C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the CH Robinson fourth quarter 2022 conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. Following the company's prepared remarks, we will open the line for a live question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If anyone needs assistance at any time during the conference, please press star 0. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Wednesday, February 1st, 2023. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ives, Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Donna, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today is Scott Anderson, our Interim Chief Executive Officer, Arun Rajan, our Chief Operating Officer, and Mike Zechmeister, our Chief Financial Officer. Scott and Mike will provide a summary of our 2022 fourth quarter results and our outlook for 2023. Arun will provide an update on our path to a scalable operating model to improve the customer and carrier experience, and then we will open the call up for questions. Our earnings presentation slides are supplemental to our earnings release and can be found on the investor section of our website at investor.chrobinson.com. Our prepared comments are not intended to follow the slides. If we do refer to specific information on the slides, we will let you know which slide we're referencing. I'd also like to remind you that our remarks today may contain forward-looking statements. Slide two in today's presentation lists factors that could cause our actual results to differ from management's expectations. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Scott.

Thank you, Chuck. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'd like to start today's call by expressing my appreciation and the Board's gratitude for the contributions that Bob Biesterfeld made to CH Robinson over his 24 years with the company, including his three years as CEO. Under Bob's guidance, CH Robinson navigated the challenges presented by the pandemic and the ongoing supply chain disruptions, and he played an important role in positioning Robinson for long-term success. We wish Bob all the best. In order to accelerate CH Robinson's strategic initiatives and take the company into its next chapter, the board felt that a change in leadership was needed. Jody Kozlak, the newly appointed chair of the board, is leading the search committee to find a new CEO. With Jody's background and expertise, I can't think of anyone more qualified to lead the board and the search process. To give you a little of my background, I've spent over 10 years as a director here at Robinson and the last three years as chairman of the board. I spent the first 25 years of my career at Patterson companies, most recently as CEO from 2010 to 2017 and also chairman from 2013 to 2017 I look forward to working closely with Jody and the board, as well as the whole Robinson team in the coming weeks and months. I'm excited to bring my experience and my knowledge of Robinson to the role of interim CEO. I'm leveraging the relationships I have with the senior leadership team to ensure that we continue delivering superior global services and capabilities to our customers and carriers while continuing to execute with great focus on our sustainable growth strategy. During my first few weeks as interim CEO, I've been meeting with our customers and employees who are highly engaged and motivated to win. And I'm confident in our ability to navigate this transition and deliver for our customers. Throughout the transition, we're increasing our focus on delivering a scalable operating model to lower our costs, improve the customer and carrier experience, and foster long-term profitable growth through cycles. The current point in the cycle is one of shippers managing through elevated inventories amid slowing economic growth, causing unseasonably soft demand for transportation services. At the same time, prices for ground transportation and global freight forwarding are declining due to the changing balance of supply and demand. While a correction in the freight forwarding market was certainly expected, the speed and magnitude of the correction in only two quarters was unexpected, with ocean rates on some trade lanes already back to pre-pandemic levels. As a result, our operating costs were misaligned. As was announced on our third quarter earnings call, we have taken actions to structurally reduce our overall cost structure. The actions are expected to generate net annualized cost savings of $150 million by Q4 2023, as compared to the annualized Q3 2022 run rate. If growth opportunities or economic conditions play out differently than we expect, we'll adjust our plans accordingly. I believe we're uniquely positioned in the marketplace to deliver for our shippers, carriers, and shareholders through a combination of our digital solutions our global suite of services, and our network of global logistics experts. Now let me turn it over to Mike for a review of our fourth quarter results.