CHRW 2026财年第三季度业绩电话会：利润率扩张、精益 AI 与 RXO 协同效应lg...

C.H.罗宾逊物流（C.H. Robinson Worldwide，纳斯达克代码：CHRW）公布2026年第三季度市场份额持续扩大、整车运输盈利能力提高以及运营杠杆率上升。管理层还强调了计划对RXO的收购，包括3亿美元的净协同效应目标，以及RXO主要整车经纪客户之间的重叠度有限。

核心要点

• 总营收同比增长29.5%，调整后毛利润（AGP）增长14.5%。
• 北美陆路运输部门（NAST）业务量增长3.5%，而公司引用的货运发货量指数则下降0.3%。这标志着其业务表现连续第14个季度跑赢市场。
• 由于CHRW对合约货运重新定价，并以更高毛利率获取交易性业务量，每笔货运的整车运输AGP同比增长17%。
• 扣除重组费用后，NAST运营利润率达到40.3%，上升110个基点；全球货运部门运营利润率上升660个基点至36%。
• 在业务量增长的情况下，平均员工人数同比下降10.4%。第三季度NAST每名员工每天的货运量提高了15%以上，自2022年底以来累计提高了65%以上。
• 管理层重申了计划收购RXO带来的3亿美元净协同效应目标。CHRW已暂停股票回购，并计划在2028年底前将杠杆率恢复至目标区间。

核心财务数据

7月全公司每工作日月度AGP同比增长6%，8月增长14%，9月增长24%。环比来看，该指标在7月有所下降，随后随着整车运输盈利能力和海运费率改善，在8月和9月有所回升。

业务与运营表现

北美陆路运输部门

NAST整车和零担（LTL）业务量均增长3.5%。零担业务实现连续第11个季度同比业务量增长。管理层指出，零售、医疗保健和科技行业是整车业务增长的主要来源，甩挂运输、跨境和短途服务提供了支持。

整车业务组合保持在70%合约业务和30%交易性业务，同比和环比均持平。扣除燃料后，第三季度美国DAT现货运价同比增长约37%。CHRW表示，订货拒绝率和货车比上升，创造了以更高毛利率获取交易性货运的机遇。

管理层将每笔货运整车运输AGP增长17%归因于合约重新定价加快、价格与成本发现能力提升，以及有选择地参与现货市场。

精益AI与生产力

CHRW继续将定制的AI Agent集成到其“从报价到收款”的工作流中。该公司拥有超过450名内部工程师和数据科学家，并表示尽管Token使用量在两年内增长了40多倍，但按年化运行速率计算，年Token成本仍低于200万美元。

平均员工人数同比下降10.4%，环比下降2%。管理层表示，生产力的提升集中在运营和后勤岗位，而面向客户的能力则得以保留或扩展。

全球货运部门

全球货运部门实现36%的运营利润率，超过了公司30%的中期循环目标。CHRW正在将NAST中使用的AI Agent、机器学习定价工具和收入管理流程推广至全球货运部门。

管理层看到了在营收增长、定价、采购运输成本和生产力方面的进一步机遇。不过，该公司目前暂无计划修改其中期循环利润率目标。

计划中的RXO收购

管理层表示RXO的毛利率状况和客户组合健康，主要的盈利机遇来自于CHRW更低的服务成本模式。公司表示，对RXO前100名整车经纪客户的外部审查显示，客户重叠度有限。

CHRW还强调了优势互补。CHRW在零担领域能力更强，而RXO补充了最后一公里和加急服务的能力。管理层承认可能会出现一定程度的客户流失，但表示这已纳入披露的协同效应目标中。

公司继续以3亿美元的净协同效应为目标。其整合计划将专注于运营和后勤部门的生产力提升，同时保留面向客户的员工和客户关系。

管理层指引

• 全年人员费用预计在13.6亿至13.7亿美元之间，反映了业务量增长、盈利改善以及基于绩效的薪酬增加。
• 全年SG&A费用指引从5.40亿-5.80亿美元提高至5.85亿-5.90亿美元，主要是由于理赔费用增加。
• 折旧与摊销仍预计接近此前9500万至1.05亿美元指引区间的下限。
• 全年资本支出指引仍保持在6500万至7500万美元。
• 全年实际税率预计为18%-20%。
• 管理层仍有信心全年运营利润将落在保持不变的目标区间内。该区间的下限相当于稀释后每股收益至少为6美元，不过公司并未给出该区间内具体数值的指引。
• CHRW预计第四季度市场业务量受季节性因素影响将低于第三季度，但预计其同比跑赢市场的表现将持续。管理层还预计，随着运力收紧，整车现货运价将在假期期间上涨。
• 公司预计将在续保谈判结束后（可能在12月中下旬）提供2027年保险成本的更新信息。

风险与关注事项

运价上涨增加了应收账款，并使净营运资金保持高位，从而给现金流带来压力。第三季度的理赔费用也高于往常，不过今年迄今的保险和理赔费用仍低于总营收的50个基点。

管理层预计2027年保险成本将上升，但认为增幅在可控制范围内。汽车责任险目前约占总营收的25个基点。在谈判结束之前，最终续保结果仍存在不确定性。

货运市场需求继续呈现喜忧参半的局面。管理层提到科技和某些制造业领域存在局部增长，但表示房地产、整体制造业和大部分零售业表现低迷。公司尚未看到支持持续、广泛货运增长的催化因素。

RXO交易还带来了整合、客户留存、员工留存和杠杆风险。CHRW预计交易完成时杠杆率将上升，目前已暂停股票回购，并计划在2028年底前去杠杆至目标区间。

分析师问答要点

• SG&A正常化：管理层表示，由于理赔具有非线性特征，第三季度SG&A高于正常运行速率。预计第四季度SG&A将环比下降，且不认为第三季度是新的费用基准。
• RXO客户留存： CHRW表示，公司将从客户需求倒推，并动用两家公司最强的客户关系团队。管理层认为，RXO健康的毛利率降低了仅因盈利能力问题而拒绝所收购货运业务的风险。
• 员工留存：生产力提升举措预计将侧重于运营和后勤部门，而非面向客户的岗位。CHRW意图将其数据、定价工具和技术平台应用于RXO的销售和客户关系团队。
• 保险成本通胀：在续保谈判完成前，管理层拒绝给现在预期的2027年增幅定量数据。管理层表示，其储备的转型举措以及持续推广的精益AI部署应有助于抵消通胀压力。
• 全球货运部门的机遇：管理层预计NAST的成功策略将支持全球货运部门实现额外的营收增长、毛利率提升和生产力改善，同时维持现有的中期循环利润率目标。
• 货运需求： CHRW对部分特定垂直领域的业务回暖保持谨慎乐观，但表示广泛的市场参与度仍不足以表明货运出现持续的绝对增长。

业绩电话会议完整转录

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完整财报电话会议逐字稿

管理层陈述

Operator

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the C.H. Robinson Third Quarter 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, Wednesday, October 28, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ives, Senior Director of Investor Relations.

