Three months after J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. president and CEO Shelley Simpson said her team was getting “better signals” from customers, the leaders of the No. 4 carrier on the FleetOwner 500: For-Hire said they are growing increasingly confident that the freight market has returned to more seasonal demand patterns.
“While in general, capacity remains readily available in the market on the highway side of the business, some customers are beginning to use more mini bids to fill some out-of-cycle capacity needs,” EVP Spencer Frazier said on an Oct. 15 conference call discussing J.B. Hunt’s third-quarter results. “Additionally, there is interest in having more collaborative long-term planning discussions around business strategies. Historically, both of these engagements have been indicative that supply and demand are becoming more in balance.”
Asked later to dig into how much J.B. Hunt’s solid intermodal numbers—total volume rose 5% in the third quarter, with transcontinental loads growing 7%—might have been influenced by shippers trying to get ahead of a port workers’ strike, president of intermodal Darren Field leaned toward underlying solidity being the driver rather than pre-shipping.
“We do have a lot of customers that continue to expect a normal peak as we go through the fourth quarter,” Field said. “We do anticipate continued demand for our services and we’ll all kind of have to wait and see if it’s a faster pull-down. But at this point, I think we’re expecting things to behave what we consider normal.”
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Arkansas-based J.B. Hunt booked $152 million in net earnings during the three months that ended Sept. 30, which was a drop of about 19% from the same period in 2023. Operating income fell 7% year over year to $224 million, while total operating revenues slipped to $3.07 billion from $3.17 billion.
Intermodal revenue for the quarter climbed to $1.56 billion, while other operating units saw their top line slip from a year earlier. J.B. Hunt’s average revenue per intermodal load fell to $2,841 from $2,984 a year ago but was up from $2,829 in the spring. The company’s dedicated and logistics services divisions made similar increases from Q2.
J.B. Hunt’s report and executives’ commentary jibe with the latest set of truckload volume and rate data from DAT Freight & Analytics. The research firm’s Truckload Volume Index for September showed year-over-year increases for van, reefer, and flatbed freight, and Ken Adamo, its chief of analytics, said the numbers showed “we’re firmly into a new freight cycle” and added that more traditional seasonality trends should provide a lift to carriers in the coming months.
Shares of J.B. Hunt (Ticker: JBHT) rose smartly in the wake of its leaders’ report: In early-afternoon trading Oct. 16, they were up nearly 4% to about $181. The stock of several other prominent trucking firms, including ArcBest Corp. and Schneider National Inc., were making similar moves.
However, J.B. Hunt shares are still down slightly over the past six months, reducing the company’s market capitalization to about $18.4 billion.
