Descartes Systems Gr (NASDAQ:DSGX) released second-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Thursday. Read the complete transcript below.
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View the webcast at https://www.descartes.com/investor-relations/financial-information
Summary
Descartes Systems Gr reported record financial results with Q2 revenues at $201 million, up 12% year-over-year, and a record net income increase of 32%.
The company remains debt-free with over $400 million in cash and a $350 million line of credit, enabling further investments and acquisitions.
Key growth areas include Global Trade Intelligence, e-commerce, and transportation management, driven by increased demand due to complex global trade dynamics.
Significant investments in AI are underway, aiming to enhance automation and improve supply chain management, with practical examples already benefiting customers.
Recent acquisitions, TIE and Extensiv, aim to bolster the company's logistics network and AI capabilities, with integration expected to slightly impact margins.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Descartes Systems Gr's quarterly results conference call. At this time all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, September 10, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Scott Pagan.
Please go ahead.
Scott Pagan
Thank you very much. Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. Apologies for the delay in starting. There was a slight technical issue with getting the press release out on the wire. Joining me on the call today are Ed Ryan, CEO, and Ed Gardner, CFO, and I trust that everyone has now received a copy of our financial results press release. Portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include statements of forward‑looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws.
These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws. These forward‑looking statements include statements related to our assessment of the current and future impact of geopolitical, trade, tariff, and economic uncertainty on our business and financial condition, Descartes Systems Gr operating performance, financial results and condition, cash flow and use of cash, business outlook, baseline revenues, baseline operating expenses and baseline calibration, anticipated and potential revenue losses and gains, anticipated recognition of revenues and incurrence of expenses, potential acquisitions and acquisition strategy, cost reduction and integration initiatives, potential share purchases under a normal course issuer bid, and other matters that may constitute forward‑looking statements. These forward‑looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of Descartes Systems Gr to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance, or achievements implied by such forward‑looking statements.
These factors are outlined in the press release and in the section entitled "Certain factors that may affect future results" in documents filed and furnished with the SEC, OSC, and other securities commissions across Canada, including our Management's Discussion and Analysis filed today. We provide forward‑looking statements solely for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. You're cautioned that such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. We don't undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward‑looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based, except as required by law. And with that, let me turn the call over to Ed.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Hey, thanks, Scott. And welcome, everyone, to the call. Today we're again reporting record quarterly financial results. We're ahead of our plan in Q2, which gives us even more room to make acquisitions, investments in AI, and other investments in our business. These are strong results that I'm looking forward to walking through in more detail. However, first let me give you a roadmap for the call. I'll start by hitting some highlights of our last quarter, and I'll provide some comments on some investments we've been making.
And then I'll hand it over to Ed Gardner, who will go over the Q2 year‑to‑date financial results in more detail. After that, I'll come back and provide an update on how we see the current business environment and how our business was calibrated for Q3, and then we'll open it up to the operator to coordinate the Q&A portion of the call. So let's get into Q2. Key metrics we monitor, including revenues, profits, cash flow from operations, operating margins, and returns on our investments.
For this past quarter, we again had record performance in each of those areas. Total revenues were at a record $201 million, up 12% from a year ago. Record high service revenues were up 13% from a year ago and our continued focus on generating recurring revenues. Record net income was up 32% from a year ago. Record income from operations was up 36% from a year ago. Record adjusted EBITDA was up 18% from a year ago. Our adjusted EBITDA margin is at a record high level of 47%.
We generated over $81 million in cash from our operations, up 28% from a year ago. So strong record results across all of our key metrics. At the end of the quarter we had over $400 million in cash and we were debt‑free with an undrawn $350 million line of credit. This was before we completed some acquisitions in August, which I'll talk about shortly. We remain well capitalized, cash‑generating, growing, and ready to continue to invest in our business.
We also have a normal course issuer bid that allows us to purchase up to 8.6 million shares before December of this year. We've made some more purchases since we last reported, and I'll allow Ed Gardner to give you those details. But especially in light of how the business performed last quarter, we remain optimistic about Descartes Systems Gr's future, and the normal course issuer bid is a tool we could use to make further purchases. Wanted to touch on a few areas that helped our business perform well this quarter.
You'll notice some of them are similar themes to previous quarters. The first is Global Trade Intelligence. Global Trade Intelligence remains one of the larger contributors to our service revenue. We had good growth in the quarter compared to where it was a year ago. I think it's helpful to understand what's going on with global trade to understand why we've seen more demand from customers in this part of our—there's three things going on in the world that are making it more challenging to move goods from point A to point B. The first is tariffs are still changing, and they're often changing rapidly. There's been lots of active resetting of international trade agreements. The setting, threatening, raising, or lowering of tariffs has become a common international tool in recent trade negotiations. Changes have often come with less advance notice than industry has been used to. It's extremely challenging for businesses involved in international trade to track and manage all of these changes on their own.
More and more businesses are reliant on global trade management systems powered by the kind of tariff and duty content that Descartes Systems Gr provides. This has been a big demand driver for us. Also, businesses have become more active in researching ways to minimize their tariff burden, consulting more and more with trade professionals or using research tools like Descartes Systems Gr Datamyne tools to understand what business peers are doing.
So it has also influenced demand further. If you can't reduce tariffs, there's value in deferring your tariff burden. Leveraging available tariff mechanisms, such as foreign trade zones, has been another area that has increased customer demand for Descartes Systems Gr. The second is customs and export control enforcement has stepped up. Governments, in particular in the U.S., have committed additional funding to customs and export control enforcement activities.
This is in response to the perception that there is a significant non‑compliance worth pursuing, particularly on sanctioned parties and export controls. Sanctioned parties are where governments list entities or individuals with whom it is illegal to trade. These sanctions often come about because of military conflicts, economic disputes, or criminal activities. Trading with a prohibited entity can bring large penalties. For that reason, a key part of global trade compliance programs should include detailed sanctioned‑party screening for shipments.
