Radiant Logistics (AMEX:RLGT) reported first-quarter financial results on Monday. The transcript from the company’s first-quarter earnings call has been provided below.
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Summary
Radiant Logistics reported strong financial performance for the first fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2026, with a 23.4% increase in revenue and a 79.4% increase in adjusted EBITDA compared to the previous year.
The company’s U.S. operations showed significant growth, particularly in international air freight, intermodal and over-the-road brokerage services.
Radiant’s Navigate technology platform is gaining traction, with over 150 active customers, enhancing supply chain management capabilities.
The company launched a new independent agent program in the truck brokerage and intermodal space, aiming to expand its agent model to new markets.
Radiant acquired the Dallas operations of Whitaker Logistics to accelerate growth in its bimodal brokerage platform.
Global trade dynamics, including disruptions in ocean shipping routes and evolving tariff landscapes, continue to influence Radiant’s international operations.
Radiant completed an amended $200 million senior credit facility, extending its maturity to 2031, and ended the quarter with no net debt.
Management expressed optimism about the potential for larger acquisitions and continued growth through both organic and inorganic strategies.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
This afternoon, Bon Crane, Radiant Logistics Founder and CEO, and Radiant’s Chief Financial Officer, Todd Maycomber, will provide a general business update and discuss financial results for the company’s first fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2026. Following their comments, we will open the call to questions. This conference is scheduled for 30 minutes. This conference call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The company has based these forward-looking statements on its current expectations and projections about future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions about the company that may cause the company’s actual results or achievements to be materially different from the results or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.
While it is impossible to identify all the factors that may cause the company’s actual results or achievements to differ materially from those set forth in our forward-looking statements, such factors include those that have in the past and may in the future be identified in the company’s SEC filings and other public announcements, which are available on the Radiant website at www.radiantdelivers.com. In addition, past results are not necessarily an indication of future performance.
Now I’d like to pass the call over to Radiant’s Founder and CEO, Bon Crane.
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining in on today’s call. We are pleased to report a solid start to fiscal 2027, delivering $12.2 million in adjusted EBITDA for our first fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2026. Our first fiscal quarter results were strong across the board, with revenue up 23.4%, adjusted gross profit up 15.3%, adjusted net income up 91.1%, adjusted EBITDA up 79.4%, and adjusted EBITDA margin expanding 630 basis points, all measured against the comparable prior-year period.
Adjusted EBITDA grew significantly faster than adjusted gross profit, reflecting the operating leverage in our model, including lower SG&A as a percentage of adjusted gross profit driven by the consolidation of our transportation management systems and the non-recurrence of the $1.3 million credit loss related to First Brand bankruptcy in the prior-year period. Our year-over-year improvement was driven principally by our U.S. operations, where adjusted EBITDA more than doubled, with notable strength in our international air freight, intermodal, and over-the-road brokerage services.
On the domestic side, we continue to be encouraged by our growing pipeline of prospective users of Navigate, our proprietary technology platform that provides customers with better visibility and tools to manage complex supply chains. We now have over 150 active customers on the platform, with one of our enterprise customers now actively managing over 1,500 vendors and who used the platform to book over 7,500 shipments during the quarter ended September 30th.
More broadly, capacity has continued to exit the North America truckload and intermodal markets through a combination of carrier attrition, tighter driver availability, and the normalization of a fleet that had expanded aggressively in prior years. Tender rejections and other cyclical indicators remained well above balanced market levels throughout the quarter and into the fall, and contract rates have moved meaningfully higher year over year, even as seasonal softness and a shift of longer-haul freight towards intermodal caused spot rates to fluctuate.
We view these developments as constructive for our domestic operations in general and our U.S. brokerage operations in particular, and we believe the intermodal shift plays to the strength of our bimodal truck and intermodal offering at Radiant Road and Rail. If these trends continue, we believe they support a more broad-based and durable recovery for the domestic freight market. Also during the quarter, we extended our two-decade track record as one of the industry’s premier freight forwarding agent networks with our move into the truck brokerage and intermodal space with the launch of a new independent agent program at Radiant Road and Rail, which we did in August. This program brings the same value proposition that has long distinguished our freight forwarding business—access to our carrier network, technology platform, back-office infrastructure, and a clear, structured path to build long-term equity value and a built-in exit strategy—to a new population of logistics entrepreneurs.
