C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CH Robinson's first quarter 2026 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, April 29, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chuck Ires, Senior Director of Best Relations.

Thank you, Operator, 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. As has been widely discussed in recent months, the North American trucking market has entered a period of supply driven tightening. As that has occurred, we've heard old tapes being replayed regarding which transportation providers benefit most during certain parts of the truckload cycle. But those storylines don't fully appreciate the secular earnings growth that has consistently been generated at the new CH Robinson, regardless of market conditions. The first quarter of 2026 was another example of this, and our adjusted earnings per share increased 15% year over year, despite a significant increase in truckload spot market costs. We continue to outperform by opportunistically capturing transactional volumes at higher margins as the industry's tender rejection rates increased, by continuing to exercise our disciplined revenue management practices, by repricing some of our contractual business in a very targeted fashion, and by continuing to widen our cost of higher advantage, all of which have improved as we implemented our new lean operating model. This enabled us to optimize our adjusted growth profit per truckload shipment and maintain our NAS gross margin percentage despite having to absorb the elevated cost of capacity. Additionally, we gained market share in our NAS business for the 12th consecutive quarter, and we continue to deliver evergreen productivity improvements across our business. Over the past year, we've consistently said that we're not immune to macroeconomic conditions or an inflection in spot costs. but that we are managing those conditions better than we have in the past and better than our competitors. Our first quarter performance puts another check mark on our Say Do scorecard. Our ability to consistently outperform over the last two plus years is a result of focusing on controlling what we can control and the strength of our Lean AI strategy. 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 we continue to purposely engineer our work to drive higher automation, and industry-leading 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 ever-changing market conditions with discipline and ingenuity, and for embracing the culture shift that has fundamentally changed this company. Our global forwarding team continues to help our customers navigate disruptions such as conflict-driven rerouting and reduced flexibility across global shipping networks. The international freight market has been tumultuous and impacted by global trade policies, geopolitical conflicts, and route restrictions. Similar to the second half of 2025, excess vessel capacity has caused ocean rates to decline versus the elevated rates from a year ago. As the team helps customers comply, with changing customs regulations and continue to implement the same revenue management disciplines that have been deployed in NAST. The team expanded gross margins in Q1 by 60 basis points year over year. We also continue to evolve our global forwarding business to a more cohesive, centralized model with standardized and lean AI-enabled processes. We'll continue to focus on providing differentiated service and solutions to our customers and carriers, executing with discipline and improving our business model and our cost to serve. We're highly confident in our ability to continue executing on all of our strategic initiatives and the strategies that our team is executing are built to be effective in any market condition. We're excited about the prospects for a possible return to a healthier demand environment. But with our strong balance sheet and cash flow generation, we're also comfortable if the freight market ends up being lower for longer. In either scenario, we're ready to serve our two-sided marketplace and to deliver higher highs and higher lows across the market cycle. Our model with an industry-leading cost to serve is highly scalable, and we expect it will continue to improve further as we continue to harness the evolving power of AI to drive automation across the quote to cash lifecycle of a load. As the pacesetter for innovation in our industry, we will continue to fail fast and use our 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.