Latest news with #CovenantLogistics
Yahoo
25-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Covenant Logistics sees potential freight market improvement in October
Covenant Logistics Group Inc. officials said a reduction in interest rates could inject momentum into home sales across the country and help revive the broader freight market. Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Covenant (NASDAQ: CVLG) reported second-quarter earnings after the market closed Wednesday. Company officials held a conference call to discuss the results with analysts on Thursday. 'I was with housing folks yesterday … in the floor covering business, and they're just basically waiting for interest rates to drop in the housing [market]. They think the backlog is gigantic as soon as people can afford the payments,' Covenant Chairman and CEO David R. Parker said. 'We see the battle going on in Washington with the Federal Reserve on the interest rate, and I think that is a catalyst because [President Donald Trump] will win. Whether that's in November, October, or next March, he's going to win that battle, and those interest rates are going to go down, and housing is going to improve.' Parker said the housing market is a big part of the trucking industry. 'It's just a big nucleus of freight for the housing industry. The better the economy, the more freight that's going to be available for all of us,' Parker said. Covenant Logistics Group's freight revenue rose 7.8% year-over-year in the second-quarter to $276.5 million, a quarterly record. The company's total revenue rose 5% year-over-year to $302.85 million. Adjusted earnings per share was 45 cents in the quarter, compared to 52 cents in the same year-ago quarter. Covenant Logistics exceeded Wall Street's earnings per share and revenue forecasts for the quarter at $0.419 and $287.25 million. Tripp Grant, executive vice president, said revenue rebounded during the second quarter due factors such as growing the company's dedicated fleet, new business in managed freight, a small acquisition and receding impact of weather and avian influenza. Covenant Logistics expedited segment posted second-quarter freight revenue of $83.2 million, a year-over-year decrease of 6.4%. Average total tractors decreased by 50 units, or 5.5%, to 860, compared to 910 in the prior year quarter. The company's expedited average freight revenue per tractor per week decreased 1% year-over-year to $7,442. 'Our expedited segment yielded a 93.9 adjusted operating ratio, a result only slightly better than the year ago quarter,' Grant said. 'While this result falls short of our expectations for this segment, we were pleased with the year over year consistency.' For the quarter, freight revenue in the company's dedicated segment was $90.2 million, 10.2% year-over-year increase. Average total tractors increased by 162 units, or 11.7%, to 1,546. Covenant Logistics average freight revenue per tractor per week in its dedicated segment decreased 1.4% year-over-year to $4,486, partially offset by a 7% year-over-year increase in freight revenue per total mile at $3.06. Covenant's managed freight segment saw revenue of $77.5 million in the second quarter, an increase of 28% from the same time last year. The warehousing segment had revenue of $25.5 million during the quarter, a 1% year-over-year gain. 'Our baseline expectations for the second half of the year includes additional start ups in our dedicated segment, a slowly improving general freight market and modest peak season that will benefit expedited and dedicated, and a wide range of outcomes in managed freight,' Grant said. The post Covenant Logistics sees potential freight market improvement in October appeared first on FreightWaves. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
24-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Saia (SAIA) Q2 Earnings Report Preview: What To Look For
Freight transportation and logistics provider Saia (NASDAQ:SAIA) will be announcing earnings results this Friday morning. Here's what to look for. Saia missed analysts' revenue expectations by 3.1% last quarter, reporting revenues of $787.6 million, up 4.3% year on year. It was a disappointing quarter for the company, with a significant miss of analysts' adjusted operating income estimates and a significant miss of analysts' EBITDA estimates. Is Saia a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it's free. This quarter, analysts are expecting Saia's revenue to decline 1.7% year on year to $809.5 million, a reversal from the 18.5% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $2.40 per share. Heading into earnings, analysts covering the company have grown increasingly bullish with revenue estimates seeing 9 upward revisions over the last 30 days (we track 15 analysts). Saia has missed Wall Street's revenue estimates four times over the last two years. Looking at Saia's peers in the transportation and logistics segment, some have already reported their Q2 results, giving us a hint as to what we can expect. Covenant Logistics delivered year-on-year revenue growth of 5.3%, beating analysts' expectations by 3.7%, and Knight-Swift Transportation reported flat revenue, in line with consensus estimates. Read our full analysis of Covenant Logistics's results here and Knight-Swift Transportation's results here. There has been positive sentiment among investors in the transportation and logistics segment, with share prices up 7.7% on average over the last month. Saia is up 11.6% during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $298.15 (compared to the current share price of $307.03). Unless you've been living under a rock, it should be obvious by now that generative AI is going to have a huge impact on how large corporations do business. While Nvidia and AMD are trading close to all-time highs, we prefer a lesser-known (but still profitable) semiconductor stock benefiting from the rise of AI. Click here to access our free report on our favorite semiconductor growth story. StockStory is growing and hiring equity analyst and marketing roles. Are you a 0 to 1 builder passionate about the markets and AI? See the open roles here. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Covenant Logistics (CVLG) Reports Earnings Tomorrow: What To Expect
