Saia Inc.’s leaders put up some big numbers in 2024, the company’s 100th year of operations: The Georgia-based carrier invested a record $1.04 billion, opened 21 terminals, relocated nine others, put into service more than 6,000 trailers, and brought on about 1,300 new employees.
Now it’s time to capitalize.
Speaking after reporting Saia’s fourth quarter results, President and CEO Fritz Holzgrefe and CFO Matt Batteh said they are focused on translating those investments in the national less-than-truckload network Saia now runs into rate gains.
“Our intense focus is on closing the revenue-per-bill gap with our national peers,” Holzgrefe told analysts. “Driving that mix of business and making sure that we’re paid appropriately for those capital investments are critically important. … Finding that freight that pays the bills with a customer that we can create a tremendous amount of value for, that’s where we win.”
See also: FedEx spinning off its LTL freight business
The medium-term goal: Push Saia’s operating ratio below 80%—from the 85.0% of last year and the 84.0% in 2023. Part of that will be higher prices but Battah also pointed that newly opened terminals—many of them acquired from the defunct Yellow Corp. over the past 18 months—will become more efficient as they build business.
The network expansion—Saia, No. 19 on the FleetOwner 500: For-Hire, now runs 214 centers and will open a few more this year—is opening doors to talk to new potential customers, Batteh said. Holzgrefe called Saia’s recent growth push “a really big deal.”
“I’m not sure that we fully comprehend what the potential of it is,” the CEO added. “We’re pretty excited about it, though […] If we keep [the] execution going, we have the opportunity to outperform.”
Such sentiments echo comments made in recent months by Holzgrefe and Batteh’s peers at Knight-Swift Transportation as they have built a near-national LTL network.
Like Saia’s leaders, Knight-Swift CEO Adam Miller and CFO Andrew Hess have been pushing prices. On their January 22 Q4 earnings conference call with investors, Miller said Knight-Swift’s sales teams have been securing LTL contract renewals with mid-single-digit rate increases.
“We have no plans to discount our pricing to win volume,” Miller added. “We have an opportunity to maintain disciplined pricing and grow the volume that we need to really start to gain some traction and to start to optimize some of these new terminals that we’ve opened up.”
On the financial front, Saia produced a net income of $76.1 million in the last three months of 2024, down from about $89 million in late 2023. Operating revenues rose 5% to $789 million as LTL tonnage climbed 10% and shipments rose 6.2%. Those volume number trends persisted into January when Saia handled 6.5% more shipments than a year ago, and tonnage was up 13.5%.
Shares of Saia (Ticker: SAIA) couldn’t escape the February 3 topsy-turvy market action around tariffs, which left most trucking stocks in the red. Saia fell 2% to about $470 but is still up more than 20% over the past six months—a move that has grown the company’s market capitalization to about $12.5 billion.