Descartes Systems Gr sanctioned‑party screening business has seen strong demand, and we don't expect increased enforcement to lower that demand. Export compliance is often at the commodity level of shipment prohibitions or licensing on goods exported from one country to another. These requirements can be because of militarily sensitive goods or dual‑use goods, or because of scarce, valuable resources in a manufacturing process, like semiconductors and chips.
Our export compliance solutions, particularly in our OCR solutions, have seen heightened demand as enforcement of these rules has increased. And the third is compliance and audit burden has increased hand in hand with the increase in enforcement. The obligation to keep detailed, accurate, and auditable records on global trade transactions has increased. So, for example, it's not enough to appropriately screen a transaction, but you also need the auditable proof of that screen available in the future for third‑party review.
The importance of global trade management systems has shifted from transactional execution to systems of record. This is particularly so with increased U.S. focus on transshipments as a mechanism that is potentially being used to avoid tariffs or sanctions. Transshipment is where goods are routed through one or more other countries before the final destination, often to avoid tariffs or sanctions that apply to the original country of origin. Customers are compelled to have accurate and detailed records proving country of origin on shipped goods, something that is increasingly challenging in a complex world of international supply chains and multiple internationally sourced component parts in finished goods. We have seen good demand from people seeking new or more sophisticated trade management systems with reputable, stable partners that could support future audits. That's been a good demand driver for us as well. A rapidly changing tariff environment, increased resources dedicated towards trade enforcement, and detailed and auditable record requirements extending into the future—a much more complex trade environment is what we're in today.
With the number of changes that have happened in the trade environment over the past two years, we found that our customers are no longer waiting to see what's next. Many have accepted that volatility is the new baseline operating condition. Rather than accepting the stability of a trade rule and building a standard operating procedure to address that rule, we found that our customers are already focused on building agility, flexibility, and redundancy into their supply chains.
They're preparing themselves to be ready for what they don't know is going to change. That approach has necessitated a higher level of investment and executive attention to supply‑chain and logistics issues than we've seen historically. We've seen the same trend with shippers booking capacity. More shippers are relying on spot rates and shorter‑term capacity contracts. That investment has been supported by one‑time tailwind for some in the U.S. Some businesses have received sizable tariff refunds from the previous U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs—again one‑time in nature—however, a stimulus for some supply‑chain investments. Second area where we've seen good growth is in our e‑commerce entries. We continue to see overall growth in consumers embracing e‑commerce. Even with the elimination of the tariff‑exempt Type 86 de minimis program, imports have continued to grow.
Coming into the United States, we have a premier solution for handling e-commerce imports into the U.S. Using our NetCHB system with particular strength in high volume and high velocity requirements, we're helping key brokers meet the demands of importers, and these volumes are contributing well to our revenue growth. We called this out in Q1, but we again saw strength in Q2. The third area is in transportation management. MacroPoint continues to be strong for us.
MacroPoint provides real-time visibility to shipments. Brokers and shippers tell us the loads they want to track. It's our job to get tracking information from onboard systems, transportation management systems, using our application, or old-fashioned calls to drivers. Over past quarters, we've enhanced our system to have AI agents that interact with drivers to encourage adoption of our tracking app, helping us reach a segment of the market that was previously difficult to reach at scale.
These agents have helped contribute to a higher percentage of shipments tracked than our peers, which in turn drives more people to our network. We're also competitively differentiated because we are tracking data from both phones and onboard devices, so we're able to compare those data sets and alert customers to discrepancies that may exist as they consider which carriers they'll use in the future. One of the particular strengths of our transportation management offerings is the combined solution that we can provide.
We have a full enterprise-grade transportation management system for shippers and brokers, real-time tracking of a shipment, and fraud detection/carrier screening with MyCarrierPortal. This combination has been well received by the market, especially for brokers who need enhanced carrier screening tools in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision imposing liability on brokers for reckless selection of carriers. A good growth driver for us with the potential for further growth, which was a key consideration for our recent investment in TIE, which I'll talk about later.
And the last is fleet performance/management and routing. We have to help customers manage their fleets of vehicles. In particular, we have routing and scheduling solutions to help companies figure out the most efficient way to make deliveries and reduce hours and miles driven to do that. There's always good demand for these solutions. However, the demand increases in periods like now where fuel costs increase, running your fleet becomes more expensive, and customers look into solutions to reduce the amount of fuel they are using to make deliveries.
Cost consciousness for fleet owners is even higher given the inflation that exists in driver wages. This wage inflation is driven in part by driver shortages. New U.S. regulations have made it more difficult to train a qualified driver. This demand in our business was supported by two recent investments. We made, at the end of Q1, we combined with Idelic. Idelic is an AI-powered driver safety and performance management system. This was a timely investment as the U.S. court focused attention on driver safety and liability in accidents. This is our first full quarter with Idelic and has paired well with our GroundCloud solution to provide an excellent tool to enhance safety oversight of our existing private customers. Then in the last month of Q2, DriveIn joined our Descartes team. Latin America has been a key expansion target for our routing solutions. There's a lot of opportunity for growth with our existing solutions portfolio plus access to a broad base of delivery information in the region.
We're joined by a great team with experience with delivery solutions in high-density urban environments. DriveIn was only here for about three weeks of Q2, but it has meshed well with our team, and we're looking forward to great things to come in Q3 and beyond. So overall, these are the items that contributed strong growth and demand in Q2. That performance, we were able to continue to make investments in our business. One of the principal areas of investment continues to be in artificial intelligence technologies, and with that, let's talk about AI.