Freight and logistics provider Covenant Logistics (NASDAQ:CVLG) will be reporting results this Wednesday after market hours. Here's what you need to know. Covenant Logistics missed analysts' revenue expectations by 4.5% last quarter, reporting revenues of $269.4 million, down 3.4% year on year. It was a disappointing quarter for the company, with a miss of analysts' Freight revenue estimates and a significant miss of analysts' adjusted operating income estimates. Is Covenant Logistics a buy or sell going into earnings? Read our full analysis here, it's free. This quarter, analysts are expecting Covenant Logistics's revenue to grow 1.6% year on year to $292.1 million, slowing from the 4.9% increase it recorded in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings are expected to come in at $0.42 per share. Analysts covering the company have generally reconfirmed their estimates over the last 30 days, suggesting they anticipate the business to stay the course heading into earnings. Covenant Logistics has missed Wall Street's revenue estimates five times over the last two years. Looking at Covenant Logistics's peers in the transportation and logistics segment, only FedEx has reported results so far. It beat analysts' revenue estimates by 1.9% and delivered flat year-on-year revenue. The stock was down 3.2% on the results. Read our full analysis of FedEx's earnings results here. There has been positive sentiment among investors in the transportation and logistics segment, with share prices up 5.9% on average over the last month. Covenant Logistics's stock price was unchanged during the same time and is heading into earnings with an average analyst price target of $32.67 (compared to the current share price of $23.60). When a company has more cash than it knows what to do with, buying back its own shares can make a lot of sense–as long as the price is right. Luckily, we've found one, a low-priced stock that is gushing free cash flow AND buying back shares. Click here to claim your Special Free Report on a fallen angel growth story that is already recovering from a setback. StockStory is growing and hiring equity analyst and marketing roles. Are you a 0 to 1 builder passionate about the markets and AI? See the open roles here.
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Much happened at Triumph Financial during the quarter; USPS dispute settled
An eventful quarter at Triumph Financial produced an earnings report that made some financial numbers seem less important than usual. But as has been the case with Triumph Financial (NASDAQ: TFIN) for most of its recent history, the company's communications in its earnings release focuses on financial performance only to a limited degree. There's far more about strategy and underlying numbers supporting that strategy. On that front, Triumph Financial's earnings per share on a GAAP basis of 15 cents per share were 10 cents per share better than forecasts, according to SeekingAlpha. Revenue was slightly higher than forecasts. However, one of the big developments at Triumph Financial for the quarter boosted that bottom line: the settlement of a long-standing dispute with the United States Postal Service. The settlement had a positive impact on pretax income both for the company's three-month and six-month net income of $12.4 million and $11.5 million, respectively. As a result of the dispute with the USPS, Triumph has been carrying a $19.4 million receivable on its books since the issue first arose. With the settlement, Graft said in his letter that Triumph Financial now has recovered all of that and more. Dispute goes back to Covenant deal The just-settled dispute over a wayward payment goes back to the Triumph acquisition of the factoring business of Covenant Logistics (NYSE: CVLG) in 2020. Triumph's stock has slid since the earnings release. Triumph Financial's stock price closed Thursday at $61.99, down from the $63.58 close that occurred just before the earnings release. On Friday, a day that stocks fell broadly, Triumph closed at $58.62, down 5.44% for the day. For the freight sector, the Triumph Financial quarterly report has voluminous data that says much about the state of the freight market as well as broader long-range plans for the company. Much of it can be found in CEO Aaron Graft's accompanying letter to shareholders where he shares not just hard information on his company's business but a philosophical outlook. That letter from Graft released Wednesday was longer than usual. Graft even joked about it on the earnings call with analysts–unique among the genre in that it is a video call–when he wondered 'not sure how many of you made it through all 34 