Charles Ives

Thank you, Donna, and good morning, everyone. On the call with me today are Dave Bozeman, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Michael Castagnetto, our President of North American Surface Transportation. Arun Rajan, our Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer; and Damon Lee, our Chief Financial Officer. I'd like to remind you that our remarks today contain forward-looking statements. .

Slide 2 in today's presentation list factors that could cause our actual results to differ from management's expectations. Our earnings presentation slides are supplemental to our earnings release and can be found in the Events and Presentations section of our website at investor.chrobinson.com. Today's remarks also contain certain non-GAAP measures and reconciliations of those measures to GAAP measures are included in the presentation.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave.

David Bozeman

Thank you, Chuck. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before we talk about another quarter of strong results delivered by the Robinson team, I want to take a moment to review what the team has over the past 3 years to revolutionize our business and why we can replicate that transformation with the acquisition of RXO. Three years ago, many doubted that a lean operating model was applicable or could be adequately implemented to drive significant benefit in the logistics business. So it will be impossible to outgrow the market and expand margins at the same time.

As it turns out, we've consistently outgrown the market. We've expanded our gross margins and optimized our portfolio, and we significantly increased the productivity and operating leverage of our business. We've achieved all of the things we said we would do, building a strong say-do ratio. Let's talk about how we delivered all of this and how this put us in a position to have a business model that can now be applied to inorganic solutions. As always, it starts with the customer. We strengthened our value proposition by improving the horizontal capabilities that support the verticals our customers operate in.

We've invested in our customer-facing roles, and we've improved our go-to-market approach in order to emphasize the full breadth of our domestic and global services. As a result of providing better service and solutions to our customers, our NAST business has outgrown the market every quarter over the past 3 years, and we expect this consistent organic market share growth to continue for many years to come. We've implemented disciplined revenue management practices that dictate the responsible nature in which we obtain market share at an appropriate gross margin.

These practices have enabled us to be more selective in the volume that we seek and accept and they've improved the speed and success of repricing our contractual portfolio when the market conditions require it. At the same time, we've improved our ability to capture spot market volume with enhanced price and cost discovery and with an AI agent that responds significantly faster to transactional quotes received via e-mail. All of these initiatives have enabled us to expand our gross margins.

Last, but certainly not least, we've lowered our cost to serve and improved our operating leverage by removing waste and automating manual processes through lean disciplines and custom-built AI agents. This has enabled us to decouple head count growth from volume growth. As a result, since the end of 2023, we've expanded our NAST operating margin by over 1,500 basis points and achieved our mid-cycle target of a 40% operating margin, and we've done it despite facing headwinds from the overall market.

Similarly, we've expanded the operating margin in our Global Forwarding business by over 2,500 basis points and exceeded our mid-cycle target of a 30% operating margin by applying the same Lean AI strategy. Three weeks ago, we announced our agreement to acquire RXO and we continue to be very excited about the benefits of the planned acquisition for our customers and carriers, our employees and our shareholders. The same lean operating model and AI technology that have been vitally important in the transformations of our NAST and Global 40 businesses are what will enable us to successfully integrate and transform the RXO business.

These disciplines don't disappear as we integrate a strong team and book of business with additional capabilities. Rather, we believe these disciplines are what will enable us to deliver different results in this industry's past acquisitions. Those disciplines will be emphasized by our skilled integration team that has proven integration experience and our transformation pedigree. That team is being led by our Vice President of the Robinson Operating Model, Jim Rutlinger, who was instrumental in several successful integrations at Danaher and in helping me stand up the lean operating model at Robinson in January of 2024.

There are also a few other things that I want to reemphasize related to our planned acquisition of RXO. It is not a substitute for our organic growth or an indicator that our organic growth is slowing. As I said earlier, we expect our organic outgrowth to continue, supported by the same initiatives that we've been executing on. We believe the inorganic growth from the RXO addition will accelerate our growth and profitability. For example, in addition to our own knowledge of where we do and don't compete with RXO, our team of external advisers did a thorough analysis of potential customer overlap, focusing on the top 100-truckload brokerage customers of RXO.

Even though this seems hard for some to believe that data shows that the overlap is limited. We are a data-driven company, and we rely on data to drive our decisions. And finally, a thorough analysis of RXO's legal docket was an important piece of the diligence that was completed. That analysis revealed that RXO's legal docket is a neutral factor when compared to our own docket. And like us, RXO has a significant assurance tower for contingent auto liability claims.

Our Assurance Tower is a differentiator versus many other brokers. And is 1 reason that we believe an inflation in our 2027 auto liability premium will be less than what other brokers will have to absorb and much less than the extreme scenarios that some have suggested. We continue to manage our legal docket as we have for years, with most cases being either dismissed or settled for amounts below our deductible. We're also progressing nicely through our '27 insurance renewal process -- and we believe this renewal will result in insurance inflation that is reasonable and manageable. As a reference, we've been absorbing approximately $30 million of annual wage inflation. And we still delivered double-digit earnings growth in 2024 through 2026.

Our insurance renewal process will be finalized by the end of December, and we will share an update on our 2027 insurance costs as soon as we can. Lastly, we continue to see examples of our customers deciding to alter their sourcing strategy to shift volume to larger brokers with significant insurance coverage and strong carrier betting processes. Everything that I just discussed is why we strongly believe that we can deliver the $300 million of net synergies from the acquisition of RXO while continuing to drive organic outgrowth that we'll be able to manage the expected insurance inflation and that we'll continue to deliver significant value for our shareholders.

