C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CH Robinson first quarter 2020 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 star followed by zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Wednesday, April 29th, year 2020. I would now like to turn the conference over to Bob Houghton, Vice President of Corporate Finance.

Thank you, Donna, and good morning, everyone. On our call today will be Bob Beesterfeld, our Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Zechmeister, our Chief Financial Officer. In order to devote as much time as possible to the Q&A portion of our call, we are implementing a couple of changes this quarter. First, we will not be covering a review of our segment performance in our prepared remarks, as this information is included in both our presentation slides and in our press release. We have also made the decision to no longer include the truckload volume growth per business day and total company net revenue growth per business day for the current month. Bob and Mike will provide brief commentary on our 2020 first quarter results. Presentation slides that accompany their remarks can be found in the investor relations section of our website at chrobinson.com. We will follow their comments with responses to the pre-submitted questions we received after our earnings release yesterday. 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, everybody. I'd like to start my remarks today by recognizing the over 15,000 C.H. Robinson employees around the world for their tireless efforts during these unprecedented times. Every day, I see examples of how they're stepping in and delivering excellence to the nearly 200,000 customers and carriers across our platform in order to keep commerce flowing and helping businesses stay open. We're delivering critical and essential goods, and I'm thankful for everything that they're doing. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our team has focused on three key pillars as guideposts for our decision making. First, ensuring the health and the safety of our employees. Second, providing supply chain continuity for our customers and carriers. And third, protecting the economic security of our people to the greatest extent possible. We believe that these pillars are the right way to evaluate our decisions and to keep our focus on the long term health of our organization. Given the global nature of our business, we gained early visibility into the disruptive nature of the COVID-19 virus. Because of these insights, coupled with the output from our investments in technology, we were able to effectively convert to a remote workforce without disruption to our customers or carriers while enabling our employees to work safely from home. Today, over 90% of our global workforce is working remotely, and we have ample bandwidth to move to 100% remote work if needed. Our teams are experienced in managing through crisis situations and are committed to ensuring that our customers' supply chains continue to move. Whether it's facilitating the global movement of personal protective equipment, leveraging our expertise in produce distribution to help retailers meet the surge in demand for fresh food items, or simply providing truckload capacity to customers when they need it the most, our employees have been laser-focused on enabling the continued movement of goods and services in this environment. Related to this current environment, we're constantly evaluating our global business operations and monitoring the changing economic conditions. While the duration and the effect of COVID-19 is still unknown, we have taken steps across our organization to reduce costs. We're implementing furloughs across our workforce that will reduce operating expenses in the short term while industry volumes are down. Our cost reduction efforts also include elimination of non-essential travel, a temporary salary reduction for company executive officers, a temporary reduction in cash retainers for our board members, and a temporary suspension of the company match to retirement plans for U.S. and Canadian employees. These actions are prudent short-term decisions and will continue to monitor the current environment and take additional steps to further reduce costs as needed to navigate through this difficult time and to emerge an even stronger company. Before I turn the call over to Mike, I'll briefly touch on highlights for the quarter. We continued to make progress on our strategic, long-term initiatives around market share gains and productivity improvement. Our first quarter results included significant market share gains in NASD, a 7.5% volume growth in both truckload and LTL, in a quarter where industry volumes, as measured by the Cass Freight Index, declined between 8% and 9%. We continue to see our investments in technology drive operating efficiency in the business, as indicated by a 1,270 basis point favorable spread between truckload volume growth and headcount growth in our NAS business. As we've said in the past, this is an important productivity metric and a key focus of our technology investments. Our recent acquisition of Prime Distribution Services is delivering outstanding performance at a time of significant increase in demand for retail consolidation. And during a quarter when global trade volumes were down significantly, Our global forwarding business performed well, with only modest declines in both air and ocean. We have a strong balance sheet, and we exited first quarter with over $1.2 billion of liquidity. Our business model is resilient and highly responsive to adversity, and we are well positioned to weather the economic uncertainty in the months ahead. I'll now turn the call to Mike to review our first quarter financial performance.