ArcBest Corporation

Greetings and welcome to the ARC Best Second Quarter 23 Earnings Conference Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we'll conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. If at any time during the conference you need to reach an operator, please press star 0. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Friday, July 28, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to David Humphrey, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us. On today's call, we will provide an update on our business, walk you through the details of our recent second quarter 2023 results, and then answer some questions. Joining me today for the prepared remarks are Judy McReynolds, Chairman, President, and CEO of Artbest, and Matt Beasley, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. In addition, Dennis Anderson, Chief Strategy Officer, Seth Runzer, President of ABF, Stephen Leonard, Chief Commercial Officer and President of Asset Light Logistics, and Christopher Adkins, Vice President of Yield Strategy and Management, are available to help answer questions. To help you better understand ARCBEST and our results, some forward-looking statements could be made during this call. Forward-looking statements, by their very nature, are subject to uncertainties and risk. For a more complete discussion of factors that could affect ARPBEST's future results, please refer to the forward-looking statement section of our earnings press release and our most recent SEC public filing. To provide meaningful comparisons, certain information discussed in this call includes non-GAAP financial measures as outlined and described in the tables in our earnings press release. Reconciliations of the GAAP financial measures to the related non-GAAP measures discussed in this call are also provided in the Additional Information section of the presentation slides. As a reminder, there is a conference call slide deck that can be found on the ARCBEST website, arcb.com, in Exhibit 99.3 of the 8-K that was filed earlier this morning, or you can follow along on the webcast. We will now begin with Judy.

Good morning. We appreciate you joining us today. Before we begin, I'd like to start with a message to our people. In our 100th year, our business has always come back to you. Thank you for being the heart of our success. No one does it better than our team here at Artbest. We have the best people in the industry. Every day, our team finds innovative ways to deliver for our customers with their skill, hard work, and resilience. These attributes are why we receive the top industry awards year after year, such as being the only 10-time winner of the Excellence in Cargo Claims and Loss Prevention Award, and why we consistently exceed industry benchmarks. Our strong employee relationships were exemplified as we finalized our five-year agreement with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters earlier this month with overwhelming approval. From the beginning, our goal was to secure a contract that keeps providing our employees with competitive wages and industry-leading benefits to ensure we're retaining the best employees in the business and recruiting top talent. We're pleased to have reached a contract that achieves these goals and sets the stage for future growth and investment. At ArcVest, we are constantly thinking about what's ahead. We're celebrating a century in business this year because we are always innovating, providing exceptional value for our customers, and remaining resilient and agile while retaining the ability to look at ourselves critically and strive for continuous improvement. We recognize the importance of operating efficiently and effectively, which enables growth and creates value. Earlier this year, we sent an experienced team to some of our ABF service centers to train managers and employees on operational best practices, which resulted in a significant increase in productivity in those locations. And that productivity improvement has continued long after the team departed. So we're going to do that on a larger scale. We will be pausing the freight handling hardware pilot at our two ABF distribution centers in Kansas City and Salt Lake City, and refocusing that implementation team on this best practice work at our largest facilities. Vox pilots with customers remain promising and are not affected. Early Vox pilot results with some major companies are showing significant efficiency gains, and we see high levels of customer interest in the solution. These pilots will continue and the teams that support external customers are not slowing down. We continue investing back into the business, into our technology, our solutions, and our people. This soft market environment will end and we are making decisions today that benefit us as the market rebounds. We are investing in technology to support our customers. How people do business is changing. This year, we enhanced our digital tools to help customers better manage their business, and later this year, we will provide additional self-service capabilities that drive efficiency. We are investing in our solutions to deliver exceptional value. Our city route optimization work is responsible for over half a million dollars per month in operating income improvement and makes our employees' jobs easier. We're in the process of expanding that initiative to improve the pickup process. And importantly, we are investing in our people to drive high engagement. We've created an industry-leading employee experience, which continues to be recognized with awards. These key areas of investment will set us up for success in the future. Having reached our 100-year anniversary, I have taken the time to reflect on who we are and where we came from. ArcBest is a company that has evolved tremendously, and I am so proud of who we are today. We listen to our people and our customers and then adapt. We have built a breadth of solutions that have positioned us as a strategic partner to our customers, helping them build better supply chains. In today's rapidly changing market environment, we are uniquely positioned to serve our customers as a trusted advisor with a full suite of logistics solutions. rather than simply a capacity provider. We have seen clear evidence of that this past week as customers have turned to ArcBest to manage their supply chains through a period of market disruption. Finally, we are resilient. We don't back down from a challenge. We're in a strong position and only look to grow from here. And now I'll turn it over to Matt to take you through the quarter in greater detail.