We’re pleased with the early response to the program and see this as a meaningful new avenue of growth as we bring the Radiant model to an entirely new market, one in which a tighter capacity environment increases the value of the carrier access and purchasing power our platform provides. Building on the strategy, effective October 1st of this year we acquired the Dallas operations of Whitaker Logistics. We are keen to accelerate the growth of our bimodal brokerage platform, and this transaction represents a tremendous opportunity to support the acquired account base with our robust technology platform and offer Radiant Road and Rail’s current and prospective agent partners and customers an expanded service offering, including domestic and international forwarding, customs brokerage, and a range of other value-added services.
The international picture, while still shaped by a complex and evolving trade environment, continued to show improvement during our first fiscal quarter. Global trade flows continue to be influenced by two significant forces. The first is the ongoing disruption to traditional ocean shipping routes stemming from a restricted flow of commercial traffic through the Straits of Hormuz and continued Houthi activity affecting Red Sea and Suez Canal transits, which has kept capacity tight across key international trade lanes.
Against that backdrop, ocean freights, which have risen sharply since the onset of the Middle East disruption in late February, held at elevated levels throughout the quarter as carriers maintain capacity discipline, a marked shift from the prolonged downturn in ocean pricing that preceded the current disruption. At the same time, elevated fuel prices and conflict-related rerouting have added cost pressure across air and ocean markets, and we continue to monitor the impact on our margins.
Volatility of this kind increases the premium customers place on reliable capacity and experienced partners. The second is the ongoing transformation of the global tariff landscape, with U.S. trade policy sustaining a high degree of compliance complexity for shippers. With the temporary Section 122 surcharge having expired in July, Section 232 and 301 measures remaining in place, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection phasing into its process for refunding IEFA duties, shippers continue to adapt to rapidly changing requirements.
This complexity, together with elevated IEFA refund-related filing activity across the industry, has continued to drive demand for our customs brokerage expertise as customers rely on experienced partners to navigate an evolving tariff structure. More recently, escalating tariff actions between the U.S. and Canada, including U.S. tariffs imposed in late August and Canada’s retaliatory measures that took effect on September 8, against the backdrop of an ongoing USMCA review, added a further layer of complexity for shippers moving goods across our shared borders.
While it’s early to gauge the full impact, we expect this cross-border dynamic to remain a source of demand for our customs brokerage and compliance capabilities, and it may also create additional international air and ocean freight forwarding opportunities for our Canadian operations as shippers look to diversify away from cross-border trucking and rail. Notably, our air freight performance continued to be up meaningfully during the quarter, driven in large part by our work in support of disaster relief following typhoon activities in the Western Pacific earlier this year. More broadly, global air cargo demand continued to grow during the quarter; even as elevated jet fuel prices and constrained Middle East capacity, air freight rates firm, we are entering this next phase of the cycle from a position of real financial strength.
In August of this year we completed an amended and restated $200 million senior credit facility, extending its maturity to 2031 and expanding our acquisition-focused accordion to $100 million and improving our price terms, and we also ended the quarter with no net debt. That capacity, together with our long-term strategy of growing organically where our network gives us an advantage and supplementing that growth through disciplined acquisitions, positions us well to build on the encouraging signs of a domestic rate recovery while continuing to help customers navigate a volatile global trade environment.
With that, I’ll turn it over to Todd Maycomber, our CFO, to walk us through our detailed financial results, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A.