We're investing in AI because it enables automation. As supply chains and logistics becomes more and more complex—managing sources of data, physical resources, human resources, payments, tariffs, duties, compliance, sanctions, fuel costs, vessel capacity, warehouses—all these are becoming too complex for humans to manage on their own. In making our investments, we have some core beliefs in mind about how AI will change our business over time. Our solutions will be used by AI through APIs and agents more than by users and with a browser. Our solutions will be used to generate outcomes for customers rather than to be licensed for access. Our solutions will be used to identify and prevent potential problems as much as to solve existing problems. We believe that human oversight of decisions made by technology will still be critical, that the data on our network will provide critical context to both fuel and human and AI decisions, and finally that our broad solution set will integrate to provide our customers with a single source for unrivaled outcomes.
We've been very active in the designing infrastructure, workflows, and commercial models to adapt to these inevitable changes. We've designed our agent control plane for agents to access our products. We've made AI skills from our products available to agents via MCP and the Agent Control Panel. We're undertaking a comprehensive data graph to bring useful network-effect context to decisions, and we're designing a uniform workbench entry point for agents and humans to access the Descartes Global Logistics Network skills.
We're very busy and tremendously excited by the value we can deliver to our customers using these AI capabilities. Our customers are also asking us for AI that removes work; they're more interested in outcomes than workflows. With that in mind, we're developing and deploying AI agents, including agents that classify HS codes, model duty exposure and sourcing shifts, agents that diagnose customs and regulatory filing rejections and suggest remediation, agents that predict late loads and proactively rebook dock appointments, agents that rate and book across transportation modes, agents to forecast e-commerce demand, balance stock, and rate shop, sanctioned-parties screening triage to clear false positives, agents that screen for double brokering and identify fraud, agents that dynamically schedule to get delivery routes back on track, and finally, fleet safety coaching. These aren't aspirational. Our customers are seeing real benefits from AI agents already. As I've been mentioning previously, our MacroPoint business is actively using agents to call drivers for location checks, gather proof of delivery information for fulfillment purposes, get arrival and departure confirmation, get truck rates to help with carrier selection, and get insurance certificates for carriers.
This helps our customers track and book more loads. We have AI agents that enabled tracking on 26% more loads than they did in Q1. As we deliver more value to customers, we get paid on delivering more outcomes. This has been a real benefit to us in the quarter and all due to AI. AI is an exciting part of our present and future. We're planning a comprehensive update on what we're doing with AI at our in-person Innovation Forum to be held October 6th through the 8th in Chicago.
We're planning on showing practical and real examples of how our customers will get value from outcomes leveraging AI. This is a big event where attendees can interact with customers, partners, and Descartes team members. A great event to learn from Descartes and others, but also to provide feedback on how we can help deliver more value. We're very excited to host everyone and share how excited we are about our future. Please see our website for more registration details, and we look forward to seeing you there.
So in summary, strong Q2 with additional AI investments, two acquisitions that impacted Q2, and plans for more investments. I'm excited about how the business is performing and the opportunity we have in front of us. With that, I will turn the call over to Ed Gardner to go through the financial results in more detail. Ed, awesome.
Ed Gardner — Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Ed. As Ed mentioned, I'll be walking you through our key financial highlights for the second quarter and year-to-date results. We're pleased to report record quarterly revenues of $201.1 million this quarter, an increase of approximately 12% from revenues of $179.8 million in Q2 of last year. Our revenue mix in the quarter continued to be very strong, with services revenue increasing over 13% to $188.6 million from $166.8 million last year in the second quarter.
With services revenue representing 94% of total revenue this quarter, removing the impact of both the recent acquisitions as well as a positive impact from changes in FX rates, we would estimate that our growth in services revenue from new and existing customers—that is, our organic growth—would have been just north of 9% this quarter when compared to the same quarter last year, which is similar to Q1 of this year. Professional services and other revenue, including hardware revenue, came in at $12.4 million, or 6% of revenue, slightly down from $12.8 million in Q2 last year, while license revenues were minimal, similar to last year.
Collectively, our professional services and other revenue combined with our license revenues was approximately 6% of our total revenues. Gross margin came in at 78% of revenue for the second quarter, up from 77% in Q2 of last year. The increase in gross margin for the quarter was primarily due to operating leverage from organic growth in services revenue. Turning our attention to the bottom line, as a result of solid revenue growth, improved gross margin as well as controlled growth in operating expenses, adjusted EBITDA came in at a record $94.4 million, just under 47% of revenue, up 18% from adjusted EBITDA of $80.2 million in the same quarter last year. From a GAAP earnings perspective, net income for the second quarter came in at $50 million, up 32% from last year. With these operating results and strong collections from customers, cash flow generated from operations came in at $81.3 million, or 86% of adjusted EBITDA, up 28% from operating cash flow in the second quarter last year. Looking at our operating results for the first half of the year, revenue came in at $394.7 million, an increase of 13% from revenue of $348.6 million in the first six months of last year.
For that same period, adjusted EBITDA came in at $184.1 million, or 46.6% of revenue, up 19% from last year. Net income for the first half of this year also increased, coming in at $98.5 million, or $1.13 per diluted common share, up from $74.3 million, or $0.85 per diluted common share, in the first half of last year. So overall, a great second quarter to complete a great first half of the year. If we look at the balance sheet, our cash balances totaled $401 million at the end of July.
As I just mentioned, we generated operating cash flow of just over $81 million in the quarter. Offsetting that was approximately $30 million in capital deployed on the Drive In acquisition and approximately $24 million on share buybacks under our normal course issuer bid. Also worth noting that since the quarter ended, we spent approximately $220 million on the acquisitions of TIE and Extensiv, and as we look ahead we still remain well capitalized and ready to capitalize on potential M&A activities in our space.