Now turning briefly to our third quarter results that Michael and Damon will discuss in more detail. I want to thank our people for continuing to provide exceptional service to our customers and carriers, embracing the Robinson operating model and executing with discipline, resulting in another quarter of double-digit year-over-year earnings growth. Q3 was the 14th consecutive quarter in which the NAST team delivered year-over-year volume growth that outpaced the cash freight shipment index. They also continue to deploy our disciplined revenue management practices, while the North American trucking market continued to reflect a period of significant supply-driven tightening.

By successfully repricing a large portion of our contractual truckload portfolio and by capturing spot volumes at higher margins, the team achieved a 17% year-over-year increase in truckload AGP per load. In NAST and Global Forwarding, the team continues to turn manual processes into a genetic workflows that are increasingly automated, more connected and easier to manage at scale. As a result, both businesses delivered a higher level of year-over-year productivity improvements that they achieved in the first half of 2026 and both businesses achieved their mid-cycle operating margin targets again.

Our ability to consistently deliver secular earnings growth over the last 3 years is a result of the disciplined execution of our Lean AI strategy. Lean AI is our unique approach that combines the principles of our Robinson operating model rooted in Lean methodology with the power of custom-built AI and the expertise of our people to maximize value, minimize waste and drive better outcomes for customers and carriers. We're highly confident in our ability to continue to execute on all of our strategic initiatives in any market environment.

Our industry-leading cost-to-serve model is highly scalable and we expect it to strengthen further as we harness AI's capabilities to automate more of the quote-to-cash life cycle of a load. As the industry pacesetter for cutting-edge innovation and differentiated solutions, -- we will continue to use our domain expertise and lean mindset to build technology that delivers on our customers' promise and drives higher value for all of our stakeholders.

I'll turn it over to Michael now to provide more details on our NAST results.

Michael Castagnetto

Thanks, Dave, and good morning, everyone. In Q3, the NAST team continued to demonstrate our ability to consistently gain market share to optimize our profit per load despite significant higher spot rates and to deliver higher levels of productivity as we incorporate agentic AI into our workflows. As Dave mentioned, our total volume outgrew the cash freight shipment Index for the 14th consecutive quarter. Our total NAST volume grew 3.5% year-over-year compared to a 0.3% decline in the index. Our growth was balanced with both truckload and LTL volume growing 3.5%, reflecting market share gains in both modes.

Having industry-leading solutions in both truckload and LTL is a competitive advantage for Robinson. In our LTL business, where we moved more LTL freight than any other 3PL in North America, we delivered year-over-year volume growth for the 11th consecutive quarter, underscoring our sustained outperformance versus the broader LTL market. We'll continue to drive the best solutions for our customers and move their freight in the most optimal way that fits their supply chain. One of the keys to our consistent market share gains has been volume growth in key verticals that we specifically targeted.

During Q3, we continued to deliver truckload volume growth in the retail, health care and technology verticals, supported by our horizontal solutions such as drop trailer, cross-border and short-haul capabilities. We continue to win volume in both the contractual and transactional markets. As a result, the mix of our truckload volume remained at 70% contractual and 30% transactional, which was unchanged year-over-year and sequentially. At the same time, stricter driver requirements, federal enforcement actions and other carrier challenges continue to remove capacity from the market, created an environment that is increasingly sensitive to disruptions and sudden changes in freight demand has also caused truckload spot market cost to increase significantly in 2026.

Excluding fuel, DAT spot rates in the U.S. increased approximately 37% year-over-year in Q3. As a result, load-to-truck ratios and tender rejection rates remained elevated, which continue to create opportunities for transactional volumes at higher margins. In Q3, our team continued to effectively capture the right transactional volume at a substantially higher AGP per shipment compared to last year. Combined with ongoing repricing of our contractual business to reflect the new market realities, we were able to give a 17% year-over-year increase in our truckload AGP per shipment.

Our revenue management disciplines, our improved price and cost discovery and our strong customer relationships have enabled us to reprice our contractual portfolio much faster than we have historically. Our customers know they can trust the market and rate information we're bringing to them, which has resulted in historically high level of acceptance in our repricing campaigns. Across NAST, we also continued to integrate Agentic AI into our workflows, lowering our industry-leading cost to serve and elevating the customer experience by enabling faster, more reliable service.

The increased automation of our workflows enabled us to continue delivering double-digit increases in NAST shipments per person per day with a greater than 15% year-over-year increase in Q3 and a greater than 65% increase since the end of 2022, measured across the entirety of our NAST organization. Looking ahead to Q4, market volumes are typically softer compared to seasonal peak in Q3 with the 10-year average of the cash phrase shipment index, excluding the pandemic impacted year of 2020, reflecting a 3.4% sequential volume decline in Q4. On a year-over-year basis, we expect our consistent outperformance versus the market index to continue.

Truckload spot rates are expected to inflect higher during Q4 as capacity seasonally tightens during the holiday time frame between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day. As we look forward, we will continue to deliver industry-leading solutions and flexibility to our customers and carriers. We'll also continue to appropriately exercise our optionality on a monthly, weekly and daily basis to pivot toward volume or margins as market dynamics evolve, making disciplined data-driven adjustments in order to optimize for the most effective combination that drives earnings growth and long-term value creation. Our people and their unmatched expertise, combined with our operating model, enable us to deliver exceptional service and drive sustained improvement.

With that, I'll turn it over to Arun to provide an update on the advancement of our Lean AI strategy.

Arun Rajan

Thanks, Michael, and good morning, everyone. Today at CS Robinson, we are faster and more disciplined in how we design, build and scale technology across the company. We adapt faster to changing market conditions, put actionable data into the hands of our people faster and respond faster to our customers and carriers, all while solving increasingly complex logistics challenges at scale. Speed alone is not the only objective, what matters is creating sustainable value by reengineering how work gets done. That includes raising the level of service we provide to customers, improving the quality of work and experience for our employees, and delivering measurable and scalable outcomes in any market cycle.