Todd Maycomber (Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks, Bon, and good afternoon, everyone. Today we will be discussing our financial results, including adjusted net income and adjusted EBITDA, for the three months ended September 30, 2026. For the three months ended September 30, 2026, we reported net income attributable to Radiant Logistics of $6,141,000 on $279.8 million of revenues, or $0.13 per basic and fully diluted share. For the three months ended September 30, 2025, we reported net income attributable to Radiant Logistics of $1,293,000 on $226.7 million of revenues, or $0.03 per basic and fully diluted share. This represents an increase of approximately $4,848,000 of net income over the comparable prior-year period, or 374.9%.
For adjusted net income, we reported $8,615,000 for the three months ended September 30, 2026, compared to adjusted net income of $4,467,000 for the three months ended September 30, 2025. This represents an increase of approximately $4,148,000, or approximately 92.9%. For adjusted EBITDA, we reported $12,180,000 for the three months ended September 30, 2026, compared to adjusted EBITDA of $6,797,000 for the three months ended September 30, 2025. This represents an increase of approximately $5,383,000, or approximately 79.2%.
With that, I will turn the call over to our moderator to facilitate any Q&A from our callers.
OPERATOR
Thank you very much. At this time, we will be conducting our question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your phone keypad now. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For any participants using speaker equipment, it might be necessary to pick up your handset before you press the keys. Please wait a moment whilst we poll for questions.
Thank you. Our first question is coming from Jason Seidel of TD Cowen. Jason, your line is live.
Jason Seidel (Analyst at TD Cowen)
Thank you, operator. Hey, Bon. Hey, guys, couple quick questions here. You know, Bon, love the details you’re starting to give on Navigate and some numbers behind it. Maybe you can help us dive a little bit further here. You mentioned 7,500 shipments were done by one customer in the quarter. How about total shipments in the quarter? Can you give us an idea of that? Then maybe, as Navigate stands right now, how much capacity does it have in terms of shipments for the quarter?
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
I’m not in a position to kind of give the broader volume count at this point, but we’ll, you know, we’ll continue to expand the scope of what we talk about, you know, as we move forward in time. But we—I think the second part of your question just had to do more with kind of, was it capacity to serve more customers? Was that—can you give it to me one
Jason Seidel (Analyst at TD Cowen)
More time? Yeah, exactly. So how, yeah, in other words, how much can you scale Navigate from here?
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, we believe it’s very scalable and continue to kind of build out the back office in support of that. And we have a fairly robust sales pipeline that we’re working. You know, as a, you know, a quick reminder, when we acquired this business, part of the idea that drew us to it was the ability to take this technology and activate our existing customer base with the tech as well as new customers. So it took us some time to get Navigate integrated into our underlying PMS, which we now have done.
And so we’re kind of very much on the front end of engaging with customers. But is it. Again, I’m not going to get into specific customer’s name, but this customer that’s growing so much with us had been a long-time customer that we were doing just a little bit of business with. And, you know, as we kind of went through the QBR, heard some of the things, some of the challenges they were trying to solve, we introduced them to Navigate and they took it and ran with it. And we, you know, we think that there will be a number of customers kind of right in, right in our own backyard, so to speak, that with the benefit of Navigate, we can really grow and scale.
So what, you know, we might have historically thought of being a small customer for us can become a real meaningful contributor to our own portfolio as well as, you know, winning incremental new business with what we believe is really differentiated tech.
Jason Seidel (Analyst at TD Cowen)
It certainly looks like it’s going well for you so far. If I could shift a little bit to your freight forwarding business. Some of your competitors out there were talking about demand in the quarter being driven by some of the hyperscalers. I guess maybe you could talk to a little bit about that and what you guys expect going forward here in the next quarter.
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Sure. We have certainly some exposure to the data center work and kind of people in and around that ecosystem. It’s not a big driver in our business, but we are certainly participating in it through probably more than 10 accounts. But our anchor business or the driver in what we’re doing right now is not data center work. But more broadly, I think what’s going on in and around data centers is part of the demand that the rest of the freight is competing for, so to speak.
And it is a very vibrant subsector of what’s going on in the tech space. And everything you read would suggest it will continue to be so, and so we’re getting a little bit, but we could always use a little more.