A couple more points as it relates to the remainder of fiscal 2027: Going forward, we expect to continue to see strong operating cash flow conversion north of 80% of our adjusted EBITDA—of course, subject to unusual events and quarterly fluctuations, including adjustments related to future earn-out payments that exceed our estimates made at the time of an acquisition. After incurring approximately $4.6 million in capital additions in the first half of the year, we expect to incur approximately $2 to $4 million in additional capital expenditures this coming year, mainly related to IT equipment purchases.
After deploying approximately $45 million on share buybacks in the first half of the year, we may see additional purchases under the NCIB program moving forward. After incurring amortization expense of $35.4 million in the first half of this year, we expect amortization expense will come in at $37.5 million for the remainder of fiscal 2027, with this figure being subject to adjustment for foreign exchanges and any future acquisitions. We estimate that payments of contingent consideration for earn-out agreements for the balance of this year could be up to approximately $9 million, subject to any necessary adjustments resulting from the final earn-out calculations. Our income tax rate in the first half of the year came in within our expected range at approximately 26% of pre-tax income, in line with our blended statutory tax rate of approximately 26.5%. For the remainder of fiscal 2027, we're expecting the tax rate will be in the range of 25% to 30% of our pre-tax income, which means it will be something on either side of our blended statutory tax rate. However, as always, we should add that our tax rate may fluctuate from quarter to quarter from one-time tax items that may arise as we operate internationally across multiple countries.
And finally, after incurring stock-based compensation expense of $14.8 million in the first half of the year, we currently expect stock compensation to be approximately $15.5 million for the remainder of fiscal 2027, subject to any forfeitures, stock options, or share units. I'll now turn it back over to Ed Ryan to wrap up with some closing comments and our baseline calibration for Q3.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Hey, thanks, Ed. It's still a challenging shipping market. International trade flows continue to adjust to a changing tariff landscape. Elevated fuel costs and driver shortages have impacted domestic trucking. Continued Middle East unrest has extended sailings, impacted capacity, and increased prices. El Niño weather events are creating transportation challenges through historical waterways; there are new restrictions on sailings to the Panama Canal, and there are port delays causing backups in offloading cargo even where the volumes of shipments are down.
Because of the challenging regulatory and trade environment, we continue to see good demand from our customers to deal with the additional complexity to move goods, so we still see good demand in the face of pressures on volumes. This is particularly so with lower-value shipments which, on a country-by-country basis, have moved from tariff-free rapid-process shipments to full-compliance customs authority review of shipments. On the plus side, we've seen some tailwinds to shipment volumes from increased movement of AI infrastructure equipment and a strong month of August for ocean shipments.
August ocean imports into the U.S. were at the third-highest monthly volume ever. We've got a couple of recent acquisitions that also impact how we look at the rest of the year. The first was TIE, an excellent complement to our existing transportation management business for freight brokers. TIE is leveraging AI within their broker workflows already and consistent with our own AI investment goals. As a system of record, TIE brings additional broker transaction data to provide context to shipments on the global logistics network—an exciting addition that complements our existing business, drives our AI goals forward, and brings a very talented team to Descartes Systems Gr. Shortly after we bought TIE, we made a second investment into Extensiv, formerly known as 3PL Central. Extensiv provides warehouse management solutions to over 1,200 third-party logistics providers who are often managing fulfillment on behalf of e-commerce sellers. This fills a gap for us on what we were previously able to offer to 3PLs and is consistent with our approach to WMS, where we focus on e-commerce and high-velocity warehouse movements.
It also furthers our AI goals by bringing a rich set of omnichannel fulfillment data on over 150 million orders to the global logistics network. We'll address this further next quarter, but it may be worth noting that a small portion of Extensiv's business sits outside the 3PL WMS core offering and is an area of the business where we expect some revenue attrition early next fiscal year. Our focus is on growing the 3PL WMS portion of the business, and our team is really excited about the opportunities that we'll have as a combined business.
We've already seen outreach from some of our existing 3PL Descartes Systems Gr customers looking to learn more about Extensiv, so very promising right out of the gate. So it's a challenging macro environment for shipping, with new things that come in to make it an ever-changing landscape for our customers. Also, two new investments in the first half of the quarter that will partially contribute in Q3. Though we have limited operating history with either business at this stage, we keep this in mind as we think about how our business is financially positioned.
In our quarterly report, we've provided a comprehensive description of baseline revenues, baseline calibration, and their limitations. As of September 1, 2026, after the TIE and Extensiv acquisitions and using foreign exchange rates of $0.72 to the Canadian dollar, 1.6 to the euro, and $1.35 to the pound, we've estimated that our baseline revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2027 were approximately $181 million. Our baseline operating expenses were approximately $111.5 million.
We consider this to be our baseline adjusted EBITDA calibration of approximately $69.5 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2027, or approximately 38% of our baseline revenues as at September 1, 2026. We're currently operating above our expected adjusted EBITDA operating margin range of 40% to 45%. Our margin can vary in any period, given such things as revenue mix, foreign exchange movements, and the impact of acquisitions as we integrate them into our business.
For now, we're keeping our target range as 40% to 45%, particularly in light of the early stages of integration for TIE and Extensiv; however, we'll monitor how we're performing over coming quarters to consider whether any upward adjustment is appropriate. These remain uncertain times for our customers. It's a challenge for them to know what they can rely on in this global trading environment. Our goal is to continue to show our customers and other stakeholders that one thing they can rely on is Descartes Systems Gr.
Thanks to everyone for joining us on the call today. As always, we're available to talk to you about our business in whatever manner is most convenient for you. And with that, operator, I'll turn the call over to you to manage the Q&A portion of the call.
