're going to be the only carrier we cover that reports sequential margin improvement in Q3. So maybe help us square the messaging there and what's happening in Q4 and your guidance. And then just longer term, Adam, in the past, you've talked about potentially unlocking over time the unique synergy opportunities from being the only carrier that has both the strong TL franchise and growing LTL operation. Maybe elaborate on that as you've gotten some traction with LTL. How do you feel about that synergy potential? What it could look like, what inning we're in, et cetera?

Adam Miller

Analyst

Sure. All right. We'll touch on that, Richa. I think on the near term with LTL, I think what we want to comment is just that we've seen a little bit of softness going into the first couple of weeks of the quarter. It's hard to read into just a couple of weeks, but we felt it was noteworthy to share that and know that we're reacting to that, and we're making the adjustments where we can. A lot of that will be on the labor front. But we've built the network to handle a certain amount of volume, and we've been building into that volume over the last few quarters and to take a step back, does put a little bit pressure on the cost front. And so we're going to manage what we can over the near term. But when we look at what the bid season and how that's building, we feel encouraged by what opportunities lie in front of us that may start to go into effect in late first quarter and into the second quarter. So we want to be cognizant of being prepared to handle those volumes. And we talked about where we expect the OR to be from third to fourth. And if you look at how we trended last year, that was -- that would be pretty consistent with the degradation sequentially given the mix of customers that we work with, we tend to have a real slowdown in the back half of the quarter, particularly in December. And so that would be something that we just have to navigate. But again, we're taking a lot of steps towards just managing the cost where it makes sense and aligning that management with where our shipment volumes are. But again, as we build…

Andrew Hess

Analyst

I would just add a couple of points there. So I think the Q3 to Q4 seasonality may look a little stronger for us than you're used to kind of with our peers in LTL. And that's just, like Adam mentioned, the nature of our business. So it's obviously an extremely volume-sensitive business. So that puts pressure on the margins. But to kind of unpack a little bit what enabled us to improve our LTL margins by the 250 basis points from Q2 to Q3 with similar volumes, it's what we've been telling you we've been doing all along. We're starting to see results in that. And so I'll point out three areas that I think are probably important for you to understand. First, in labor. So we've in-sourced a lot of our purchase trans. We reduced that as a percentage of labor by 2.3% or purchase trans percent. Our headcount is down about 2.5%. So we've been able to kind of rightsize our headcount as we understand the flow of our freight. And so the rate of work we're doing and increased discipline on scheduling and hours and building the dock efficiencies are starting to translate into real improvement. Our variable labor per shipment improved quarter-over-quarter by $2 per shipment. So I would say those improvements are going to continue, continue fundamentally outside of the volume that's going to obviously lever in the business. The other costs that we've talked about in prior discussions here is some of the inefficiencies that we had just from the system and business integrations. So that's travel costs, contract labor, equipment rental, all of those were reduced in the quarter, and we expect that will continue. We feel like there's opportunity there. We're seeing good results as we implement technology in our P&D and rolling that out. We feel like we're just starting to see the benefit of that, and we feel like there's a lot of opportunity there to see more benefit. And then there was -- we've had some redundant facilities as we've upside certain locations over periods of time, we've been replacing existing facilities and upgrading our facilities with larger facilities where we've had yard or door pressure. So we've been carrying some duplicate costs in some areas. And now we were able to exit some of those prior locations. So those are kind of some of the structural costs that will come out as we get stability in our network. So all of those are going to continue. What you're seeing from Q3 to Q4 is simply a matter of the volume impact on the margins in a high fixed cost business.

Richa Harnain

Analyst

Okay. Understood. Quick -- just a quick one. So the softness that you cite, that's mainly on the volume side in LTL. It's not from a pricing perspective, what you're seeing in the environment is still pretty rational and consistent with what it's been?

Andrew Hess

Analyst

That's absolutely right. Pricing has been disciplined. We've not seen any pattern of change there. What we're seeing is some softness. Now it's early in the quarter. We'll see how it persists through the quarter. But these first few quarters have definitely signaled some softness.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Ariel Rosa from Citigroup.

Ariel Rosa

Analyst

So I wanted to ask about some of the cost-cutting opportunities. You had mentioned, I think, last quarter that there was kind of increased focus on scaling back costs and looking for ways you can be a little more efficient. I'm just wondering kind of where you are on that -- in terms of progressing on that for each of the segments.