pages of the letter that was published last evening.' Positive developments at Triumph Financial, even in the midst of a weak freight market, included the fact that annualized combined revenue in transportation–factoring, payments and intelligence–reached $237 million, up from $206 million in the prior quarter. The USPS settlement is not in that figure. In his letter, Graft said he believes the opportunity is $1 billion, 'and nothing has changed my view.' The financial impact from the USPS settlement came in Triumph Financial's factoring segment. Of the group's 13.3% quarter-on-quarter sequential improvement in revenue, 3.4% of that growth came from the USPS settlement. The group's operating margin of 48.5% saw 24.7% of that come from the USPS. Previous Graft letters and earnings call commentary have focused overwhelmingly on the company's payments network, which provides fast pay and audit services. EBITDA in the payments sector was positive for the third time in the last four quarters. The payments sector includes the audit functions that Triumph Financial acquired more than four years ago in its purchase of HubTran. It includes the quick pay activities that previously existed under the TriumphPay banner The positive EBITDA margin in payments was 13.9%. It was slightly negative in the first quarter, and was 0.5% and 8.6% in the last two quarters of 2024, respectively. Big push on intelligence But it was Triumph Financial's relatively new intelligence sector and the second quarter acquisition of Green Screens that got a large amount of attention. The intelligence group also includes the late 2024 purchase of Isometric Technologies Inc. (ISO). As a group, it is tiny so far: just $1.7 million in revenue for the quarter. But Graft in his letter said the third quarter will be used to establish a 'true base line of revenue and margin so investors can measure our performance in future periods.' The more significant role that Triumph Financial sees for its Intelligence unit is that it grows the entire package of offerings in its 'value chain' that Graft laid out in his letter. It starts with the audit services of the payments sector, which Graft said will create trust among its broker customers. With that trust established, Graft wrote, the broker customers and their truckers will look to Triumph for financing. The next step will be that some of those customers will request a digital wallet to receive those payments, an offering that is at the core of Triumph's LoadPay product. Separately, brokers will want to use the sea of data Triumph Financial holds to aid in their internal pricing models, Graft wrote. And that gets down to the intelligence unit. 'When you offer a data product, broker customers will also realize that you have a broad database of objective metrics on how carriers perform on certain loads, which they will want to help influence their routing guides, so they will ask for that to be added to the data product,' Graft wrote. One key metric in Triumph Financial's earnings has been the average invoice size it either processed in its payments segments or factored by its factoring unit. That latter number in particular has long been a focus of investors and others. During the call, Graft said Triumph might have been in error in pushing that number. 'We started training investors to look at average invoice size back when all we did was factoring,' Graft said. He said given the wider footprint of the payments unit, the size of the average invoice in that sector was more indicative of market conditions. But neither number showed any strength in freight markets. The average invoice size in payments fell sequentially to $1,186, down from $1,222 in the first quarter. But that number was higher than in the prior three quarters, including a year-ago second quarter number of $1,103. As for the factoring sector, the average invoice size there was $1,663. That is well below the second quarter figure of $1,769 and a year ago number of $1,738. Kimberly Fisk, the president of Triumph's factoring segment, said changes in the company's customer base for its factoring offerings are responsible for some of the decline in the average invoice size in that group. A change in the factoring customer mix 'As you go upmarket, you might get a diversified mix of carriers that might be doing different types of hauling,' she said on the earnings call. 'And so some might do some shorter regional type loads, which will reduce your invoice price.' If those shorter hauls are taken out of the equation, Fisk said, the average invoice price is closer to $1,200. Factoring overall has been experiencing solid growth measured by volume. The second quarter figure of 1.7 million invoices purchased came out to a purchased volume of $2.87 billion. That volume is 13.3% more than in the first quarter, but with the lower average invoice size, the purchased volume was only up 6.1%, which is still a solid sequential growth. Triumph Financial's Factoring as a Service (FaaS) offering, which offers a platform for third parties to provide their own factoring services to their own customer base, pulled in a significant new partner during the quarter: RXO. Although the RXO (NYSE: RXO) deal was announced this month, after the second quarter's close, it still could be seen as an extension of the activity at Triumph Financial that director of investor relations Luke Wyss said on the call provided a 'noisy quarter.' The partnership between RXO and Triumph