OPERATOR
Thank you, and ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by the number two. Once again, that would be star one to ask a question. With that, your first question comes from the line of Chris Quintero with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Chris Quintero — Analyst at Morgan Stanley
Hey guys, appreciate you taking the questions here. Maybe first on TIE, really interesting acquisition there. I know you already have made some acquisition in this kind of broker TMS kind of space. So curious, from your perspective, what about TIE is really additive and complementary to the rest of the portfolio there?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
We think their software is best in class. We think that their AI capabilities are far ahead of their competitors. They obviously have a great growth rate, and we thought they would be a great fit with some of the other tools we bought in that space in the past—Macropoint, Aljex, MyCarrier Portal, et cetera. So we're looking forward to it. We heard great things about them before we bought them, and those things appear to be true to us now that we have.
So we're excited about that.
Chris Quintero — Analyst at Morgan Stanley
Thanks, Brad. And then maybe if you take a step back and look at the overall M&A philosophy, obviously these are some bigger deals than what you've done recently. But curious, any change around your M&A philosophy and what gives you confidence around the integration and synergies you can get from these bigger deals here?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Well, we see less people showing up in the deals and therefore we see the prices coming down as they have in the public markets. Usually the private markets follow in turn, and we're starting to see that right now. And I think that played a role in us being able to get these deals done and I think probably play a role in some of the future deals. You see, we went through this once before in ’08–’10—and I don't know, the times are as bad right now.
But there's a lack of confidence in software companies right now that's probably helping us get acquisitions done and arming all public companies and therefore private companies in that sector for the foreseeable future. So as one of the guys that's flush with cash and also believes in our space, we look around and say, hey, we think we're going to be winners in AI. What are the companies out there do we believe will also be winners in AI and how can we come together with them at a reasonable price to get things done?
An attitude like that and being in a position like that back in ’08–’10 we thought really benefited us in the last 10 years as we bought stuff for very reasonable prices that ended up being big contributors to our business. And to see that be repeated again here.
Scott Pagan
Excellent. Thanks for the question. Okay, thanks, Chris.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from the line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Please go ahead.
Dylan Becker — Analyst at William Blair
Hey, gentlemen, appreciate it. A nice job here. Maybe. Ed, I think you kind of defined Ty as transitioning to a system of action and you called out a number of interesting agentic use cases. But how you think about kind of the opportunity more broadly to pair your network data with workflows and intelligence to make those decisions actionable, how that kind of drives more value for customers, moving to outcome-based pricing, the kind of areas you see that first resonating, maybe more broadly and obviously how that kind of supports your conviction in aggregate platform differentiation over time.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
All right, we think AI is going to change everything. And that comes from a guy, if you've known me for a while, that doesn't believe that all the time, things like blockchain, people were telling me it's going to change the world. And we didn't agree and we're open about saying so. Drones had to answer that question for years. And AI comes along and we go, hey, I think this is going to be everything. Just like in 1999 if you said, what's your Internet revenue?
If I had given you a number, it would have sounded silly. Five years later when everything was Internet revenue. And I believe the same is going to be true here. We started to try and break out AI revenue or talk about AI as if it was some separate thing that was going to happen in the business, that we think it's going to be everything in the business five years from now. We think it's going to rapidly and significantly enhance our ability to make our customers’ lives easier, more efficient, and as a result help them make more money and service their customers better.
And it's, you know, we believe it's going to be a part of everything we do very quickly. And you know, we're headed there and we believe we have a great shot because of the data that we have in our network and all the customers we have and all the functionality provide them to put this together and make it work better than it does today in ways that you might not even be able to imagine today as these things start to compound on each other. So, you know, we already have guys around here that are starting to see the future as we're building more things and going, oh my God, if I put this and this and this and this together, this could change everything for our customers. And, you know, we're starting to see that, and we're getting excited about it and trying to get there as fast as we can. Acquisitions like Ty are all part of that.
Dylan Becker — Analyst at William Blair
All right, that's really helpful. Thank you. And then maybe too, you called it out on kind of the tariff dynamic. You're starting to see some customers. Customers kind of get those refunds at the same time. Obviously, continues to kind of evolve. But I guess just how. Yeah, your conversations with customers progressing, how they're thinking about deploying the refunds that they've received into technology capabilities, just maybe kind of netting out some of the puts and takes and how they're helping or how they're thinking about navigating kind of the dynamic backdrop.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
We're helping them get it back. In a lot of cases. I don't know that we've talked about what they're doing with it. You know, the investments they're making in AI. I mean, the payback is so fast. You know, when they're doing something with us. I mean, we're giving them ROIs that are almost immediate, you know, because we charge transaction prices. Right. So I'm charging you to do something that you would have, you know, a person spend an hour doing it, and I'm charging you 25 cents for doing it. You know, that's, that's. That's. That's a pretty immediate payback. You don't need to be saving up to do that. And, you know, we think of it more like that. I'm not looking at their refunds like, you know, give that back to me.
In fact, in a lot of cases, they're probably supposed to be giving it back to their customers. So we tend to not talk about that refund other than to help them get it back.
Dylan Becker — Analyst at William Blair
Very helpful. Thanks, Ed.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from the line. Paul Cousins with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Paul Cousins — Analyst at Wolfe Research
Hey, guys. Saw the 9% or heard about the 9% services organic growth in the quarter. Can you talk about how much of that is underlying market trends versus share gains?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
I don't know if I have an exact breakdown. I mean, I can tell you that the. There's not been a lot of growth in truck and air, you know, volumes. There's been a little bit in ocean. So I'd say we're selling a lot more stuff right now. You know, our salesforce is doing really well, and we're selling a lot more things to customers. A lot of it AI kind of related stuff. And, you know, some of it's taking stuff from customers. I don't know. I have. If I had to guess, I'd say it's a third of it. You know, share gains from competitors and the rest is probably not so much transaction related, but just selling more of our tools to our customers, which may drive more transactions, but not necessarily be counting on the industry to have more transactions to get there.