Andrew Hess

Analyst

Okay. Yes. Let me -- I kind of focused on that last question on LTL. So maybe I'll spend a little time addressing our approach to our costs in our Truckload segment. So let me break it down for you a little bit because the approach is different by area. I just want to hit a few areas. So let me talk about fixed costs. They represent maybe 1/3 of our costs in truckload and obviously very lever really well in the business. We really feel good about the progress we've made here. We've reduced our fixed cost spend, cost per mile percentage of revenue, both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter by multiple percents. And so we -- the progress there in our cost on the fixed cost is meaningful, and we think permanent. So about half of that is equipment based. And that is obviously a big driver of our cost. And so we -- our strategy around equipment is multipronged our kind of analytical approach to equipment life cycle, how we procure our asset utilization improvement that you're seeing in our miles per truck numbers and our ability to reduce unseated trucks and then maintain optimal trailer tractor ratios, we've got a lot more miles we can put on our trucks, and we think that's going to -- with volume, it's going to really give us some leverage opportunity. But our goal is to reduce our equipment cost per mile year-over-year each quarter. And so we're seeing good results there. The second area in our fixed costs, our G&A and overhead. -- we're deploying significant initiatives, lean initiatives, technology-based initiatives, that's AI, but that's other areas as well with the goal to offset inflation, reduce our spend in G&A and overhead costs year-over-year every quarter. And so we saw good…

Adam Miller

Analyst

I would add...

Andrew Hess

Analyst

Yes, go ahead, Adam. Sorry.

Adam Miller

Analyst

Yes. just one said we didn't touch on intermodal. I mean that's an area where we've made, I think, a good amount of progress. And some of the areas we will be focused on is investing in chassis in certain markets, and that's given us some real operating leverage. And as we've improved the volume in that business, we've seen more of that volume translate to improved margins. And so we look to continue down that path. And then we're finding ourselves being able to balance our network a lot more effectively as well. And so that's another area that we're focused on, on the intermodal front.

Ariel Rosa

Analyst

Just as a follow-up, if you don't mind, I'm trying to get a little bit more clarity on like how far along you are in terms of implementing these initiatives and to what extent it's kind of showing up results -- showing up in results? And then how much can drive kind of improvement in margins independent of rate improvement that might still be on the table.

Andrew Hess

Analyst

No, I don't think -- look, I think it's -- I think our efforts in this have been earnest for the last year. It still feels like early stages, particularly around the technology-enabled efficiencies that we expect to really translate in our G&A and overhead costs. So that's probably -- I take a little more time than I probably can allocate here to really unpack that. But we feel like that is -- there's going to be a lot of opportunity there to really impact our business. We've been hard at work at it, and we think the results are largely ahead of us. We think 2026 is we're going to really start to see that impact our business.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Ken Hoexter from Bank of America.

Ken Hoexter

Analyst

Adam, just a real quick one on the -- a lot of confusion I'm getting some messaging. The technical reason, any technical reason why adjusted EPS, you went with $0.32 versus the $0.42, which it seems like that's your actual number if you exclude the two charges. And then my question would be just revisiting your fourth quarter comments, you talk about seasonal demand you're seeing it or you're not seeing -- you noted a lot of requests, but then said it's not building into actual seasonal demand. So a little mixed message. I just want to understand your message there.

Adam Miller

Analyst

Yes. No, I appreciate that, Ken, and give me an opportunity to clarify there. So for one, on the $0.10 related to the third-party insurance and the U.S. Xpress settlement, Historically, we have not adjusted those out. And so we're just following the historic pattern that we've used for reporting, but we wanted to make it clear to the reader that we believe these are kind of abnormal type charges. And -- but we want -- we didn't want to change our approach to how we actually do the accounting. So we adjusted out the impairments, but not the claims expense, if that makes sense.

Ken Hoexter

Analyst

Yes.

