CSX Corporation

Now I'd like to turn the conference over to Matthew Korn, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

Thank you, Brianna. Hello, everyone, and good afternoon, and welcome to our first quarter earnings call. Joining me this afternoon are Joe Henrichs, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mike Corey, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Kevin Boone, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, and Sean Pelkey, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In presentation accompanying this call, you will find slides with our further looking disclosure and our non-GAAP disclosures for your review. With that, it is now my pleasure to introduce Mr. Joe Enrichs.

All right. Thank you, Matthew. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our first quarter call. CSX had a solid start in 2024 that was in line with our expectations. I've learned that when it comes to routing, it never really is an easy quarter. And this year has already brought us a number of challenges. Thankfully, we have a great one CSX team of over 23,000 people. And as you've seen in our weekly volume performance, our railroad has kept moving forward after the early periods of severe weather in January. The latest incident, of course, has been the tragic Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. CSX has a deep historical relationship with Baltimore, and we have important operations there, particularly with our export coal business. committed to doing our part to help the city recover we are happy to see the progress already being made for reopening the port later in the call mike corey and kevin boone will tell you more about what we are doing now to mitigate the impact of this event for our customers all that said we are very pleased with the momentum that we built over the quarter and are seeing in the business today we knew we had the opportunity to grow our profitability compared to the fourth quarter and we did just that Our goal was to maintain our strong customer service levels while looking for ways to run the network more efficiently, and we have done so. We have more work to do, and we are confident in our railroad and are excited about the rest of the year. Now let's start with slide one, where we highlight some of the key results from our first quarter. Total volume grew by a solid 3% with strong support from our international, our intermodal business franchise, which grew at 7% compared to last year. Our operating margin reached 36.8%, which represents a 90 basis point improvement compared to the fourth quarter. Revenue of just under $3.7 billion was about 1% lower than a year ago and flat compared to last quarter. Operating income was 8% lower than last year, but up 3% sequentially. And while our earnings per share declined by 4% versus last year, EPS grew by 2% compared to the previous quarter. Now altogether, this was a good first quarter that reflected our solid progress. The entire OneCSX team knows that there's much more that we can achieve given all the opportunities ahead and the great people we have across the entire railroad. But before we begin, I'd like to take a moment to recognize and remember Jim Foote, who passed away earlier this week. Jim was our president and CEO from late December 2017 until I arrived in September of 2022. He guided this company through some very challenging and transformative times in our history, including rebuilding the network after the dramatic changes in 2017 and dealing with the COVID pandemic. I had several impactful and insightful conversations with Jim while I was being recruited to come to CXX. And I thank Jim for his support with our board of directors to bring an outsider in as CEO of CSX. We thank Jim for all his contributions to CSX and the railroad industry overall throughout his 40 plus year career. And our thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends. Now, let me turn the call over to Mike Corey, who has brought a tremendous amount of new energy and new ideas to CSX to discuss our operational performance.