Paul Cousins — Analyst at Wolfe Research
Sure. And then maybe looking forward. I know you've talked a lot about how the complexity of the shipping environment is kind of helping you guys at the moment. How do you foresee things playing out through the end of the year and into next year? If there is some sort of de-escalation at any point or even without it, is there any insight into how you expect things to trend the worst? No, just organic growth trends. Like what's the outlook going forward?
Does it seem like it's going to continue to be challenged if you exit in a better place? Just any insight as to.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
I mean, look, we're real happy with 9%. Thanks. We're happy with 9%. I don't know what the growth rate is going to be in the future, but I do know we had two very good quarters a year ago in Q3 and Q4. So we're up against a challenge to provide the same growth rates just because the quarters really picked up. We'll see what we can do here. 9%. Lock in 9% for the rest of my life. I would take it right now. That's a great number for us, especially when we're trying to grow 15% EBITDA to have 9% organic growth in your pockets.
Great. I hope we can keep that up. Could it get better? Of course it could. I mean, we've seen it a couple times in the last 10 years around the pandemic get much better than that. Even I don't want to count on that. And it doesn't feel like business is turning down right now. It feels like it's going quite well. So I don't know, you know, will that turn around one day? I'm sure it will, but I don't see it in sight right now. So we're happy about that and we're trying to continue to run a good business and not get ahead of ourselves knowing that, you know, we don't know what's going to happen a year from now.
Paul Cousins — Analyst at Wolfe Research
Okay, thanks, guys. I'll turn it back.
OPERATOR
Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Stephanie Price with CIBC. Please go ahead.
Stephanie Price — Analyst at CIBC
Hi. Thank you. Congrats on the two big deals recently. Just curious in the current M&A environment if you're more interested in the growthier kind of names in the pipeline or opportunities that are maybe a bit cheaper but need to be restructured. It sounds like you got one of each in this quarter and just curious how you're thinking about it here.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Well, we'll do either. We certainly over the years, 15 years ago, we used to do a lot more fixer uppers. We started to buy growthier assets and have to pay up for them, but found a lot of success in doing that. Now in this environment we're looking for first and foremost looking for stuff that we think is going to help us grow and looking to pay a better price than we may have had to pay a couple years ago. Because what's happening in the market, we see what's happening to us because of AI and we see what's happened to the rest of the market because AI and I go, I don't believe that the reaction they're having to us is indicative of what's going to happen in the long run. I think we're going to benefit from AI and the bet right now is that us and every other software company on the planet is going to suffer from it. I don't know about everyone else, but I think we're in pretty good shape because of it. In fact, I think we're going to benefit from it significantly. We're looking to pick up assets that we think are going to do the same and it'd be nice if they had growth then it'd be nice if I could pay a reasonable price for them because I don't like where we're trading at right now.
So I don't want to have to pay up for someone else. And the fact that we're trading at a lower multiple than we were historically helps us in making an argument to someone else that hey, your company may not have been worth what you thought it was and that helps us get a deal done. Ty and Extensiv both we probably wouldn't have been able to get done couple years ago because the multiples they wanted we did not believe in. And because of what happened in the market in the last year, we were able to get a deal done at something we thought was fair and so we did that.
Stephanie Price — Analyst at CIBC
So in that kind of environment, would you be willing to take on leverage if you continue to see compelling M&A opportunities? And what kind of do you have a target leverage ratio that you up to?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
I mean, sure, we'd take on leverage to do it. It would depend on the asset. We'd have to, you know, obviously we have to. If we have to take on leverage to do it, we have to factor that into the calculations and whether it's worth it. So it has to be something we think is a good deal. But, you know, we've always been comfortable going up to three times. We've done it a couple times and paid it off very quickly. You know, we make a lot of money right now, and we're making $100 million a quarter.
That's a lot of money to spend on acquisitions. So if we happen to get something big enough that we needed to, to lever up to do it, you know, we would go up to three times to do it, and we probably spend our time paying it off pretty quickly.
Stephanie Price — Analyst at CIBC
Great. Thank you very much.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Yeah, thank you.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from the line of Lachlan Brown with Rothschild and Company. Please go ahead.
Lachlan Brown — Analyst at Rothschild & Co
Hi, guys. Thanks for the question. Appreciate the recent acquisitions will likely carry lower margins in that 40% to 45% range. Maybe. Just what impact should we expect these deals to have on adjusted EBIT margins in the short term, and any color on the duration of the cost synergy ramp?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
I'm going to pass this to Ed. I would just say that they don't make as much money as a percentage of revenue as we do, so it's going to take it down. I don't know how much more Ed wants to say about it.
Ed Gardner — Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, look, I think it's... We still don't know exactly where they'll settle. That's something we'll work on as we get through the integration. But there's always a bit of work whenever we combine with someone. It's rare that we find someone that's got the same margins as us on day one. But we look to have a path to get there as they scale. And I think there'll likely be an impact this quarter. But as you can probably see as you take a look at the calibration, compare one quarter to the next, it's not a massive impact.
Lachlan Brown — Analyst at Rothschild & Co
That's helpful. Thanks. And I thought that was an interesting comment made by Expeditors recently that AI is contributing 50% of the growth in U.S. net imports. You've obviously delivered quite robust organic services growth of 9% or greater over the last couple of quarters. So I guess my question is how much of a tailwind has the AI supply chain been to the GLN network? And if so, is there any sort of outlook on the visibility here?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Well, you heard me mention it in my prepared remarks, so enough to get mentioned. You know, I wouldn't go buying the stock over it, but it's been helpful to our customers and therefore helped us.
