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Werner Enterprises, Inc. (WERN) Citi’s Global Industrial Tech & Mobility Conference 2026 February 17, 2026 10:30 AM EST
Company Participants
Derek Leathers – Chairman & CEO
Chris Neil – Senior Vice President of Pricing & Strategic Initiatives
Presentation
Unknown Analyst
We have CEO, Derek Leathers; and Chris Neil, SVP of Pricing and also Head of IR. Thank you for joining us. Thrilled to have you guys.
Question-and-Answer Session
Unknown Analyst
So just to start, right, everyone is thinking a lot about kind of the broader macro environment, right, the uplift that could come. A lot of people have been excited about what we’re seeing here from spot rates here early in the year. Talk to us about how you’re interpreting kind of the spot rate trend here at the start of the year. How durable do you think it is? How much of it is weather-related versus real confirmation of a structural shift?
Derek Leathers
Chairman & CEO
Sure. I’ll start us off here. But clearly, spot rates have been the headline in the news really kind of starting in December. I would say it was outsized seasonal performance in December. As we got into January, it held pretty well. Obviously, the storms hit. The storms do play some role in it. But I think when you look at rejection rates nationally and you see what’s been happening to and through the storm and especially the few weeks after the storm, that is not all storm related.
So some portion of it, I think, would be smart or prudent to take the top off a little bit. So when you think about 14.5% rejection rates, 14.75%, I think, for a couple of days, Could 4%, 5% of that be storm-related in the early days post storm? Sure. That still puts you at double-digit rejections. It still puts spot rates at sort of