Our approach of pairing AI with our proven lean operating model continues to differentiate us. A key part of that differentiation is our builder culture and more than 450 in-house engineers and data scientists. They enable us to design fit-for-purpose technology and embed our agents directly into our proprietary systems and workflows. They understand logistics, our business and how work gets done at Robinson, enabling us to build for real-world complexity rather than rely on generic solutions. That same expertise also enables us to engineer workflows for efficiency, optimizing token usage and selecting the right large language model for each task based on effectiveness and cost.

We don't need the newest or the most expensive model for every use case, and we are not dependent on any single provider. Our focus is on achieving the best business outcome at the best economics. As a result, while our token usage has increased over 40x versus 2 years ago, our annual token cost on a run rate basis is still less than $2 million. As we continue to integrate our custom-built AI agents into more workflows within the quote-to-cash life cycle, the value of our lean AI is showing up across the enterprise. This includes improved service and responsiveness to the customer and productivity gains of more than 65% in both NAST and Google Forwarding since the end of 2022. These outcomes reflect the combination of our custom-built technology and our proprietary data and context.

More than ever before, we're now putting these advantages to work in our Global Forwarding business and leveraging the learnings from the same journey in NAST. One example is ocean floating where we are enabling faster responses for customers and less manual work for our teams. Our lean operating model turns those advantages into repeatable execution. We simplify and standardize workflows, identify high friction work and prioritize opportunities based on measurable outcomes. Our people are central to that continuous improvement. Their understanding of the work helps us identify the processes need to change and where technology can make a meaningful difference.

We are not simply automating existing processes. We are applying logistics expertise and lean problem solving to improve the processes themselves. That discipline also provides a structure AI needs. Our agents have specific responsibilities, defined guardrails and human oversight. We measure what works, learn from what does not work and continuously improve. This is not technology operating separately for the business. It is embedded in how we run the business.

As we said before, we remain in the early innings of our Lean AI transformation. We have automated on a fraction of the hundreds of processes across the quote-to-cash life cycle with substantial runway remaining across NAST and Global Forwarding. Our logistics expertise, proprietary data and context, custom-built technology and lean operating model work together to deliver measurable outcomes and create advantages that are difficult to replicate.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Damon for a review of our third quarter results.

Damon Lee

Thanks, Arun, and good morning, everyone. Our Q3 results provide further evidence that our Lean AI strategy and our disciplined execution are driving secular earnings growth. We continue to make meaningful progress against our strategic priorities, including market share gains, gross profit optimization and improved operating leverage. Our Q3 total revenues and adjusted gross profit or AGP, grew year-over-year by 29.5% and 14.5%, respectively.

This was due to NAST continued outperformance versus the cash index, higher pricing in mass and Global Forwarding and further progress on optimizing our truckload gross profit. On a monthly basis, our total company AGP per business day compared to the prior year was up 6% in July, up 14% in August and up 24% in September. On a sequential basis, AP per business day declined in July before increasing in August and September, reflecting improving truckload profitability and stronger ocean rates.

Turning to expenses. Q3 personnel expenses were $360.3 million, including $3.6 million of restructuring charges related to workforce reductions. Excluding restructuring charges, our Q3 personnel expenses were $356.7 million, up $17 million or 5%, primarily due to higher incentive compensation that is aligned with our strong financial performance. This increase was partially offset by our cost optimization efforts and productivity improvements. Our average head count was down 10.4% year-over-year in Q3 and was down 2% sequentially, illustrating how we continue to decouple head count growth from volume growth, while growing volume.

Due to our continued volume outgrowth in NAST, our strong 2026 earnings growth and our pay-for-performance compensation plan, we now expect personnel expenses to be in the range of $1.36 billion to $1.37 billion. Sequentially, we continue to expect incentive compensation to be lower in Q4 than in Q3, in line with our sequential earnings profile. Our Q3 SG&A expenses totaled $176.3 million, including $15.4 million of other charges that consisted primarily of $12.5 million of impairment charges associated with continuing to optimize our real estate footprint. Excluding these charges, SG&A expenses of $161 million increased $25.1 million year-over-year, primarily due to higher claims expenses.

While our claims expenses are typically linear throughout our year, periodically, some quarters are higher than others as demonstrated in Q3. However, even with the higher than usual claims expenses in Q3, our year-to-date insurance and claims expense remains at less than 50 basis points of our total revenues. Based on our expenses to date and our expectations for Q4, we now expect our total SG&A expenses to be in the range of $585 million to $590 million compared to our prior range of $540 million to $580 million.

This includes an expectation that depreciation and amortization expense will still be toward the lower end of our previously stated range of $95 million to $105 million for the year. As Dave mentioned, we hit our mid-cycle operating margin targets again in Q3. By segment, NAST delivered operating margin, excluding restructuring costs, of 40.3%, an increase of 110 basis points year-over-year. Global Forwarding delivered an operating margin of 36%, an increase of 660 basis points year-over-year. This reflects the continued impact of our Robinson operating model and Lean AI strategy, which creates greater operating leverage across the enterprise.

Based on our performance through the first 9 months of the year, we remain confident in our ability to deliver full year operating income within our target range that is shown on Slide 17 of our earnings presentation. The bottom end of our target range remains equivalent to at least $6 of diluted EPS, but we are not guiding towards any part of the target range. The range itself is unchanged from the target we raised in October of 2025 despite year-to-date market volume growth that has been negative on a year-over-year basis. We have been able to offset that headwind and absorb other cost increases by consistently overdelivering on our strategic initiatives, aimed at growing market share, optimizing gross profit improving productivity and expanding operating leverage.

Moving below operating income. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 20.6%, and we are maintaining our tax rate guidance of 18% to 20% for the full year. Turning to cash flow on our balance sheet. We generated $124.1 million of cash from operations in Q3. However, net operating working capital remains elevated as higher freight rates continued to drive an increase in receivables and negatively impacted cash flow. Our capital expenditures were $17.5 million in Q3, and we continue to expect full year capital expenditures to be in the range of $65 million to $75 million. We ended Q3 with approximately $747 million of liquidity.

While our capital allocation strategy remains grounded and maintaining an investment-grade credit profile, our balance sheet enabled us to return $289.1 million of cash to shareholders in Q3, including $214.3 million of share repurchases and $74.8 million of dividends. This represents an increase of approximately 52% compared to the third quarter of last year. Our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio at the end of Q3 was 1.71x, up slightly from 1.64x at the end of Q2.