Lachlan Brown — Analyst at Rothschild & Co
Okay, thanks for the questions.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Yep, thank you.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from the line of Kevin Krishnaratna with Scotiabank. Please go ahead.
Kevin Krishnaratna — Analyst at Scotiabank
Hey there. Good evening. Thanks for taking the question. Thanks for all that commentary on the various agentic solutions. Sounds really interesting. I had a sort of two-part question on talent. As you start introducing more and more of these solutions, does that require any change in the go-to-market? Maybe having more technical sales, sales engineers with AI experience? Just wondering, you know, anything to comment there on customer education. And then second part is you yourself are a company with a wealth of knowledge in logistics and supply chain expertise.
That's a hot area, and companies are looking to build competencies there, whether that's forward-deployed engineering.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Hey, hold on, let me just get to the first question. I'm not as fast as you. So as far as sales reps going, I don't think the sales reps are going to be out talking about all the things that AI does at any kind of technical level. I think it's going to be talking about delivering functionality and solutions that the customers might not have imagined were possible because we're using AI, and I don't need to explain the technology to them. I never did.
And I think no. We have salespeople that are here a long time. We go to great lengths to make sure we keep our good salespeople, and that means that they're all experienced in understanding logistics and supply chain. I just heard someone, one of our sales managers around here, saying we win most deals because we know more than the other guys about what our customers do for a living. And that's what we need to know to walk in and explain to a customer how we're going to solve a new problem using AI, and the technology behind it is not going to be described in any great detail.
So that's the answer to the first question. Can you ask your second question again?
Kevin Krishnaratna — Analyst at Scotiabank
Yeah, no, great, that's perfect. And I think related to that, then you've got quite a bit of knowledge and expertise in supply chain and logistics. And so I'm wondering how you think about talent retention because some of your employees are probably in pretty hot demand. So I'm just curious if you're seeing anything there, anything competitively from other companies trying to poach your employees, and just what you're doing around talent retention.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
I mean, we're a pretty good company to work for. I mean it's been growing and growing and growing for 20 years in a row. So, you know, I'm not saying we won't lose anyone to another company that's seen as good in this space, but I think we're a pretty good company to work for and I would hope that our employees would agree with that and want to stay here. You know, you can see we don't have a lot of people for the revenue that we produce. We manufacture our own software.
AI has given us the ability to manufacture even more of it. We're not laying off anyone because of AI; we're just building more and more functionality with the people that we have. So we're giving everyone that we have an opportunity to get involved and learn more and become more and more valuable to our company. So I hope that makes them want to stay. I haven't heard otherwise.
Kevin Krishnaratna — Analyst at Scotiabank
Gotcha. Appreciate that. Maybe just on GTI, you called out that as a source of strength again. What are the drivers there? If you look into the revenue there, is it customers moving into higher-tier packages or is it more net new logos? Just sort of, what are the contributions there of that growth?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Well, I laid it out. That's what I was going through on the call. I think I laid it out: tariffs changes, and they're changing rapidly. That's one of the drivers. Customs and export control enforcement that stepped up, and what that causes our customers to have to deal with, and the audit burden has increased as they have more enforcement personnel. So those are the three things that really pushed it out. And if you go back and listen to the beginning of the call, I lay it out in pretty explicit terms.
Kevin Krishnaratna — Analyst at Scotiabank
But are you seeing net new customers coming on?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Yeah, always. There's constantly new customers coming on in that business. That's one of the ways we make money. And then existing customers buying access to more information is the other way. People rarely, people rarely leave. Rarely leave if that's the other side of it.
Kevin Krishnaratna — Analyst at Scotiabank
Thanks, Ed.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Thank you.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from the line of John Shao with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
John Shao — Analyst at TD Cowen
Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to revisit that 9% service organic growth, which is the same as last quarter. So my understanding is the freight environment is still weak, but it did get incrementally more favorable. That should create a bit of growth acceleration there. Just curious what the offset is. So the organic growth number's unchanged. Is that FX?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Well, firstly, it's not FX because there's a lot of balls in the air in that question. Right. In the first example, you're comparing Q2 to Q2 and then Q1 to Q1. So I'm comparing to a different quarter when I'm saying what the growth was, and it's a quarter a year ago. So you'd have to think about what was happening in each of those quarters to comment on it. Otherwise, I don't know that I agree that it got a whole lot better for the customers, and maybe in one area it got better, but trucking, I could argue it got worse.
I don't know that I agree with your initial premise.
John Shao — Analyst at TD Cowen
That makes sense. And my second question is the platform holds a lot of proprietor data. So could you maybe talk about your strategy to monetize that data points, and can I say now it's part of your AI strategy?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Sure. We have all kinds of different data. Some of it's something that customers hold more dear and we shouldn't release. And other stuff is, as long as we anonymize it, we can use it to every customer's benefit. But they all have to share their own data. Right. So they're all sharing the same thing. We're not going to tell someone what one carrier charges for something. We're not releasing anything that they hold near and dear. And, you know, that's combined with a bunch of data that's publicly available data that helps us as well.
And we've been taking that data, formatted in ways, and used it in ways that are very helpful to customers. So I think you're going to see us do something like that. And it's not that we're going to start arguing with customers about, you know, can we release your proprietary information. We're going to be sharing stuff that's anonymized, as we always have really, but now with more capability to help customers more quickly. And remember, the same customer that's sharing his data anonymized is also getting access to everyone else's data anonymized to make good decisions as well.
And I don't think our customers are going to have a problem with that.
