(The Florida Times-Union posted the following article by Gregroy Richards on its website on March 24.)
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jacksonville’s business leaders got a peak into the world of CSX Corp., yesterday, when CSX head Michael Ward spoke before the Cornerstone Regional Development Partnership quarterly luncheon.
Ward let the roughly 600 attendees know that in that world, shipping freight by trucks is bad. Shipping freight via rail is good. He said the Fortune 500 company converted more than 800,000 truckloads of freight to CSX’s trains over the last two years.
“We’re putting the world the way God intended it to be,” Ward, CSX’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, said to laughs. “We’re doing God’s work getting trucks off the highway.”
In his 20-minute address, Ward painted a positive picture of both Jacksonville and CSX, a transportation holding company with the nation’s third-largest railroad as its primary business. The firm carries the mantle of Jacksonville’s newest Fortune 500 company, having last month moved its headquarters to the First Coast from Richmond, Va. But Ward predicted CSX won’t carry that honor for long.
“It won’t be long before another Fortune 500 company recognizes what we know: This is a great place to do business, it’s a progressive city and it’s a city on the move.” (Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. is Jacksonville’s only other Fortune 500 firm.)
At CSX, service and growth are key, he said. The company has improved its record for delivering shipments on time for the last nine quarters and added 500 new customers just last year. The result has been an 18 percent jump in the value of CSX stock from the spring of 2000 through January of this year.
Some people still regard railroads as Industrial Age-dinosaurs, Ward said, but CSX is hoping to change that image through technology. Among those initiatives are new hand-held computers that allow employees to track railroad car shipments in real time, and a new Web site where CSX’s customers can obtain shipping prices, order railcars and pay their bills. All is this is designed to make shipping by rail more appealing.
“That may not sound real exotic, if you think about FedEx or UPS,” Ward said, “but for railroads it’s pretty revolutionary.”
Ward, who lives in San Marco, said the type of corporate scandals that happened at Enron and WorldCom won’t happen at his company. CSX strives to be “above reproach” in its accounting and financial policies. Ward said he saw no higher validation of CSX’s high ethical standards than January’s confirmation of former CSX Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Snow as secretary of the U.S. Treasury.
Many in the crowd at the downtown Adam’s Mark hotel were impressed by Ward’s remarks.
“It just shows the direction the city has taken over the last eight to 10 years has been correct,” said William Sims, the local manager for Ciber Inc., a national technology services company. “It’s good to see a company like CSX make those kind of comments.”
John Tabor, president of the Clay County Chamber of Commerce, said Ward’s comments bode well for the future of the region’s economy. “It’s a good testimony about where Jacksonville is going as a headquarters town.”