C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc.

gentlemen and welcome to the CH Robinson fourth quarter 2024 conference call. At this time, all participants are in 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, January 29, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ives, Senior Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Shamali, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today is Dave Bozeman, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Castagnetto, our President of North American Surface Transportation, Arun Rajan, our Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, and Damon Lee, our Chief Financial Officer. I'd 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. Our earnings presentation slides are supplemental to our earnings release and can be found in 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'll let you know which slide we're referencing. Today's remarks also contain certain non-GAAP measures and reconciliations of those measures to GAAP measures are included in the presentation. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dave. Thank you, Chuck.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I first like to acknowledge the challenges that many people are facing due to the severe weather and natural disasters in certain regions of the country, including the recent wildfires that damaged and destroyed many homes and businesses in the Los Angeles area. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted. And we extend our gratitude to the first responders who worked tirelessly to keep people safe. I'm proud of the support that our company and our employees provided to help those in need as well as our customers. Turn into our fourth quarter. We've talked extensively over the past year about our new Robinson operating model and the discipline execution that the model is enabling. as well as how we're leveraging our industry-leading talent and technology to raise the bar in logistics. The benefits of these efforts were never more evident than in the significant year-over-year improvement in our Q4 financial results. In what continues to be a historically prolonged freight recession with market growth in 2024 that did not materialize as had been projected, The difference in our execution versus last year is stark. Our people are embracing the discipline needed to generate higher highs and higher lows across market cycles, resulting in a higher quality of volume, greater productivity, and expansion of our gross profit and operating profit margins. In a trucking environment where the cost of purchase transportation increased in Q4 due to a decline in industry capacity, Our dynamic costing and pricing tools, our revenue management practices, and our cost of higher advantage enabled us to provide greater value to our customers and at the same time, improve our NAS gross margin both year over year and sequentially. In our global forwarding business, the team has debunked the thesis that Robinson couldn't continue to improve productivity when volumes are growing. Throughout 2024, I've been impressed with and highly appreciative of the team as they continue to be nimble and highly engaged with our customers to help them navigate various market disruptions and to provide differentiated service and solutions. As a result, our ocean and air shipments grew each quarter on a year-over-year basis, and each grew more than 5% for the full year. Through improvements in process standardization and automation and embracing the rigor of our operating model, the forwarding team decoupled headcount growth from volume growth, reduced their average headcount for the year more than 10% and achieved productivity improvement of greater than 15% for the full year. Over the two-year period of 23 and 24, we delivered compounded productivity growth of 30% or more in both global forwarding and NAST. And as we said at our investor day in December, we view our productivity as evergreen improvements that we do not expect to get back. Enabled by the operating model disciplines and tools that are being applied across our company, we expect to further advance our productivity as we grow our businesses, including both NAST and global forwarding. The productivity improvements have lowered our cost to serve and increased our operating leverage. Combined with our expanded gross margins, this resulted in a 79% year-over-year increase in our enterprises Q4 adjusted income from operations. I want to thank our people, one of our greatest competitive advantages, for their relentless efforts to embrace our new operating model and execute in a fit, fast, and focused way. as we keep pushing the bar higher on exceptional service to our customers and carriers and on financial performance across market cycles. Our new operating model has changed how we discover and inspect root cause issues and quickly implement countermeasures to improve the level of our operational execution. The reliability of our operating reviews continues to increase as we leverage our data-rich environment to inform our decision making and enhance our competitive differentiation. This is showing up in improvements such as more disciplined pricing and better decisions on the volume that we're seeking. We are still early in our journey, but the operating model is helping us execute a solid strategy even better. And we expect further improvement as the accountability that the operating model demands is embraced deeper in the organization. I'm confident in the team's ability to drive a higher and more consistent level of discipline in our operational execution. As freight markets continue to fluctuate due to seasonal, cyclical, and geopolitical factors, we continue to remain focused on what we can control, including deploying our operating model and lean principles across the company, providing best-in-class service to our customers and carriers, gaining profitable share in targeted market segments, and leveraging game-changing generative AI to improve our service, workflows, and cost at scale, not in theory. We also continue to focus on ensuring that we'll be ready for the eventual freight market rebound with a disciplined operating model that responsibly grows market share. further decouples headcount growth from volume growth, drives additional operating leverage, and generates incremental operating income. I'll turn it over to Michael now to provide more details on our NAS results.