John Shao — Analyst at TD Cowen
That's great. Color. Thank you.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Thank you.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from the line of Mark Shackle with Loop Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Mark Shackle — Analyst at Loop Capital Markets
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Ed, as you build out the LSP portfolio through acquisitions like Ti and Extensive, what do you see as maybe the biggest remaining product gaps in serving LSPs? And then also, should we expect future M&A to continue to prioritize LSP-specific solutions versus investing in more capabilities aimed at shippers?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
No, I think you're going to see us do both. I mean, you know, we service carriers, LSPs, and big retailers, manufacturers—call them shippers—and I think you're going to see us continue to try and fill out the entire space. We're trying to be the global leader in logistics and supply chain technology. And to do that properly, we think we have to be exactly what we are: large, global, neutral, and serving all three of them, and building out functionality for all three of them that makes their lives easier.
And I think that's the way you'll see us handle it. I don't know if we think of it like we have any gaps. We have areas we'd like to do more and probably could take. The section I had at the beginning of the call that talked about where we were doing well, those are my first choices combined with the network as to where to expand. But we'll look at anything that's available in our space and see if we think they'll be a help, and if we can get a deal done with them, we will.
Mark Shackle — Analyst at Loop Capital Markets
That's helpful, thanks. And then in your prepared remarks, you called out areas of your business where you saw strength in the quarter, like global trade, visibility, routing. What parts of the business saw, let's just say, less strength in the quarter?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
I don't know. What did you see?
Ed Gardner — Chief Financial Officer
No, I think just some of the modes we've talked about where you can continue to see a little pressure on air. The air space is a bit mixed. The truck volumes themselves are a bit depressed. In the face of that, we continue to do well in areas like MacroPoint because we provide a better solution than our competitors. But we'd do better if they were doing well.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Yeah, exactly.
Mark Shackle — Analyst at Loop Capital Markets
Thank you.
OPERATOR
And your next question comes from the line of Doug Taylor with National Bank Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Jack Durno — Analyst at National Bank Capital Markets
Hey guys, this is Jack Durno. I'm for Doug. Thanks for taking my question. Yeah, I mean, in the prepared remarks, you guys noted that you're seeing some good demand despite the pressure on shipment volumes. So I guess it kind of relates back to your last point. But also, if volumes recover from here, should we expect that to add another leg of growth on top of the complexity-driven demand, or would that just simply replace some of the current benefit?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Oh, no, I think if volumes improve, you'll see our numbers improve. Our growth rates will go up in all likelihood. We're really happy we're getting 9% growth in a lackluster transportation market.
Jack Durno — Analyst at National Bank Capital Markets
Okay, thank you. And I guess my next one, for whatever you guys can say just on Ti and Extensive. Can you give us any maybe framework for the growth profiles, and then how the valuations for them would compare to, I guess, what you've historically targeted?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
They're largely in range with our historic targets, though they may be adjusted a little lower for the market right now. But let Ed say anything else we're allowed to say about that. Yeah, look, we don't comment on specific details of acquisitions, but as you know, we're disciplined. Buyers will continue to evaluate transactions with the same guiding principles. We are always conscious of the price environment we're in, which is more favorable now than it was a year ago. So, you know, I think when you look at those two businesses, both have a characteristic that we look at and say we can grow those businesses, and there is no acquisition we will do if we look at a business and we think it's going to shrink as part of our ownership.
That's a key part that we look at. You know, I think if you were looking around, you'd probably hear that Taio is probably a faster grower than Extensiv. But other than that, any acquisition we look at, it has to have an attribute that we look at and say, as a combined business, we can grow this business. And for both, we feel that.
OPERATOR
All right, and your next question comes from the line of Robert Young with Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Robert Young — Analyst at Canaccord Genuity
Hey, thanks, Ed. In the prepared comments, you said AI agents enabled tracking on 26% more loads than in Q1, a sequential growth. Is that just AI agents growing 26% or is that overall? I'm trying to understand that 26% — what is that growing?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
It's loads that were tracked as a result of an AI agent helping initiate that load. So the loads initiated by agents, which is still a small percentage of our loads, but that grew sequentially 26% quarter from the previous quarter. So it's just a demonstration that the agents are having a real impact. And we've seen that improve from last quarter to this quarter. It's still a small part of the overall volume in MacroPoint, though.
Robert Young — Analyst at Canaccord Genuity
Great, great. Okay. And then second, the capacity for integration of these large acquisitions — they both overlap a bit with existing functions. And you said you had financial capacity, but what about the operational capacity in the M&A team? Is there — does that need to grow, or have you got everything in place? I'll pass line.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Yeah. We've been building our team to be able to do this kind of thing for years. The beauty of our business: both these businesses sit within — there's some common attributes — but sit with different, let's call it, business leaders internally that have bandwidth to help make sure that they integrate. Even you look at the Drive In acquisition from July as well. So we're comfortable we'll be able to digest them. If we did 10 at the same time, you might get a different answer from me.
But we feel good about where we are now. We've been making sure for a long time we've got a team that's able to handle more at one time, and we're feeling good about it.
Robert Young — Analyst at Canaccord Genuity
Well, if you continue at the current pace, you could be at 10 by the end of the fiscal year. And so is that something that's possible?
Edward Ryan — Board Member
I would say anything's possible. You know, it's not necessarily that easy, but possible. Yeah.
Robert Young — Analyst at Canaccord Genuity
One of my, one of my favorite pastors is, "Anything is possible." So.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Yes. Yeah.
Robert Young — Analyst at Canaccord Genuity
Thanks for taking the questions.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
We certainly would love to see it be that way. It'd be a good problem to have.
OPERATOR
Thank you. And I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would like to hand it back to Ed Ryan for closing remarks.
Edward Ryan — Board Member
Hey, thanks everyone for your time this afternoon. Hopefully we'll get a chance to see most of you as we make the rounds this quarter and look forward to reporting back in December on Q3. Have a great night.
OPERATOR
Thank you, presenters and ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.
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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