C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the C.H. Robinson Fourth Quarter.

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 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. Over the past year, we've consistently said that we're not immune to macroeconomic conditions, but that we are managing them better than we have in the past. The fourth quarter certainly provided a challenging macro environment. With weak global freight demand, rising spot costs in trucking, and falling ocean rates all providing headwinds to our business. The cash freight shipment index declined year over year for the 13th consecutive quarter and was the lowest Q4 reading since the financial crisis of 2009. Spot market costs for truckload capacity spiked during the last five weeks of the quarter due to a seasonal decline in capacity, three winter storms, and incremental pressure from the cumulative enforcement of various commercial driver regulations. International freight continues to be impacted by global trade policies, which caused previous front loading, a dislocation of shipments, and a more pronounced decline in demand after the Q3 peak season. Combined with excess vessel capacity, this caused ocean rates to decline substantially versus a year ago, consistent with the expectations that we laid out at our investor day in December of 2024. So the macro conditions for global transportation companies were difficult in Q4, and we are not impervious to these volume and rate dynamics. However, we've consistently focused on controlling what we can control, which is providing differentiated service and solutions to our customers and carriers, executing with discipline and continuously improving our business model and our cost to serve. This focus and the strength of our lean AI which is the combination of our lean operating model, industry-leading technology, and the best logisticians, has enabled us to consistently outperform over the last two years. And we did it again in Q4. In NAST, we grew our total volume by 1% and our truckload volume by approximately 3% on a year-over-year basis, compared to a 7.6% year-over-year decline in the CAAT's Freight Shipment Index. This reflects another quarter of demonstrable market share growth. This was accomplished while mitigating some of the market pressure on gross profits through strong revenue management practices and by improving our cost of hire advantage. These disciplines enabled us to improve our NAS AGP margin by 20 basis points on a year-over-year basis. despite the pressure on spot market costs from a decline in available capacity. In global forwarding, we expanded gross margins by 120 basis points year over year through improved revenue management discipline. We also continue to evolve our global forwarding business to a more cohesive, centralized model with standardized and lean AI-enabled processes. We continue to improve our productivity and cost to serve across the enterprise, resulting in a double-digit productivity increase in NAS for the full year and a high single-digit productivity increase in Global 40. As we continue to purposely engineer our work to drive higher automation, a lower cost to serve, and improved customer outcomes, all of this is aimed at building the best model for demonstrable outgrowth while continuing to have industry-leading operating margins. I'm proud of our employees for navigating difficult market conditions with discipline and ingenuity and for embracing the culture shift that has fundamentally changed this company. Changing the culture of a company is 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. We certainly encountered challenges along the way, but how we solve them now is different, and it's not easy for others to replicate. With the discipline and tools that we've armed our people with, we solve challenges with a lean mindset, with experimentation, and with urgency. As we've said consistently over the past year, we're 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. We're also highly confident in our ability to continue executing on all of our strategic initiatives, including further increasing our operating leverage when freight demand eventually inflects. Our model, with an industry-leading cost to serve, is highly scalable, and we expect it will improve further as we continue to harness the evolving power of AI to drive automation across the quote-to-cash lifecycle of a load. While we've made considerable progress, we're still in the early innings of our lean AI journey. Lean AI is our unique disciplined approach to AI innovation that is transforming supply chains. It combines the principles of our Robinson operating model rooted in lean methodology with the power of custom built AI and the expertise of our people to maximize value, minimize waste, and drive better outcomes for customers and carriers. As a result, we are building an ever expanding fleet of AI agents that continues to not only improve our productivity and operational performance by automating manual tasks that free up our industry leading talent to focus on more strategic, higher value work, but they're also directly enhancing the service and value we deliver to our customers and contributing to our market share gains. In other words, We are using our trusted domain expertise to build technology that delivers on our customer promise and drives higher value for all of our stakeholders. We are the trusted provider that customers look to for cutting edge innovation, differentiated solutions, and best in class service. And while we're pleased with the results we've delivered in the last two years, we are still in the early stages of our transformation. Significant runway exists as we continue to deepen the lean mindset and scale custom-built AI agents across the enterprise. I'll turn it over to Michael now to provide more details on our NAS results.