C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the C.H. Robinson third quarter 2025 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. If anyone needs assistance at any time during the conference, please press star 0. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Wednesday, October 29, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ives, Senior Director of Investor Relations.

Thank you 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 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. Today's remarks also contain certain non-GAAP measures and reconciliations of those measures to GAAP measures are included in the presentation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave. Thank you, Chuck.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I've met with many investors over the past year, and as you know, we don't normally start our discussions or spend a lot of time on the macro environment due to the exciting lean AI transformation that is occurring at Robinson. After a really strong third quarter performance that I and the team are really pleased with, I do want to start off, however, by sharing a little bit of context around the macro conditions that we're not immune to and that I'm proud of our employees for navigating with discipline and ingenuity. The third quarter of 2025 was marked by a continued soft freight environment with the cash freight shipment index declining year over year for the 12th consecutive quarter. The cash index reading was the lowest Q3 reading since the financial crisis of 2009. And despite a fairly steady exit of trucking capacity over the past three years, truckload spot rates continue to bounce along the bottom due to low demand. International freight has been impacted by global trade policies, which caused previous front loading, a dislocation of shipments, and a softer than normal peak season. Combined with excess vessel capacity, This cost ocean rates to decline substantially versus a year ago, consistent with the expectations that we laid out at our investor day in December. Ocean rates also declined substantially during Q3, causing our adjusted growth profit per ocean shipment to decline 27% from June to September. So the setup for global transportation companies was certainly unfavorable in Q3. We are not immune to the market, and the volume and rate dynamics in global forwarding are certainly headwinds we are facing. But this is a new CH Robinson, and we don't use the macro environment as an excuse. We are a fundamentally different company than we were two years ago, illustrated by the company's consistent outperformance versus the market. But make no mistake, this consistent outperformance does not just happen. and it's not easy for others to replicate. We're changing the culture of the company, which is really hard work. We've shifted to a culture of solving problems with speed, and the implementation of a lean operating model has contributed greatly to this change. A lean operating model is about building the habit of getting better every day through innovation, failing fast, and discovery. We certainly encounter challenges along the way, But how we solve them now is different. With the discipline and tools that we've armed our people with, we solve those challenges with a lean mindset, with experimentation, and with urgency. The Robinson operating model helps us focus on what matters most, to eliminate waste and deliver more value to our customers faster. Our people have embraced our lean operating model and the discipline needed to generate higher highs and higher lows across market cycles. While we've made considerable progress, we are still in the early innings of our lean transformation, and a significant runway exists as we continue to deepen the lean mindset and methods across the organization. Shifting to our Q3 results that provide another proof point of the discipline execution of our strategy. In NAST, we grew our combined truckload and LTL volume by approximately 3% year over year, and demonstrably grew market share versus a 7.2% decline in the CAASPP Freight Shipment Index. This was accomplished while expanding growth margins for the eighth consecutive quarter and further increasing productivity and operating leverage while growing volume. This resulted in a 39% adjusted operating margin in NAST and further progress toward our 40% mid-cycle adjusted operating margin target for NAST. In global forwarding, we expanded gross margins by 380 basis points year over year through improved revenue management discipline. We also continue to improve our productivity, which has now increased by more than 55% in global forwarding since the end of 2022. This improvement in our operating leverage enabled us to achieve our 30% mid-cycle adjusted operating margin target in Q3, despite the difficult market conditions. With seven consecutive quarters of consistent outperformance through the disciplined execution of the strategy that we shared in our 2024 investor day, there is no doubt in our minds that we are on the right path to deliver sustainable outperformance. We are not waiting for a market recovery to improve our financial results. and the strategies that our team is executing are built to be effective in any market environment. With our strong balance sheet and cash flow generation, we are comfortable operating in an environment that is lower for longer. In today's environment, there is a flight to quality, and that is Robinson. We're also highly confident in our ability to continue delivering exceptional value for our customers and to continue executing on all of our strategic initiatives, including further increasing our operating leverage where the market eventually inflects. Our model with an industry-leading cost to serve is highly scalable, and we expect it will improve further as we harness the evolving power of AI to drive automation across the quote-to-cash lifecycle of a load. We're still in the early innings of our lean AI journey, Call it third inning in NAST and first inning in Global 40. Lean AI is our unique disciplined approach to AI innovation that transforms supply chains. By combining the principles of lean methodology in our Robinson Operating Model with the power of AI, Lean AI is designed to maximize value and minimize waste for better outcomes. It is uniquely enabled by our leading AI technology. our expert logisticians, and our lean operating model that drives continuous improvement. Our fleet of AI agents are not only improving our productivity and operational performance by automating tasks that free up our industry-leading talent to focus on more strategic, higher-value work, but they are also enhancing the service and value we deliver to our customers and contributing to our market share gains. We are pioneering new ways to eliminate tasks, augment our capabilities, and supercharge our talented people with industry-leading technology that materially elevates the customer and carrier experience. And our lean operating model enables us to do this in a disciplined and cost-effective way that delivers the most value to all our stakeholders. Our agentic supply chain solutions are enabling a new era of logistics. and we're leading the way for customers and carriers. Overall, the progress on our strategic initiatives remains on track. The consistent discipline execution of our lean AI strategy supported by the Robinson operating model makes us stronger. And we continue to believe that the next two years for CH Robinson and our stakeholders will be more exciting than the last two years. I'll turn it over to Michael now to provide more details on our NAS results.