Old Dominion Freight Line, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Old Dominion Freight Line Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in 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 a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, This event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jack Atkins, Director of Finance, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the third quarter 2024 conference call for Old Dominion Freight Line. Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay beginning today and through October 30th, 2024 by dialing 1-877-344-7529, access code 4025. The replay of the webcast may also be accessed for 30 days at the company's website. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements, among others, regarding Old Dominion's expected financial and operating performance. For this purpose, any statements made during this call that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Without limiting the foregoing, the words believes, anticipates, plans, expects, and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. You are hereby cautioned that these statements may be affected by the important factors, among others, set forth in Old Dominion's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in this morning's news release, and consequently, actual operations and results may differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. As a final note before we begin, we welcome your questions today, but ask that you limit yourself to just one question at a time before returning to the queue. At this time, for opening remarks, I would like to turn the conference over to Marty Freeman, the company's President and Chief Executive Officer. Marty, please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and welcome to our third quarter conference call. With me on the call today is Adam Satterfield, our CFO. After some brief remarks, we will be glad to take your questions. I am joining the call today from a separate location. Therefore, please bear with us when we are taking questions if there are any connectivity issues. Old Dominion's financial results in the third quarter reflect continued softness in the domestic economy. Our revenue and earnings per diluted share Both declined on a year-over-year basis during the quarter, although our market share and volume trends remained relatively consistent with the first half of the year. While the operating environment continued to be challenging, our team did a good job of managing our variable cost, and we also continued to control our discretionary spending. The deleveraging effect from the decrease in revenue, however, caused many of our cost categories to increase as a percent of revenues. This was the primary driver for the increase in our operating ratio to a 72.7 in the third quarter. We have been pleased with the consistency in our market share this year, which is consistent with our historical experience during slower parts of the economic cycle. We continue to have strong customer retention trends, and we are also winning new business. Our customers simply have had fewer shipments than they contender to us. And our average weight per shipment has also remained at historical lows. The stability of our market share continues to be supported by the quality of our service and overall value that we offer to our customers. These are a few of the foundational elements of our long-term strategic plan. The OD family of employees continue to execute on these core principles during the third quarter, as our on-time service was 99% and our cargo claims ratio was a 0.1%. While we are incredibly proud of these service statistics, we would also like to remind you that superior service means much more than simply picking up and delivering our customer's freight on time and claims free. There are plenty of other attributes that shippers consider when selecting a carrier, such as carrier's trustworthiness, ease of doing business, and the quality and responsiveness of customer service representatives. In fact, Matthew and company measured 28 different service and value related attributes as part of its recent annual survey of shipper and logistic professionals. Matthew published the results of his 2024 study last week, and we were honored to be named the number one national LTL provider for the 15th consecutive year. OD finished number one in 23 of the 28 evaluated categories measured by Mastio and maintained a sizable lead against our competition when it comes to the overall quality of service. I would like to congratulate the entire OD family of employees on this remarkable achievement, and I would also like to thank this outstanding team for their commitment to our company and our customers. We continue to believe that consistency and quality of our service over the long term has differentiated Old Dominion in the marketplace and driven our long-term profitable growth. While becoming the best carrier in the business was hard, remaining the best carrier for 15 straight years is an incredible accomplishment, and that is hard to put in perspective. Every member of the OD team has played a part in our success, and I can assure you that each of us is incredibly motivated to keep delivering our promises to provide our customers with the highest standard of service. By continuing to provide best-in-class service to our customers day after day and year after year, we are also able to maintain our long-term and disciplined approach to pricing. We continue to focus on consistently improving our yields to sufficiently offset our cost inflation and support additional investments in capacity and technology. These ongoing investments have created incremental value for our customers in many ways. which has further enhanced our industry-leading value proposition. Our customers have recognized our value proposition over time, which has allowed us to be able to earn more and more of their business. As a result, we have won more market share over the past 10 years than any carrier in our industry. While the economic environment has remained sluggish for much longer than we ever anticipated, we believe we are better positioned than ever to respond to the eventual inflection in demand that will occur as the economy improves. We have the capacity, the fleet, and most importantly, the committed team of people to take advantage of an improving economic environment. Our unique company culture and each employee's commitment to excellence gives me tremendous confidence that we can also be the biggest market share winner over the next 10 years. This confidence is bolstered by the results of the most recent MASTEO study, as well as the ongoing conversations we have with our customers. By staying focused on long-term opportunities for additional profitable growth, we remain confident in our ability to create additional value for our shareholders. Thank you for joining us on the call this morning, and now Adam will discuss our third quarter in greater detail.