Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Our first question comes from Tom Wadewitz – JP Morgan.
Tom Wadewitz – JP Morgan
Maybe you could go into a little further detail what it is that you see that seems to give you a lot of confidence, or at least some confidence that the market’s improving?
Henry H. Gerkens
I think what we are seeing right now is increased revenue from some existing accounts from agents that we brought over. I mentioned we have some very, very big weakness in certain accounts. I mentioned automotive-related was down 17%. To offset that, we obviously are doing something right in taking additional market share. When I look at pricing from the van sector, the van pricing has literally, in our opinion, stabilized and we are not having these huge declines as we had. Volumes are still a little bit light based on our revenue mix, but we continue to have a very strong platform operation with platform increasing in the fourth quarter over 11% and we see that continuing into the first quarter.
Again, it’s our drive I think to take market share and I do believe that things, when you look at where we were last year in the first quarter, just aren’t the same way. I think at certain points in time things, I believe, do bottom. I’m not calling a bottom but I think when you look at what the Fed has done recently, I think that when you get in the back half of this year, I think we’ve got to be pretty close to a bottom. So I just see a lot of positive things happening.
Tom Wadewitz – JP Morgan
Do you think more of the optimism is driven by a different mix of customers so your agents have probably focused hard on getting new customers and maybe have a little better business outlook? Do you think it’s more that the market’s kind of bottomed?
Henry H. Gerkens
I think clearly we’ve done a very good job as far as taking some market share. When you look at the Global Logistics numbers as far as some of those increases and some of the modes again, albeit some of the numbers are small but we took out some pretty substantial growth in Landstar Global Logistics. That represents really new business and increased account penetration, which is really one of the initiatives that we’re going to go through this year.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
