J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc.

Hello and welcome to J.B. Hunt's third quarter 2024 earnings conference 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. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. 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. Words such as expects, anticipates, intends, estimates, or similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on JB Hunt's current plans and expectations and involve risk 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 risk factors, please refer to J.B. Hunt's annual report on Form 10-K and other reports and filings with the Securities 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 Poulou, Spencer Frazier, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing, our COO and President of Contract Services, Nick Hobbs, 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. First, our thoughts are with those impacted by the recent hurricanes in the Southeast and Florida. Many of our employees were impacted, and I'm proud of how our company has responded to support them and the recovery and relief efforts in these communities. The rebuilding will take time, and J.B. Hunt will continue to support these efforts. Turning to the quarter, we continue to navigate a challenging freight environment while remaining focused on what we can control around our costs, providing exceptional service to our customers, preparing for their future transportation needs, and maintaining our focus on safety. As discussed last quarter, we have seen a return to more normal seasonal demand patterns as evidenced across our businesses in the third quarter, which the team will highlight in their remarks. I remain confident in our strategy as we execute on our 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. Our focus remains on how we can deliver value for our customers with excellent service while looking for ways to drive waste out of their supply chain. We do have some more positive sides in the business to support our work in this area, particularly around our volume trends, customer awards, and third-party surveys that highlight J.B. Hunt's performance. I see more evidence today that we can scale our investments in our people, technology, and capacity to capture additional market share at better returns as the freight cycle inflection occurs. I remain confident in our strategy and maintain our focus on generating appropriate returns on capital that deliver value for our shareholders. As we prepare for an eventual turn in the freight market, we have focused our organization on being operationally excellent and delivering unmatched value for our customers. By controlling what we can right now, we position ourselves to grow with our customers, knowing that these key service components are ingrained in our people. At the same time, we know we need to repair our margins to generate acceptable returns to reinvest in the business, and our customers are and should be aware of that as well. We take great pride in providing high-quality service in all that we do, which is a testament to the dedication that our people have to serve customers well. Creating value for our customers is core to what we do and helps build long-term strategic relationships. Customer value delivery, or CVD, is a process that we have used for a while in our dedicated business, and we continue to roll this out across our entire organization. Part of the value we create is through our safety culture and performance, which is a strength of our business, and we have continued to improve upon last year's record performance, as Nick will discuss. The team will provide more details on each of our businesses, but in summary, I continue to have strong conviction around our strategy and the growth potential of our company. We have, and we will continue to prove our ability to deliver our performance for our people, our customers, and our shareholders. Our confidence comes from our people, our experience, our complimentary suite of services, our scale, our strategic investments, and our financial strength. All of these uniquely position us for the future as we pursue our 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 Kulo. John?