C.H. Robinson Delivers Another Quarter of Outperformance in Q4 2025, Demonstrating Strength of Its Lean AI Transformation

Despite one of the most challenging freight environments in more than a decade, C.H. Robinson closed out 2025 with another quarter of outperformance, showcasing the company's disciplined execution, continued market share gains, and the accelerating impact of its Lean AI strategy.

Navigating a difficult macro backdrop with discipline and focus

During the company's fourth quarter earnings call, President and Chief Executive Officer Dave Bozeman emphasized that while global freight markets remained under pressure, C.H. Robinson again delivered results that outpaced broader industry trends.

The Cass Freight Shipment Index declined year over year for the 13th consecutive quarter, hitting its lowest Q4 level since 2009. Meanwhile, trucking spot costs spiked during the final five weeks of the year due to tightening capacity, winter storms, and regulatory pressures. Ocean shipping was also impacted by declining demand and excess vessel capacity.

Even with these headwinds, Bozeman underscored the company's continued strength.

"We've consistently focused on controlling what we can control, which is providing differentiated service and solutions to our customers and carriers, executing with discipline, and continuously improving our business model and our cost to serve. This focus, and the strength of our Lean AI, which is the combination of our Lean operating model, industry leading technology and the best logisticians, has enabled us to consistently outperform over the last two years, and we did it again in Q4."

Q4 2025 Highlights

Market share gains and operational discipline

• NAST volume grew 1.0%, including ~3% truckload growth, outperforming a 7.6% decline in the Cass Freight Shipment Index.
• NAST AGP margin expanded by 20 basis points year over year, despite spot market cost pressure.
• Global Forwarding achieved 120 basis points of gross margin expansion, supported by stronger revenue management.
• Enterprise-wide productivity continued to rise, with double-digit gains in NAST and high single-digit gains in Global Forwarding for the full year.

Financial performance

• Total revenue and AGP declined 7% and 4% year over year, primarily due to significantly lower ocean rates.
• NAST AGP increased 2%, partially offsetting the international decline.
• Operating margin (excluding restructuring) expanded 320 basis points, reflecting strong cost optimization and Lean AI productivity improvements.
• Adjusted diluted EPS increased 1.7% to $1.23, despite macro headwinds.

"Changing the culture of a company is hard work," Bozeman added. "We've shifted to a culture of solving problems with speed, and the implementation of a Lean operating model has contributed greatly to this change. We certainly encounter challenges along the way…but how we solve them now is different and it's not easy for others to replicate."

Lean AI: A sustainable competitive advantage

Lean AI remains at the center of C.H. Robinson's transformation. The company continues to scale its fleet of proprietary, custom-built AI agents, designed to automate manual tasks, enhance decision-making, and deliver superior service to customers and carriers.

Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer Arun Rajan highlighted Robinson's "builder culture" as a major differentiator, with an in-house team of more than 450 engineers and data scientists that effectively and efficiently build fit-for-purpose AI agents.

An example: newly deployed AI agents that address missed LTL pickups have reduced return-trip pickups by 42%, automated 95% of checks, and are helping carriers improve their own operations using newly surfaced data.

These innovations, paired with the C.H. Robinson Lean operating model, allow the company to:

• Deliver superior customer and carrier experiences
• Respond to market volatility with faster, more frequent algorithmic cost and price discovery
• Decouple headcount from volume growth, expanding operating leverage

"The difference at Robinson is our industry leading technology is combined with our Lean AI operating model, and we expect that our in-house team with deep domain expertise will enable us to sustainably build and implement our proprietary AI innovations in a disciplined, cost-effective way that maximizes the return on our tech investments," said Rajan. "Our fleet of AI agents is growing quickly as we continue to pioneer new ways to automate manual tasks and supercharge our industry-leading freight experts to solve for complexity and deliver high quality service to our customers and carriers."

Strength in NAST and continued leadership across key verticals

President of NAST, Michael Castagnetto, noted that Q4 marked the 11th consecutive quarter of NAST market share gains. The company's focus on strategic verticals delivered double-digit growth in retail and automotive, supported by enhanced drop trailer capabilities, expanded cross border solutions, and increased warehousing and cross-dock space near the U.S.-Mexico border.

"These results show the strength of our operating model and our ability to deliver in any market," Castagnetto said.

Financial strength and shareholder returns

CFO Damon Lee highlighted the company's disciplined financial management and continued execution of its capital allocation strategy.

• Generated $305 million in cash from operations
• Returned $207.7 million to shareholders via dividends and share repurchases
• Continued to optimize its cost structure while delivering higher productivity

"We're still in the early innings of our transformation," said C.H. Robinson's CFO Damon Lee. "We're excited about the significant runway that remains in executing our Lean AI strategy and in our ability to deliver sustainable profitable growth and long-term value for all of our stakeholders."

Outlook

Looking forward, C.H. Robinson remains focused on winning in any market environment. Even as macro uncertainty persists, the company expects its Lean operating model, strengthened by the expanding capabilities of Lean AI, to continue driving outperformance.

"We are the new disruptor," Bozeman concluded. "You've heard us say that we expect the next two years to be more exciting than the last two years, and the last two years have been pretty damn exciting."

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