J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and thank you for standing by. My name is Abby and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the J.B. Hunt Transport Services second quarter 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. And if you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star 1 a second time. Thank you. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Brad Delco, Senior Vice President of Finance. You may begin.

Good afternoon. Before I introduce the speakers, I would like to provide some disclosures regarding forward-looking statements. This call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. or similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on J.B. Hunt's current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results to be materially different from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. For more information regarding key risk factors, please refer to J.B. Hunt's annual report on Form 10-K and other reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, I would like to introduce the speakers on today's call. This afternoon, I am joined by our President and CEO, Shelly Simpson, our CFO, John Kulo, Spencer Frazier, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, our COO and President of Contract Services, Nick Hopps, Darren Field, President of Intermodal, and Brad Hicks, President of Highway Services and Executive Vice President of People. I'd now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Ms. Shelly Simpson, for some opening comments. Shelly?

Thank you, Brad, and good afternoon to everyone on the call. I'd like to start by saying I'm humbled and honored to have recently assumed the role of CEO and to lead our great company on the next phase of our growth journey. While recognizing this is a big moment as only the fifth organizational leader in our company's 62-year history, let me be clear. Our vision... our mission and our focus has not changed. We have large addressable markets. We provide excellent service for customers. We have talented people across our organization. We are primed and we are ready to execute on our opportunities for growth. My message to the team on day one was quite simple. Ready, set, go. As you've heard us say consistently, we remain committed to our investments, and managing the business with a long-term mindset. These investments span across our company foundations, which include our people, our technology, and our capacity. Through investments in these key areas, we have a significant number of opportunities to provide value to and on behalf of our customers across our suite of complimentary service offerings. Our focus remains on deploying capital in areas of the transportation industry where we see a long-term opportunity to generate compounding returns. We operate in an industry that is cyclical, but we have focused on businesses and areas that we feel confident we can compete effectively, take share, and win. We do this by remaining financially disciplined, keeping our focus on the long-term while managing costs in the near term, and relying on our vast experience. We will be prepared to meet the growing needs of our customers while driving long-term growth for the company and our shareholders. Earlier this year, we introduced our priorities for 2024, and we as a management team and as an organization continue to execute on these priorities, which as a reminder are, one, to deliver exceptional value to our customers through operational excellence, two, scale our long-term investments in our company foundations, which are people, technology, and capacity. And three, drive long-term value and returns for our shareholders. While the first half of this year has been challenging in terms of our financial performance, we remain focused on delivering exceptional value to our customers. In 2024, we've continued our record performance in safety and our service levels to customers has been exceptional. We have received multiple awards this year for our high service level from our customers. Our joint intermodal service offering with BNSF, Quantum, is running well above our initial expectation from an on-time service performance. In Dedicated, we continue to prove our value to customers as we've been able to balance the need to be disciplined with underwriting new business while providing customers some flexibility with meeting their needs. Final Mile continues to make progress on its profit improvement plan And we continue to work on areas around cost, integration, and growth in ICS and see some progress in the business. Finally, we remain encouraged about the value proposition for customers in our drop trailing business in JBT and the future potential of that business. While admittedly, the market has been challenging, we have invested throughout this downturn to set us up for future growth and success across the business. We continued to focus on controlling expenses in the near term without jeopardizing our long-term potential, managing our headcount through attrition, while at the same time continuing to deploy and enhance our technology to increase the productivity of our people. We took advantage of a strategic opportunity to acquire the intermodal assets from Walmart earlier this year, which added capacity to our network, but also increased the long-term growth potential of our company which we believe will drive long-term returns for both the company and our shareholders. The team will provide more details with their prepared comments, but in summary, we will stay the course, focus on the long-term with the same vision to create the most efficient transportation network in North America. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, John Kulow. John?