Jason Seidel (Analyst at TD Cowen)
Can’t we all? I wanted to switch over a little bit to the acquisition side. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about Whitaker and the percentage of business they have split between intermodal and pure truck brokerage. And then I have a follow-up question.
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Sure. So Whitaker, the Dallas operations that we acquired were not large. I’ll just leave it at, you know, smaller than a bread box for a technical term. You know, so it was small, but it was really interesting. You know, Gary Whitaker is a long-time, recognized entrepreneur in our industry and we were really pleased to have the opportunity to partner with him in Dallas. And it really, as a precursor to acquiring the Dallas operations, which were principally intermodal in operation, they had a few agents which were actually the first couple of agents that we onboarded as we kind of got ourselves organized for the day Dallas transaction.
And so it was really just a first step, so to speak, in us activating the agent model in the truck brokerage and intermodal space. But literally within hours of the press release, we started receiving reverse inquiries from folks interested to understand more about what we’re doing and have a number of interesting opportunities in flight in furtherance of that strategy.
Jason Seidel (Analyst at TD Cowen)
That’s good color, Bon. And then lastly, you guys expanded the accordion up to $100 million. Is this sort of a signal that you might be open to some larger acquisitions? I’m just curious.
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, I think the short answer is yes. And you’ve been here from the beginning almost, Jason, long time. Yeah, you can really appreciate that for the longest time our stock traded at just a substantial discount to fair value, which really kept us focused on much, much smaller acquisitions and stock buybacks. But, you know, we’re starting to get a little better valuation of our own stock in the marketplace, which I believe is well deserved. But a byproduct of that is it creates an environment that would allow us to do larger deals.
So while I still think our bread and butter will likely be smaller, call it plus or minus $2 million EBITDA type tuck-ins, and making good on our brand promise to support our agent stations and conversions, if we found a larger deal, should we choose, we can go play in those arenas where historically we really didn’t. I would offer it’s still the same financial discipline, but we’re just going to have the ability to move up market.
Jason Seidel (Analyst at TD Cowen)
Bon, I appreciate the time as always, a nice quarter.
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you very much. And our next question is coming from Jeff Kaufman of Citizens Bank. Jeff, your line is live.
Jeff Kaufman (Analyst at Citizens Bank)
Thank you very much. And Bon, congratulations. Terrific looking quarter. A lot of good things happening. I was just kind of curious your view on the bigger picture. With the Democratic sweep we’ve had in the House and the Senate, you know, things might change longer term, probably not so much short term. But do you think this has any potential impact to USMCA and maybe some of the business you’re doing with Canada and Mexico? And then have you thought internally about what this may or may not mean for domestic or global trade?
Because I know with all of the, and you mentioned your release, right? With the change in 122, 232, 301, it’s creating a lot of business for customs. Do you see that environment potentially shifting with the election or no?
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Wow, that’s a big question. We can always count on change, right? So I think it’ll always be shifting. But a lot of what we have done and continue to do is based upon a longer-term view of things, and without trying to avoid the politics as best I can. You know, I’ve never—I could be wrong at the end of the day, of course—but I’ve never thought some of these initiatives would be durable beyond this administration. And so we’ve been looking on the horizon and thinking about a world reverting to more normalized global trade flows.
That may or may not happen, but that’s just kind of my own, personal view of things. So I’m hopeful for some relief to the tariff dynamics, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect much relief in the next 24 months. But I think ultimately it will come.
Jeff Kaufman (Analyst at Citizens Bank)
Now, I’m just curious. I don’t know all the details on how sausage gets made, but I know the view of the administration prior to the election was USMCA would want it to become USMC and then US, USMX and USCA, so bilaterals instead of this trilateral trade agreement. But is that decision made by the administration, or is that decision made by Congress?
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Wow. I slept through that part of civics class. So I’m going to have to defer. I’m going to have to defer on that one.
Jeff Kaufman (Analyst at Citizens Bank)
All right, fair enough. So revenues have been much higher than expected the last few quarters because of what’s going on in the global environment. Normally we see a sequential uptick from 1Q to 2Q with 4Q actually being the strongest quarter of the year. Is there any reason to believe that we wouldn’t see that normal seasonality, or is there something going on that makes it a little different this time around?