As a reminder, following the announcement of the RXO acquisition, we expect our leverage ratio to increase upon closing. Consistent with our commitment to maintain investment-grade credit ratings, we have now paused share repurchases and remain committed to deleveraging and returning to our target leverage range by the end of 2028. Our strong conviction in the strategic and financial merits of the RXO acquisition has not wavered. RXO's portfolio of customers and capabilities will add to our growth strategy, and we remain confident in our ability to execute the integration and achieve our synergy targets.

We have strong conviction in the strategy we are executing and in the intrinsic value of the business. Significant traditional runway remains across the enterprise, and we believe our lean operating model, our technology and our expertise position us well to create value through both organic initiatives and future inorganic additions.

With that, I'll turn the call back to Dave for his final comments.

David Bozeman

Thanks, Damon. As you've heard in our prepared remarks today, we've continued to deliver higher highs and higher lows from the disciplined execution of our strategy, and we continue to strengthen our say-do ratio. I'm proud of the progress we've made to transform C.H. Robinson into the global leader in lean AI supply chains. And I want to thank our people for embracing the culture shift that has fundamentally changed this company. With our lean operating model, our commitment to continuous improvement and our AI innovations at the core of our transformation, I continue to be even more excited about what we have the opportunity to deliver in the coming years through both our organic growth and through the addition of RXO.

When I joined this company a little over 3 years ago, I told the C.H. Robinson employees that we needed to provide such exceptional service and value to our customers and carriers that they would view us as the trusted partner that they choose to do business with. We've made significant strides in delivering on that mantra. And we believe the addition of RX will only magnify our value proposition. The strength of our strategies, our technology, our people and our operating model disciplines are differentiating and sustainable.

We will continue to lead with purpose and move with urgency to disrupt ourselves and the industry and to deliver customer success through our unmatched expertise, our unrivaled scale and our tailored solutions, and we expect to drive sustainable outperformance, profitable growth and long-term value for all of our stakeholders.

That concludes our prepared remarks. I'll turn it back to the operator now for the Q&A portion of the call.

Operator

[Operator Instructions]

Today's first question is coming from Jeff Kauffman of Citizens Bank.

分析师问答

Jeffrey Kauffman

And congratulations for maintaining momentum in such a tough market. I just want to dig down a little bit into other SG&A. Obviously, expenses can be lumpy -- and that's what happened with claims. And you also had the real estate impairment that came through the quarter. So I guess my question is, I know you've raised the SG&A range in your view is let's just run these through operations. But in theory, was this kind of an odd lumpiness of expenses this quarter? And do we go back to more of a run rate like we were seeing in the quarters prior? Or is there a quarter where you probably have lower than expected versus the run rate because claims should average this, and we were very, very lumpy in 3Q. .

Damon Lee

Thanks, Jeff, for the question. Look, first of all, before I get into SG&A expenses, let me just say, I'm very proud about the performance the team delivered in Q3. As you mentioned, consecutive quarters of outperformance versus the market for our NAS business. 3 years ago, I don't think anybody would have thought that was possible for the team. Another quarter of exceeding expectations. And another quarter of exceeding mid-cycle margin targets for both businesses. So we feel really good about the performance of the team in the quarter.

Specific to SG&A, I think you're on some right themes there, Jeff, which is SG&A by quarter is nonlinear, right? I mean I think we certainly focus on the full year. And to your point, there's quarters that are below run rate, and there's quarters that are above run rate. And we certainly view Q3 is a quarter that was above run rate. But if you look at our revised SG&A guidance, you will see that we've got Q4 SG&A coming down versus Q3 levels, right? So we certainly don't view Q3 as a new run rate for SG&A expenses.

And I'd also say I don't view anything unusual I think as all of you know, we have multiple types of claims that go into claim expenses. You have cargo claims. You have various types of customer settlements, you have auto liability claims, you have auto liability settlements and all those things just by their nature are nonlinear and you just saw a higher accumulation of those in Q3. But as I said before, we certainly have the expense level for SG&A coming down in Q4. And we don't see Q3 setting any type of new run rate for the company.

David Bozeman

Jeff, I want to put a period on what David said, and I like the way you framed the question. Again, I couldn't be more proud of this team in a really, really tough kind of macro backdrop and they continue to be consistent and deliver. And that is our say-do ratio. That is the system and the model that we've built, and we continue to drive through at Robinson. So I like that framing, I love Damon's answer, but I appreciate the question.

Damon Lee

Yes. Jeff, I'll just put a final bow on my answer as it relates to SG&A. And then we speak about this a lot. We typically refer to total insurance and total claims expenses being targeted at 50 bps of total gross revenue. And certainly, year-to-date, we are below that 50 bps of total gross revenue, even with the higher Q3 level, right? And so we typically look at these type of expenses, as I mentioned, on a longer trajectory than certainly 1 quarter, and we're still well within that guidance that we've given on where total claims and total insurance expense lies.

Operator

The next question is coming from Tom Wadewitz of UBS.

Thomas Wadewitz

Yes. And nice to see the good results, and I think in truckload volume picking up a bit, that's a good thing too, the 3.5% growth. So I guess, Dave, I wanted to ask you about, I don't know if this is like for you or for Jim Rutlinger or Michael Castagnetto, but if you could appreciate your comments on RXO and kind of the 100 customer overlap analysis. I just wonder if you could give a little more thoughts on how you planned the integration with RXO to avoid maybe not an overlap issue, but what is your approach, what if you reject more loads because they're not as profitable as the RXO and the customer doesn't like that or they really like the customer rep or just things like that, that could be friction it could cause some attrition, not necessarily because of overlap. So what would your approach be on the integration really to avoid some of the more negative experiences that have happened with prior brokerage deals.

David Bozeman

Yes, Tom, thanks for the question. First of all, I couldn't be more excited about this deal. I think you know that look, we've assembled a team that is experienced and ready for this deal. We have playbooks that are detailed ready to execute and all of what you're talking about are things that you have to execute on integration, and we feel really good about setting up for execution. This is a really good company, incredible top line that's going to come into a company that has built the best lowest cost-to-serve model in the industry. And we have the details to do that. But Michael can go in further on the customer overlap that you talk about because this is front and center for us. .

