C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CH Robinson second quarter 2019 conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. Following today's presentation, Bob Houghton will facilitate a review of previously submitted questions. If anyone needs assistance at any time during the conference, please press the star followed by the zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Wednesday, July 31st, 2019. I would now like to turn the conference over to Bob Houghton, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Donna, and good morning, everyone. On our call today will be Bob Easterfeld, Chief Executive Officer, and Scott Hagan, Corporate Controller and Interim Chief Financial Officer. Bob and Scott will provide commentary on our 2019 second quarter results. Presentation slides that accompany their remarks include can be found in the investor relations section of our website at chrobinson.com. We will follow that with responses to the pre-submitted questions we received after our earnings release yesterday. Starting with this quarter, we will be shortening our prepared remarks to devote a larger portion of the call to the question and answer session. I'd like to remind you that our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. Slide 2 in today's presentation lists factors that could cause our actual results to differ from management's expectations. And with that, I will turn the call over to Bob.

Thanks Bob and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining our second quarter earnings call. For the second quarter, we achieved 3.5% net revenue growth versus the year ago period where net revenues increased 17%. We delivered our fifth consecutive quarter of operating margin expansion and an 8% increase to earnings per share. Our North American surface transportation business generated 6% net revenue growth in the quarter and we delivered operating margin expansion in both our NAST and Robinson Fresh businesses. In global forwarding, the integration of the space cargo group is off to a strong start. We also expanded our Europe surface transportation business with the acquisition of DEMA services. And we continue to make improvements in working capital, which combined with the increased earnings allowed us to generate nearly $200 million in cash flow from operations and increase cash returns to our shareholders. Within our North American business, there's no question that we are in a softer market today than we were a year ago. Driven by weakening demand and additional capacity, industry-wide truckload transactional volumes and spot market pricing are markedly below year-ago levels. Declining new truck orders and increased carrier bankruptcies suggest that capacity has peaked and is starting to exit the marketplace. Concurrently, the global forwarding market is experiencing air and ocean volume declines as shippers work through elevated inventory levels, resulting from the volume pull forward ahead of tariff activity. However, with this as a backdrop, there were a number of volume highlights in our second quarter. Our truckload contractual volume increased at a low single-digit pace. Truckload and LTL volumes for business day increased sequentially during the quarter. Our truckload and LTL volumes outpaced industry indices such as the Cast Freight Index, where volumes declined mid-single digits in the second quarter. And ocean volumes included double-digit growth in Southeast Asia as we continued to benefit from our scale in this region amidst tariff uncertainty. With these results, I'd like to recognize the hard work of our people across the globe. Your continued commitment to deliver world-class service and to ensure the success of our customers and carriers is instrumental to our continued success. So with those introductory comments, I'll turn it over to Scott to review our financial statements.