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Our seasonality has become muted over time. So sequential improvement, I would typically say yes, but it’s become more modest, particularly as it relates to these last couple of quarters. What for us is, because we’re fiscal year, I was getting into the quarter ended September and the quarter ended December. Those are typically our stronger quarters, but not materially stronger one versus the other—smoothed out a little bit over time.
Todd Maycomber (Chief Financial Officer)
So, Jeff, one thing that kind of muddies the waters is if we have significant charters, right? That happens in one quarter versus the other. So we do have a bit of that. We talked about that a little bit, how we had some that came in this quarter and we had a larger amount in the prior quarter. So that’s obviously something that needs to be considered.
Jeff Kaufman (Analyst at Citizens Bank)
No, thanks, Todd. And then one final question. Congratulations on the customer expansion with Navigate. Can you help us understand whether we think about it as revenue or profit? I know the benefit is transparency to the customer across the system. But from a company standpoint, as a customer moves over to Navigate, is there a revenue difference? Is there a margin difference? Or is it just we have this system that the customer loves and we want to get as many customers on it?
But, you know, what is the benefit to the company of more customers moving on to Navigate?
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, well, I think it’s taking multiple forms, but I think ultimately it will translate into incremental transportation volumes, right, and margin. So it is a tool or a resource or a differentiator that will encourage customers to want to do more business with us because of the value to them in doing so.
Jeff Kaufman (Analyst at Citizens Bank)
All right, thank you so much. And again, congratulations.
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you very much. Just a reminder there, if there will be any further questions, you can still join the queue by pressing star-1 on your phone keypad. Our next question is coming from Ryan Myers of Lake Street Capital. Ryan, your line is live.
Ryan Myers (Analyst at Lake Street Capital)
Hey, guys, thanks for taking my questions. Given the strong EBITDA during the quarter, how much of that do you think we should view as sustainable underlying earnings power versus benefit from disaster relief?
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
This is where I go, go, Todd, go.
Todd Maycomber (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I mean, we typically don’t quantify that, but the vast majority of this absolutely is baseline business. But that said, we do have these disaster relief things come in and do help us out. It lifted us, you know, I’d say more than a million dollars, but less than two. So it was a little bit of, you know, it helped out the quarter. So there you go.
Ryan Myers (Analyst at Lake Street Capital)
Yeah, that’s helpful. Thank you. And then on the Strait of Hormuz, if Hormuz and Red Sea routes reopen and ocean rates normalize, how does that change the outlook for your international business?
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
That’ll be interesting to see. I would assume we would see margin characteristics of ocean come down a bit, I would think.
Todd Maycomber (Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, I would think. Yeah. And air would probably come down a bit, too. I think we just open up, you know, the—yeah, I’m in line with Bon. I think it would reduce both of those.
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
But hopefully we’ll get a lot of project business going back and rebuilding all the things that got destroyed.
Ryan Myers (Analyst at Lake Street Capital)
Yeah. All right, great. Thank you so much.
OPERATOR
Thank you very much. Well, we appear to have reached the end of our question and answer sessions. I will now hand back over to the management team for any closing comments.
Bon Crane (Chief Executive Officer)
All right, thank you. Let me close by saying that we remain optimistic about our prospects and opportunities to continue to leverage our best-in-class technology, robust North American footprint, and extensive global network of service partners to continue to build on the great platform we’ve created here at Radiant. At the same time, we intend to thoughtfully re-lever our balance sheet through a combination of agent station conversions, synergistic tuck-in acquisitions, and, given the opportunity, even some larger transactions through our multi-prong approach.
We believe we will continue to create meaningful value for our shareholders, operating partners, and the end customers that we serve. Thanks for listening and your support of Radiant Logistics.
OPERATOR
Thank you very much everyone. This does conclude today’s conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation.
Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company’s SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants’ and analysts’ statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
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