Michael Castagnetto

Yes, Tom, first of all, thanks for the question. And we did cover in some of our previous remarks, how we feel strong about the overlap number being very manageable for us in terms of the process. In terms of some of the more direct engagement post close, first of all, I'd say we're going to operate from a work backwards from the customer mentality and make sure that they get the best experience possible of the 2 companies coming together. And that means we'll be incredibly no ego about this and make sure that the right people are talking to the customer to maximize growth for the customer, maximize the service we bring to them. .

Your second part is actually something I'm really excited about in terms of profitability, maybe something they have that's different that we have at different levels of profitability. Dave really covered it, which is we've got this incredible top line growth company we are acquiring. We feel really good about that. But combining them with our industry-leading cost-to-serve, our industry-leading pricing and costing engines, our ability to put our data combined with their data in front of our people our combined teams really makes me excited about what that profitability can be not a business that others would struggle to execute.

We're going to be really in prime position to go grow and execute at a highly profitable level.

Damon Lee

Tom, I would only add one last thing, which is when you mentioned, would we be inclined to decline volume because it's less profitability than than currently Robinson's levels. Remember, one of the things we're excited about, about this acquisition is RXO's book of business is very healthy, right? Their gross margins are actually what we consider very healthy. And so therefore, from a quoting perspective, I don't think you have much of a falloff between RXO and C.H. Robinson in the marketplace, right, where they're challenged on profitability is cost to serve. Or certainly, we have industry-leading capabilities.

So to your point, I don't see I don't see a possibility of us walking away from new business because of profitability because as I just mentioned, their AGP margins are quite healthy.

David Bozeman

And keep in mind, Tom, and great question. You can see we're pretty passionate about it. You have 2 of the companies that are the strongest when it comes to customer interaction, customer retention, customer execution, these 2 are the strongest in the industry, and now they're going to be coming together. So I couldn't be more excited about that, and I hope you will be as well.

Thomas Wadewitz

Yes, that's a great answer. I appreciate it. I just wondered if there's a room for like a clarification on 1 comment you made, Dave, you said that $30 million kind of inflation on comp and benefits you absorb each year. Are you trying to imply like should we assume that the increase in insurance would be less than that $30 million or of that magnitude it seems like you might be implying that with the way you presented that comment, but I just -- I don't want to read it the wrong way.

Damon Lee

Yes. I mean, look, we provide that as an example of a magnitude just so you guys can get your head around the headwinds that we absorb every day and never talk about, right? And so when we talk about the $30 million on labor inflation, right? We've never referenced that number before. That's a number we absorbed year in and year out, it compounds year in and year out, and we still deliver demonstrable earnings growth even with that inflation.

So we've given that example just to show the community, the external community here, how we're built, right, how we're built to offset headwinds and how we're built to absorb inflation and still deliver demonstrable results. So we thought that was a permanent example to give just to give you some context around how insurance -- our inflation on insurance is not going to be some of that derails are our earnings trajectory going forward.

I mean, yes, yes, it's good stuff. Thanks.

Operator

The next question is coming from Stephanie Moore of Jefferies.

Stephanie Benjamin Moore

Great. Actually, I think I'll jump off of Tom's last question here and maybe try to dig in for a little bit of a finer point here. So 2-part question, but same topic. So first, maybe just remind us when we should expect to hear any update on incremental in insurance costs for 2027. So when we should kind of see that come through, you'll be able to speak to the headwind there?

And then second part of the question, I think maybe just talk a little bit about how you think you could manage these inflationary pressures. So I appreciate that you just gave that $30 million example, you're very confident that you've been able to, but you've already done a lot of work behind the scenes, and you've made a lot of headway to obviously reduce your cost to serve. So what's the next leg to the story here that gives you the confidence that in probably an accelerating inflationary environment, you can still be that successful in offsetting those costs.

Damon Lee

Thank you for the question, Stephanie. So on the timing of insurance updated information or clarity, certainly, the definitive date is sometime in mid- to late December. I mean, that is typically when we get finality on what next insurance policies will look like. Now as you know, we are trying very hard this year to finalize those negotiations sooner, right? And we won't wait to provide guidance once we have it, right? And so once we have insight on to insurance inflation going into '27, we will not wait for the next earnings call to provide that information, right? That's information that would more likely file a K and provide that information as soon as it's available.

But as we said last call, and is the reality of what we're going through today is those negotiations are still pending, they're still in progress. And what I would say, though, is we still feel very good about those proceedings, right? We said multiple times that we feel like the outcome of our insurance negotiations will be close to industry leading, if not industry-leading, and we certainly don't feel like the inflation on those costs will be anything that will derail earnings going forward. And again, just to remind everybody, automobile liability insurance is only 25 bps of total gross revenue for us.

And so therefore, it's a de minimis cost today. With inflation tomorrow, it will be a de minimis cost tomorrow. So that's what I'd say. Now how do we offset inflation? It's a great question. This is at core of our lean operating model and our Lean AI strategy. Certainly, our whole organization is working on a pipeline of initiatives every single day. And that pipeline of initiatives far exceeds what we need to deliver any given month, any given quarter, any given year, right? And so we have the ability to pull initiatives to the left when we need to or when we're capable of doing so, right?

And so therefore, I think that's what differentiates us versus so many companies is our ability to react to the conditions that we're seeing today. And be able to improve our performance based on those funnels of initiatives that we're working on. And so I would just say that is really our full management and just the forward thinking, the forward planning that we do as a company allows us to plan past things like inflation on labor and inflation on insurance .

Arun Rajan

And Stephanie, I'll just add that road map of opportunities to Damon's point of lean AI and sort of what the tools deliver or the new tools that they roll out and the way we're able to leverage it, both on Global Forwarding, you've seen us make some announcements. We still have a lot of room to scale up opportunities that we've already got. We started to roll out. And then we've rolled out. We've talked about this before, there's still plenty of opportunity in the cash life cycle across all of our businesses as we go deeper.