involves both the FaaS offering and LoadPay. As for LoadPay, Graft's letter said the company had opened its 2,000th load pay account in June after a soft marketing rollout. By July 14, that number was up at 2,729. The 58 days from customer 1,000 to 2,000 is expected to be less than on the road to 3,000, Graft said. LoadPay's digital wallet allows the payments unit at Triumph Financial to make its payments directly to a driver or other customer's digital wallet. More articles by John Kingston At a conference of mostly green investors, AlFleet pushes marriage of AI and trucking Oregon ties itself closer to California's Advanced Clean Trucks rule, even though it may have no future A smaller Marten turns in a second quarter of 2025 much like a year earlier The post Much happened at Triumph Financial during the quarter; USPS dispute settled appeared first on FreightWaves. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Covenant Logistics, Landstar, Norfolk Southern, Schneider, and Werner Shares Skyrocket, What You Need To Know
A number of stocks jumped in the afternoon session after the major indices popped (Nasdaq +3.4%, S&P 500 +2.5%) in response to the positive outcome of U.S.-China trade negotiations, as both sides agreed to pause some tariffs for 90 days, signaling a potential turning point in ongoing tensions. This rollback cuts U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 30% and Chinese tariffs on U.S. imports to 10%, giving companies breathing room to reset inventories and supply chains. However, President Trump clarified that tariffs could go "substantially higher" if a full deal with China wasn't reached during the 90-day pause, but not all the way back to the previous levels. Still, the agreement has cooled fears of a prolonged trade war, helping stabilize expectations for global growth and trade flows and fueling renewed optimism. The optimism appeared concentrated in key trade-sensitive sectors, particularly technology, retail, and industrials, as lower tariffs reduce cost pressures and restore cross-border demand. The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks. Among others, the following stocks were impacted: Ground Transportation company Covenant Logistics (NYSE:CVLG) jumped 10.1%. Is now the time to buy Covenant Logistics? Access our full analysis report here, it's free. Ground Transportation company Landstar (NASDAQ:LSTR) jumped 7.3%. Is now the time to buy Landstar? Access our full analysis report here, it's free. Rail Transportation company Norfolk Southern (NYSE:NSC) jumped 6.8%. Is now the time to buy Norfolk Southern? Access our full analysis report here, it's free. Ground Transportation company Schneider (NYSE:SNDR) jumped 8.9%. Is now the time to buy Schneider? Access our full analysis report here, it's free. Ground Transportation company Werner (NASDAQ:WERN) jumped 8.2%. Is now the time to buy Werner? Access our full analysis report here, it's free. Covenant Logistics's shares are not very volatile and have only had 7 moves greater than 5% over the last year. Moves this big are rare for Covenant Logistics and indicate this news significantly impacted the market's perception of the business. The previous big move we wrote about was 26 days ago when the stock dropped 7.5% on the news that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell signaled a cautious stance on future monetary policy decisions during a speech in Chicago, emphasizing that trade tariffs could add upward pressure to inflation in the short term and complicate the Fed's efforts to stabilize the economy. He warned that such trade measures are "likely to move us further away from our goals," referring to the Fed's dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment. The comments did little to improve sentiment, as major indices were already in the negative territory in the morning session after Nvidia announced it might be unable to sell some high-end chips (including the H20 chips) to China due to export controls and requirements from the Trump administration. As a result, the company planned to take a $5.5 billion charge due to inventory writedowns and canceled sales. Adding to the sector's pressure, chip tool maker ASML posted weak bookings (a key demand indicator) which fell below Wall Street's expectations, noting that tariffs had made the industry's outlook more uncertain. Taken together, these updates likely fueled investor anxiety, amplifying concerns about global trade tensions, tech sector vulnerability, and the Fed's limited room to maneuver in an increasingly uncertain macro environment. Covenant Logistics is down 13.3% since the beginning of the year, and at $23.32 per share, it is trading 23.1% below its 52-week high of $30.33 from November 2024. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Covenant Logistics's shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $5,579. Today's young investors likely haven't read the timeless lessons in Gorilla Game: Picking Winners In High Technology because it was written more than 20 years ago when Microsoft and Apple were first establishing their supremacy. But if we apply the same principles, then enterprise software stocks leveraging their own generative AI capabilities may well be the Gorillas of the future. So, in that spirit, we are excited to present our Special Free Report on a profitable, fast-growing enterprise software stock that is already riding the automation wave and looking to catch the generative AI next.
