J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Abby and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to JB Hunt's fourth 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 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 one 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. Words such as expects, anticipates, intends, estimates, 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 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'd like to introduce the speakers on today's call. This afternoon, I'm 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 Highway Services and Final Mile, Nick Hobbs, Brad Hicks, President of Dedicated Contract Services, and Darren Field, President of Intermodal. 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. While 2024 was a continuation of the challenging freight environment, I am proud of the work of our team and how we position the company for our future. We focused on providing excellent service to our customers, improving on our record-setting safety performance, and remaining cost discipline, all while leveraging our strategic investments in our people, technology, and capacity. We have been in a period of heavy investment to better prepare ourselves to expand all aspects of our business in the future. Our commitment to our people and providing quality, differentiated service and capacity for our customers, particularly during another strong peak season, sets us up extremely well to scale into these investments ahead. Looking forward, the overall strategy and focus of our organization is on operational excellence and scaling into our investments. We are positioning the business for long-term growth that generates appropriate returns on capital that delivers long-term value for our shareholders. The decisions we make to strategically hold on to our people and capacity through the freight recession and make some bold investments like acquiring the intermodal assets from Walmart were made through that lens and has only enhanced our future earnings potential. That said, while our performance has held up relatively well in this difficult environment, we aren't satisfied with the current results of our business, particularly around margins and returns on capital. A focus and a top priority for our leaders in the company is to get us on a path to repair and improve our financial performance. My confidence in this team and our ability to leverage our brand and our scroll of services coming off of another strong year of service execution and safety is extremely high. We've executed on two consecutive quarters of record intermodal volumes with capacity to grow more while we focus on repricing our larger book of business. Our dedicated business has been remarkably resilient and has solid visibility to future growth. We still have work to do in our brokerage business, and progress is being made, but I see lots of opportunities to scale that business ahead, and I'll let Nick provide some color on the plan there. And our JPT and final mile businesses have a good model, and we see plenty of opportunities for growth ahead. While market dynamics remain uncertain around the timing and magnitude of a potential inflection, our focus in 2025 is to grow and begin to repair our margins. We will be coming out of the freight recession from a position of strength. We believe the value we create for our customers with our capacity and our exceptional service levels are unique in the market and that our return should mirror this value. We and our customers know this. We stand ready to continue to expand with our customers and to add new customers under the J.B. Hunt scroll. The team will have more commentary on each area of business, but in closing, We have proven our service levels and our safety culture are unmatched and have available capacity ready for future growth. We will continue to focus on the long term while taking steps in the near term to improve the return profiles of our business, all with the same mission to drive long-term value for our people, customers, and shareholders. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, John Kulo. John?