Boyd: Focus is on shop work volume, insurance relationships, and in-house scanning/calibration

Boyd Group Services President and CEO Brian Kaner told investors Wednesday that the company’s current focus is taking care of the volume of work coming into its shops and “continuing to deepen” relationships with its insurance partners.

“As we do that, we know that we’re continuing to outpace the market and would expect to continue to do that if the market continues to get more positive,” he said.

Several investors had questions regarding Boyd’s recent acquisition of Joe Hudson’s, including the company’s capacity to continue mergers and acquisitions of smaller shops this year.

“We intend to integrate Joe Hudson’s business with a separate team of people that’s focused on the base business acquisition activity that we do, so we don’t expect to see a big slowdown in activity as it relates to acquisitions driven by the integration,” Kaner said.

“Our intention is to get through the integration of Joe Hudson by early in the second quarter; to have all the shops converted and have that business kind of up on our operating platform and running and ready to go. The organization is already put in place, so I don’t expect it to be distracting throughout the year.”

Kaner added that Boyd’s M&A activity pipeline remains very robust, with a well-positioned balance sheet.

Thirty-two startup locations are already planned for 2026 as part of 80 to 100 acquisitions and/or startups added to the company, Kaner said.

As for the claims environment overall, Kaner told investors that he wouldn’t call it positive, but rather progressing less negatively, as expected.

“We’ve always said that based on collision avoidance systems, we expect the underlying marketplace to be negative by 2%,” he said. “We expect that to be offset by 1% improvement in miles driven, as well as a 1% increase in the car parc, which leaves the market kind of down 1%.

“As we suggested in the fourth quarter, we’re starting to near that 1%, so we wouldn’t expect to give up the share gains that we’re getting right now in the down environment. We’d expect that to continue even as the market improves.”

Part prices and labor costs, Kaner added, continue to increase.

“Parts pricing CPI in February was 2.6%,” he said. “We also continue to see labor price increases. We still believe that that’s still partially being offset by the blending down of the overall claims population driven by the elevated total losses.

“I’d expect that to come through more visibly as we start to see total losses come down. We haven’t yet seen it in our results to date. Right now, through Q3 of 2025, the industry cost to repair was up about 1.7%. That’s still far off of the 3% to 5% that we would expect it to be.”

Kaner said he’s suprised that used car prices haven’t “moved more meaningfully,” including this year, as tariffs have impacted new car pricing.

“New car prices are at an all-time high, even as we sit here today,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me that as used car prices go up in a more meaningful way, total losses come down. And I think it shows itself as a higher average cost to repair.”

Instead of total losses muting the benefit from parts prices and labor costs increasing, Boyd could be put in a position similar to that of 2022 and 2023, when prices increased at rates higher than 3-5%, Kaner said.

When asked if Boyd is facing labor rate pressures from insurance companies, Kaner said no.

“I think the insurance carriers recognize that the cost of labor continues to move at, generally speaking, inflationary levels,” he said. “And the price of a labor hour is going to have to move commiserate with that.”

When asked about the progress and benefits of Boyd moving scanning and calibration operations in-house, Kaner noted doing so shifts the revenue category from a sublet — reportedly its lowest-margin category — to a labor-margin.

Offering scans and calibrations in-house also reduces consumer-paid costs because of Boyd’s menu-based pricing, and reduces cycle times since completion isn’t reliant on a sublet vendor, Kaner said.

Boyd increased internalization of its U.S. scanning and calibration services to 75% in Q4 2025 from 53% in Q4 2024. Kaner said the goal is to reach 80% by the end of this year.

“I think as the car parc continues to require more calibration services, over time, what’ll happen is that will migrate into a shop,” he said. “That migration into a shop will open up the opportunity for us to leverage the mobile capabilities that we have to expose that more to the external market and maybe even potentially take care of mom and pop shops that don’t have the financial wherewithal to invest in this type of equipment.”

Jeff Murray, Boyd’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, added that in addition to internalization leading to margin uplift, calibration volume will also increase.

“Since it is a higher margin, higher volumes over time are also going to help provide additional margin lift going forward,” he said.

For the full-year 2025, Boyd reported Wednesday that sales increased by 2.4% over the same period in 2024 to $3.1 billion, including incremental sales from 119 new locations of $94.2 million, partially offset by same-store sales[1] declines of 0.2%.

It also added 70 collision locations, including 43 acquisitions and 27 startups.

Since closing the Joe Hudson’s deal in January, 114 locations, or 44%, have been converted to Boyd’s systems and branding.

A Boyd press release states that, based on Q4 claims processing platform data, the company estimates repairable claims volume declined 2-4%.

“This represents a notable improvement compared to earlier in the year, when claims were down an estimated 9-10% in the first quarter, 6-8% in the second quarter, and 3-5% in the third quarter,” the release states. “Thus far in 2026, we have continued to see sustained improvement in the key industry drivers that supported this recovery, including insurance premium inflation falling below overall CPI levels, insurance rate reductions across several carriers, and increasing used vehicle prices.”

Images

Featured image provided by Boyd Group