Werner Enterprises IncWERN
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Werner Enterprises Inc Deutsche Bank’s Chicago Industrials Summit

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Richa HarnainDirector and Lead Analyst of Surface Transportation and Airfreight Equity

Welcome everyone to Deutsche Bank's Industrial Conference for 2026. I'm Richa Harne, and I head up the Equity Research Transportation franchise here. Very pleased to have Werner Enterprises with us today. Derek Leathers, Chairman and CEO, along with Chris Wikoff, CFO, and Chris Neal, who heads up the IR efforts along with a number of other responsibilities. Thank you for the full suite here. Maybe we could jump right in. I'll start with you, Derek. Perhaps you can start with level setting on where we are in the cycle. You seemed very constructive on your earnings call a few days ago. I wanted to hear more on kind of what cards the market is dealing you before we talk about specific strategies that Werner's implementing around that framework. Let's start with the supply side.

Richa HarnainDirector and Lead Analyst of Surface Transportation and Airfreight Equity

You used the term early innings to describe where we are with respect to some of the recent initiatives on capacity and cleaning that up. Just elaborate there on what makes you think we're so early, what could be next, et cetera.

Derek LeathersChairman and CEO

Yeah, sure. There's a lot there, but I'll certainly take a swing at it. Where we're at, obviously, is we are in the turn now versus the pending turn. I think it's been a supply-driven turn, which is different than what we've seen historically. Usually, when these kind of tightening events happen, it's driven by upticks in demand. This one has been supply-led with a lot of the attrition that's been taking place. I used early innings because I think there's a multifaceted level of enforcement going on. I think most of the focus has been on the non-domiciled CDL, and people kind of have a belief that, well, these will fade out over this sort of expiration timeline that's been widely publicized over the next, call it, now we're down to probably more like a year to 15 months.

Derek LeathersChairman and CEO

But the reality is there's a lot more going on than that. When I say early innings is because I'm speaking to everything from what we're seeing with start at the beginning of the funnel, right? The schools and school networks around the country where they're actually going in and validating that these schools are in fact training drivers versus just issuing training certificates. They've closed out. They removed about 10,000 schools from the federal registry already. They've closed down approaching 850, 900 schools at this point. As that school closure rate continues, that tightens supply even further, but it should be tightened if you're not actually training these drivers. By contrast, for instance, we've had nine of our schools audited and came out of those audits with very flying colors, like almost zero defect across the nine schools.

Derek LeathersChairman and CEO

We are comfortable that what we are doing is trying to train drivers the right way. On the electronic logging side, which has probably got the least attention, I think that is where a lot of my early innings comments come from. They have stopped 400, nearly 500 at this point, new entrants into the marketplace because the ELDs did not pass the basic kind of sniff test of certification, and they were too easily able to be edited or manipulated. They have taken many of the existing ELD providers out, but there is a lot more of that that needs to happen. At the starting point of all this, there is over 1,000 electronic logging companies registered in the U.S.

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