We deployed a lot of agents to automate various tasks. But the ability to stitch together those agents and automate entire workflows, there's still plenty of opportunity to [indiscernible] to cut.

Damon Lee

Yes. And I would just end that Stephanie was saying, look, it wouldn't be a Robinson call if we didn't talk about the early innings of our transformation. Very early innings of the lean transformation. I think we've gone at length on what that means and why we feel that way. And then as Arun just walked through, I mean, certainly, early innings in our tech deployment as well. And I think we've only touched a fraction of the processes that we can touch within Robinson.

But I'd also say that even processes that we've already touched, we're going back and touching it multiple times. We're making them better as the technology evolves, as our understanding of processes evolves, right? And so when we say we're in the early innings of this transformation, that is why we have such a robust pipeline of opportunities going forward. Thank you for the question.

Operator

The next question is coming from Jonathan Chappell of Evercore ISI.

Jonathan Chappell

Thank you. I kind of wanted to reframe the opportunity for Global Forwarding now that you've run out some of your initiatives there. Let's go back to the Investor Day and the anticipation for Global Forwarding that underwrote your '26 estimates, you weren't expecting much at all. You're saying go back to kind of late '23. And clearly, that business has done well on its own without you implementing a lot of the lean AI principles that you've done at NAST.

So now that you're kicking that off, but understanding you're coming from a much higher starting point on Global Forwarding than what you were underwriting to begin with, what's the potential there, whether that's mid-cycle margins, whether it's outsized market growth, how do we measure the medium term for Global Forwarding today versus 2 years ago at Investor Day?

David Bozeman

Yes. Thanks a lot, John. A couple of things I want to clarify on Global Forwarding. When we started our journey in our transformation, I would say this, as we kicked off our operating model, we put that business under that operating model here for the last 2.5, 3 years. And we like the progression that we've seen on the self-help of that business and the health of that business. And I agree with you on the acknowledgment of how it's kind of gone up and to the right, but as David said, we're just getting started on that. And as we signaled earlier or later last year in the beginning of this year that we will continue to now roll out in a purposeful manner, our technology stack into Global Forwarding similar as we did to NAST. So kind of a 2 part approach.

And we're starting to see the benefits of that as well. But make no mistake, the lean operating model really has begun -- has transformed that business, and there's more to come on that, that Arun just alluded to, but we can go a little bit further and deeper on that.

Damon Lee

Yes. John, I'll just add to what Dave said. I mean, certainly, we're in a different position in Global Forwarding than we are in our NAST business, right? I mean, certainly, the NAST business is starting at the top. And of course, we've improved that gap between us and everyone else. But Global Forwarding isn't, right? I mean, Global Forwarding is a much smaller competitor in the forwarding space. And so therefore, there's tremendous opportunity on all levels, right, on margin enhancement, on revenue growth. And I would say the same playbook we've gone on NAST is the exact same playbook we're running on Global Forwarding. So to your specific to your question.

We believe there's demonstrable revenue growth opportunities in Global Forwarding. We think there's demonstrable revenue management opportunities in Global Forwarding to improve their price and cost of purchased transportation. And then we think there's always continued opportunities on driving productivity to improve their cost-to-serve model.

And if you look at our press release, right, and things I've said and Dave said historically is we do believe we will have the best tech stack in for, right? And that will be the best tech stack and not being the #1 player in the industry. So I think to your point, I think there's a lot of opportunity to continue to expand the performance of Global Forwarding just because of everything we said, they're getting the same playbook that MAST has been so successful on. But where we're starting in the industry is a much different starting point than where NAST is.

Arun Rajan

Yes, to just sort of like amplify what Damon just said, our agent AI platform that powers all the NAST productivity that you've seen us deliver and all of our machine-learning models that power our price discovery and cost discovery basically our algorithm pricing and costing and NAST. We're deploying all of that to Global Forwarding, right? And just to David's point around our confidence in building and deploying the best technology stack in the industry, we feel very confident about that. We've got the playbook. We deployed it in NAST.

We see the results, and we're in the early innings of deploying the same capabilities, both on productivity and gross margin, i.e., revenue management and going forward.

Damon Lee

Yes. And one final comment, John, on mid-cycle margin targets, right? We don't envision changing that target for the NAST or Global Forwarding, right? We believe those targets are solid targets. We believe they're anchored in our strategy, and we want to use that optionality around those targets to drive even more demonstrable benefits for the enterprise. So I don't necessarily see a future where we give revised mid-cycle targets. We believe those are appropriate targets for both businesses as they said. But what we have committed to is making sure that the optionality above those targets drives optimal earnings for the company. Thanks for the question.

Operator

The next question is coming from Chris Wetherbee of Wells Fargo. .

Christian Wetherbee

Maybe I wanted to come back to the Arco acquisition. I think the market is looking at this and is expressing some concern about revenue attrition as you put these 2 companies together. And Dave, I thought it was helpful, some of the comments early in the call about the 100 customer analysis that you guys have done. And comfort with that overlap. I don't know if there's any way you can unpack or expand on that to give us a little bit more comfort, give investors a little bit of an idea of like how you see whether it be by service or by vertical, where there is that overlap? And just maybe put a little bit of a finer point around it if possible. I think that would be very helpful. .

Michael Castagnetto

Chris, this is Michael. I'll try and expand on this a little bit. So versus, I think Dave did cover it really well around the top 100. And we've said even in our external statements post the announcement, right? There's a couple of places where we are really strong in the industry. LTL is an example, a couple of places. They're super strong in the industry last mile, expedite where we don't cross over really at all. And so there's a lot of opportunities, we think, from a synergy perspective there. When you take some areas, but there's large parts of the for-hire market where we don't -- we have 0 crossover.

In places where we do have some crossover, we've heard from customers that they're excited about this because there's opportunities that even within customers, we don't do the same. And so we feel really good that while we're not naive that there will be some attrition, but we've built that into the synergies number that we've shared externally. We feel really good about the future growth opportunities of the 2 entities coming together. And when you start to combine our capabilities that's the part where we feel really good about our opportunities.

When we think about how we go to market, one of the maybe unknowns is that when we go to market and compete for business, we're not competing just with other brokers, we are competing with assets. We're competing in supply chain solution modeling. We're really going after how do we provide the best solutions to customers. And in that case, when you combine our 2 capabilities of what we offer, I think it's going to be a very, very strong value proposition for customers. And so from that aspect, I'd say we feel really good about the net end game of where this plays out.