Adam Miller

Analyst

And then in terms of fourth quarter, so let me -- I know I was kind of saying two things at once. But what I would say is we went into this fourth quarter with some peak projects already awarded to us and some of those are already beginning to -- we're already beginning to execute. There's some that have maybe a later date than we would have seen historically, but still a project that is under the works that we've been awarded and are anticipating generating outsized margins. Now what I was trying to convey is kind of more of just the broad-based demand in terms of I look at every day how we're booked out, we haven't seen that demand grow like we would typically see from third to fourth when you have a strong peak season. So there's kind of limited seasonality with certain customers that projects that we already have. Now last year, we had a project or two that developed kind of out of the blue kind of mid-fourth quarter that really had an impact on our results, and that was largely in our Swift business. And we're having dialogue around that, but nothing has been awarded. Nothing -- there's nothing that we can count on that's going to occur. So that still may happen. But today, I can't sit here and say, yes, that's volume we expect to see. So I guess what I'm trying to say is there is some peak seasonality. It's somewhat limited right now. That could change. But based on what we see, what we know, we're expecting what we already have in the pipeline to occur and really just limited seasonality beyond that.

Ken Hoexter

Analyst

Would that be in your range? Is that in the $0.34 to $0.40? Or is that something that pushes beyond that?

Adam Miller

Analyst

The $0.34 to $0.40 is what we know today.

Ken Hoexter

Analyst

Okay. And then just a follow-up on an answer you gave before, Theresa, just a real quick one. The OR bounce, I was surprised at your answer there just because I thought you had start-up costs a year ago. Is that -- I know you're talking seasonality or Andrew was talking about it, but wasn't there start-up costs in that number as well?

Adam Miller

Analyst

We had some start-up costs with DHE, but we also had accelerated load count that we -- our shipment count from third to fourth. And so today, where we stand, we've seen a little bit of softness in the first two weeks. And so we're just taking a conservative approach on if that continues, this is what we would expect margins to do with us taking steps to try to limit the impact on it. that could change if we see those volumes begin to pick up. We don't know how much could be related to government shutdown, how much that flows through in terms of LTL shipments. But it was just kind of unusual to see a little bit of a slowdown. And our channel checks would indicate that I think other LTL carriers are seeing something similar.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Chappell from Evercore ISI.

Jonathan Chappell

Analyst

Hopefully, the enforcement of non-domiciled CDL and English proficiency is a little bit better than asking one question and one question only. Here's my one question, Adam, a little interesting that Knight-Swift was so supportive of the UNP and NSC potential merger. I understand the benefits to your intermodal franchise given that you're on both rails as your primary carrier. But can you walk through what it means to your TL business, especially the long haul? 70% of your business is one-way spot market or one-way market. And it seems like that's the area where a lot of the revenue synergies are coming from, from this transaction. So maybe the puts and takes on why you're so supportive of that where on the surface, it looks like it could be more competitive to your core business.

Adam Miller

Analyst

Yes. So here's what I would say, without getting too detailed here, if it offers a cost-effective solution to our customers, we think that we would be supportive of that, considering that we have an intermodal offering that we could be there to support our customers with our rail partners. Now when I think about that long length of haul freight that you're referring to, quite honestly, that is not -- we don't haul a lot of that freight today. We do a lot of the regional kind of the tougher freight that we know how to price and generate a healthy revenue per truck per day. The long length of haul is typically the cheapest freight out there because it's very attractive to the really small micro carriers that really care about just running miles on those trucks. And typically, those are some of the less safe carriers out there. And so I feel like offering a good solution, a better solution for our customer for that type of length of haul would not be detrimental to our business. It would be additive because we could provide that with intermodal because, hey, that's just not freight that we really compete for in our truckload business.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Ravi Shanker from Morgan Stanley.

Ravi Shanker

Analyst

I'm going to stick with the three run-on question strategy here. Just 3 follow-ups from me. One is just to confirm, you guys sound excited about what's happening on the capacity side, but you said it may take some time. So I just want to confirm that you don't have anything capacity-wise in terms of tightness reflected in your guidance versus normal seasonality. Second, can you give us an update on where bid season has been going for '26 in your early conversations? And third, when will you know if those special projects for peak season materialize? You said mid-fourth quarter. So will you know in like two to three weeks' time?

Adam Miller

Analyst

Yes. We're going to have to change the rules for this. I think Scott started this off, not on the right foot here.

Ravi Shanker

Analyst

Yes, shift call.

