Pat O'Malley
Analyst · Morgan Stanley
Thank you, Henry. Although Landstar has historically participated, to a small degree, in the LTL market, beginning in August 2011, we increased our emphasis on this service offering by implementing an easy-to-use capacity procurement tool, established standard rates with LTL carriers and work with our agents to identify customer opportunities. As such, LTL volumes have increased over 20% in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the first quarter the previous year. As Henry mentioned, most of our sales staff and many agents have a background in LTL and are comfortable selling the product. From the perspective of the LTL carrier base, Landstar's business model, diverse agent population and large customer base represents an attractive variable cost sales channel. In addition, virtually every existing Landstar truckload customer has some LTL business. This gives Landstar and our agents an additional revenue stream inside our existing account base. Finally, having this service offering exposes Landstar to another group of potential agents. Now, Henry had talked about our new agent revenue performance. As a reminder, a new agent in the 2013 first quarter represents an agent who had contracted with Landstar after January 1, 2012. As Henry stated, new agent revenue in the 2013 first quarter was 2.2% of revenue, below the historic range of 3% to 6%. We continue to believe the challenges for small independent brokers are many and difficult to solve without outside support. Whether it's access to capital, cash flow, tight capacity, inferior systems or the increase in the minimum surety bond requirement from $10,000 to $75,000, this segment of the population is fertile ground to recruit productive new agents. The Landstar agent recruiting department and field staff have done a good job of seeding our pipeline with quality new agent prospects. Although the number of new agents add in the first quarter 2013 declined slightly year-over-year, the average revenue per new agent per week nearly doubled to over $10,000, near an all-time high. We believe that our recruiting strategies, business environment and systems will help us maintain the momentum in adding productive new agents through the balance of the year. Henry?