J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the J.B. Hunt Transport First Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brad Delco, Senior Vice President of Finance. Please go ahead.

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 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 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 Kulu, Spencer Frazier, our EVP 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. The team will provide more details on each of our business segments, but at a high level, our results during the first quarter came in largely as we expected and as we shared with you back in January. I continue to be proud of the work of our team and remain confident that we have better positioned the company for future growth and success. We are seeing our service performance provide us benefits during this bid season. Safety is core to our company's culture, and we continue to improve on our key metrics despite following two consecutive years of record-setting performance. We also remain focused and disciplined on our costs without sacrificing on our strategic investments in our people, technology, and capacity. We are well-positioned to scale into and leverage these investments as we grow in our large addressable markets served by our portfolio of services. As we've shared, We are not pleased with our returns, and efforts across the organization continue to reduce and eliminate costs, refine our capital plans, and drive further productivity across our businesses. As I said last quarter, beginning to repair our margins and improve our financial performance remains a top priority for our leaders and our company. Looking ahead, while headlines are changing daily, our overall strategy and focus as an organization remains the same. be operationally excellent, provide a valuable service for our customers that is critical to their business needs, and scale into our strategic investments. That said, our executive team has explored various options we might implore to more aggressively eliminate costs in some of our scenario planning analysis. However, we are fortunate in that our assets move to where our demand for our services originate, so we will have to stay agile and make quick decisions if the market dynamics change. We will stay informed by our internal data, customer feedback and outlooks, and make decisions as needed to maximize long-term value for our shareholders. Before turning this over to the team, I'll close with this. The strength of our business supported our investments during this challenging freight environment while meaningfully enhancing the future earnings potential of our company. While the timing of the market inflection still remains uncertain, we will exit from a position of strength. which is unique in our industry and becoming even more unique each day. We have proven our service levels and safety culture are unmatched. We had record first quarter intermodal volumes. Dedicated continues to have industry-leading margins, and we're seeing signs of improvement in our highway businesses. Our brand is very strong with customers, and we have the talent, systems, and capacity to support a future growth. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CFO, John Kulow. John?