Adam Miller

Analyst

Yes, I know, I know. So I'll try to wrap that in as one question, right, in terms of just how are we seeing the market right now. Yes, I think, again, on the capacity front, we're seeing certain areas where there's some tightness, and it's really -- we get some visibility of that through our brokerage business and when they're trying to secure certain capacity in some markets. It is starting to percolate, but it's not widespread yet. But I do think over time, it's going to build. And I think there's probably a year or two time line when a lot of these kind of non-domiciled CDLs will expire. I think it will -- it won't be linear. I believe we'll see that happen maybe on the earlier part of that time line. So I do feel like we start to see that into '26. But really, that's not something that we're baking into the fourth quarter. So the fourth quarter, it's, hey, we have the projects that we've already had built into our system. Some have already started. Some will begin kind of -- could be late October, early November is really the time line. And some of them have a definite time, but get pushed out if the customer still has a need, and we're starting to see that with some of the projects we have already started. So it's still a bit of a moving target. But anything that's been awarded to us, we expect to start on target and on the date that we were awarded it. I think, the real question is, is there going to be something that builds in a meaningful way that we're just not aware of today similar to what happened last year. And so again, we're not baking that into our guidance. If that were to occur, that would give us some upside. Your long run on question there, Ravi.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Tom Wadewitz from UBS.

Thomas Wadewitz

Analyst

So I wanted to, I guess, get your thoughts on how much price maybe you need and to improve truckload margin in 2026. Clearly, there's a lot of hard work going on, on the cost side to control costs and reduce your cost per mile, which is great. I don't know if you anticipate any driver inflation or if that's just going to be another kind of muted year. But how do you think about inflation that you'll have to offset? And what kind of pricing do you think you need in 2026 to see some meaningful improvement in truckload margin?

Adam Miller

Analyst

Yes. So, Tom, I think the way we're looking at it is, I think early in the bid season where we don't see the tightness that could come in '26, we're going after securing healthy wins on the volume front, but probably getting the low single-digit pricing in the early part of the bid, which I think we shared in our prepared remarks. I think that, that pricing will grow if the capacity tightens like we think it will. But we wanted to start the bid season with a healthy amount of volume because when we can run our trucks at more volume and improve the utilization on the equipment, that certainly helps with that fixed cost absorption. And so that helps drive our cost per mile down and manage any inflation that we may feel. On the driver front, it's really going to be dependent on what we see in the market. If drivers get really tight, obviously, as an industry, we're due to do something for drivers, but it's going to be market-driven, and we haven't determined if that's something that we're going to do yet. So I think the margin improvement that we expect to see in 2026 will be a combination of volume and price earlier in '26 will be probably more volume, and I think back half will be driven more by price.

Thomas Wadewitz

Analyst

But if you get that low single-digit pricing, is that enough to get margin improvement? Or you need to see something stronger through the bid season than that to really get the margin improvement?

Adam Miller

Analyst

If that leads to additional volumes and productivity, then yes, that can improve margins. But as -- if the market does tighten like we expect it will, we'll have opportunities on -- in the spot market where we'll shift capacity over there where we'll be able to see rates move much faster than what we've done on the contractual business.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Reed Seay from Stephens.

Reed Seay

Analyst

I wanted to touch on exactly what you just talked about was on the contract side. As we look at this tightening, I'm sure shippers are seeing a lot of the same things that you are. When you start your negotiations for next year, do you get any leverage when you talk about the tightening that you're seeing in the capacity coming out? Or are they still pretty hesitant to give you any credit for that right now as we sit?

Adam Miller

Analyst

That's going to be really case by case with our customers. There's some that try to look ahead and try to see what carriers they want in their portfolio if they do come across a tighter market and may be willing to do more on the contractual side to lock in that capacity. And then there's others that are going to take the approach of getting the best price possible in the near term and deal with any fallout in their network down the road. And our customers have different means of doing that. Some have mini bids that they put out on a weekly basis where they have challenges covering certain lanes and they allow carriers to bid on that. And in many cases, in a tightening market, that becomes a premium rate that they pay to cover any holes. And then there's others that put things out on just spot boards that are transactional that we participate in. And then there's others that may come to us and try to secure more capacity at, I guess, more favorable rates for us to ensure that they don't have fallout. But again, it's going to be customer by customer and hey, we're fine with any approach that they want to utilize, and we work with them to provide them good service, to have flexible capacity at scale. And hey, we understand the market similar to what -- how they would, but some take different approaches. And so we just -- we always try to remain nimble in the market. So we don't lock in too much capacity. And so when there are changes, we can be one of the first carriers out there to capture what the market will bear. And that usually leads to us improving margins faster than the broader industry. Okay. So I think that hit our time for the call. We appreciate everyone who has joined. And again, we've got the phone number out there if we weren't able to get to your question, (602) 606-6349. And again, we appreciate everyone who joined the call.

Operator

Operator

And this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.