David Bozeman

Chris, listen, I felt really good when customers have reached out, as Mike said, and felt good about doing business with us going forward. I mean, again, remember, last mile, expedite , these are not things that Robinson was exactly strong in or even did. And so that's why we feel really good. We always said now you have 2 companies that you take the steam ship and go to the front door. And so it's a lot of different customers for us, and that's why we're so excited about this. And you'll see that, and we just can't wait to really get started on doing this.

Operator

The next question is coming from Brandon Oglenski of Barclays.

Brandon Oglenski

Maybe I'll continue with the third question on RXO here. if we look at the recent acquisition of Coyote, it was kind of hard to see the synergies you maybe drop into the bottom line for them. And I know David talked about maybe the cost headwinds at RXO today or excess cost in the business. So when we think about key relationships with key employees and customers, how do you really address the potential for attrition in the employee side, so especially the key folks there.

David Bozeman

Well, I think a couple of us to jump on this question, Brandon. I want to start and be really, really clear to everyone in hearing this. And hopefully, you guys, a number of you have been with us here during this transformation in the last 3.5 years. The operating model that Robinson has developed and have executed. We have basically transformed this company through a disciplined measured approach. It's a safe due ratio that we always put up with our receipts on being consistent, super, super important. But it's something that we operate this company with discipline. That will be no different then we go in and do the integration within RXO, which is why it's so exciting.

Damon hinted to it, really good healthy book of business on the gross profit line. where our strength is, is operating, and I don't know that there's a debate with that. And our operating model will allow us to bring this company in with confidence and drive that. That's a bit different. We can't speak to every deal out there in the industry. What we can speak to is how we execute. And I think we execute pretty consistently. And that's what we will do with this deal as well. But Mike, why don't you double in on some of the attrition .

Michael Castagnetto

Well, I think what I'd start with is looking back on what we accomplished inside our NAST business and our ability to get our cost to serve where it's been has been driven through process improvement, our Lean AI capability, combined with our operating model. It has also been focused on how do we get the best information and data into our relationship and revenue-driving job families so that we can go grow our business. .

And so when I think of potential attrition, what I would say to the folks on that team is I would be super excited about the opportunity to have the combined data stack, the information and capabilities that we have and put those into the revenue and relationship management job families that RXO has. We have not prioritized cost cuts in those job families here at Robinson. We have improved our operating processes -- and I think -- and we said this and it showed in our Q3 results in terms of our repricing, we were able to put better information into our people's hands, and we were able to reprice our contractual book faster than any time in our history.

And that comes from the operating model and putting our capabilities into our revenue and relationship managing job families as fast as possible. And so if I was on -- in those job families at RXO, I would be super excited about the combined capabilities of our entities and how quickly we're going to get information and opportunities for growth into their hands in the future.

Damon Lee

Yes, Brandon, I would only add is just remember, on our productivity journey here where we've generated over 65% productivity since the end of '22, that has been significantly over-indexed operational roles, right, not customer-facing roles, right? We have retained, we've promoted. We've enhanced our customer-facing talent. In many areas, we've added, not reduced resourcing and head count in those areas. And as Michael said, we've used our technology to enhance those relationships between our customer-facing teams and their relative customer, right? And so as we said overall, again, you guys will get tired of hearing this right, we are going to run the same playbook with RXO, right?

And so if you run the same playbook on RXO, right, you're going to keep a lot of those relationships. You're going to keep a lot of that talent, right? You've got to keep those customer relationships, right? And the productivity is going to be driven in the back office and the operations. right? And so again, any time I think you guys think about what's going to be different versus what's not, just look at the playbook we've run on Robinson, we're going to run the same playbook on RXO.

Arun Rajan

And just to kind of underscore that all the technology we've invested in to Michael and David's point, this ability to send targeted signals to the desk such that they can action changes in the market is we've invested in this for many years, and the platform is there to be applied to RXO as well. .

Operator

We're showing time for 1 final question. Today's final question is coming from Bruce Chan of Stifel.

J. Bruce Chan

I appreciate all the great color so far. Maybe 1 on freight forwarding. You gave a lot of good on the internal opportunities. It's obviously been a big beneficiary on the rate side from global disruption. But as you think about demand, maybe you can give us a sense for what you're seeing in terms of strength by end market? And then maybe as part of that, how much of a benefit are you seeing from a data center build-out to airfreight right now? And how are you thinking about that as an opportunity?

Damon Lee

Yes. Thanks for the question. Bruce, certainly, part of our vertical strategy is focused on those areas of the market that are outgrowing the overall market, right? So you mentioned certain areas of technology and data centers. And certainly, that is a focused area of growth for us. In aggregate, what I would say about 40% is very similar to what we've said about the overall freight market, which is certainly, we are seeing signs of life. There are pockets of life in the freight market.

So certainly, in technology, certain areas of manufacturing, you are seeing growth. I think you're starting to see that show up in the cash index is an overall representation of the NAST market. And I'd say there's a correlation to the Global Forwarding as well. But what I would say is consistent to what we've said, which is we're optimistic that there are signs of growth. But the contributors to the overall freight market growth are still somewhat tepid, right? I mean housing is certainly tepid market. I'd say overall manufacturing is still a tepid market and there's certainly large areas of retail that is still happening.

So until you see significant participation from those those industries, it's going to be hard to have meaningful absolute growth in the overall freight market. So we're cautiously optimistic. And now finally, [indiscernible] at least on a month-to-month sequential basis is showing some of that optimism, even though the quarter was still slightly negative. You saw some of that exit rate on August and September. I would say that theme does hold for global freight markets as well.

So optimistic, but we have not seen what I would consider demonstrable catalyst yet to say that we're going to see sustained absolute growth in the overall freight markets.

Operator

Thank you. I would like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Chuck Ives for closing comments.

Charles Ives

Yes. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning for the call. We look forward to talking to many of you throughout the quarter, and have a great day.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation. This concludes today's event. You may disconnect your lines or log off the webcast at this time, and enjoy the rest of your day.

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