speaker
Operator
Conference Call Operator

Good day and welcome to the Old Dominion Freight Line First Quarter 2026 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. Please go ahead.

speaker
Jack Atkins
Vice President, Investor Relations

Thank you, Dorwin. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the first quarter 2026 conference call for Old Dominion Freight Line. Today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay beginning today and through April 29, 2026 by dialing 1-855-669-9658. Access code 7699494. 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. We will hereby caution 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. 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. Finally, before we begin, we note that we welcome your questions today, but ask that you limit yourselves to just one question at a time before returning to the queue. Thank you for your cooperation. At this time, for opening remarks, I'd like to turn the conference call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Marty Freeman. Marty, please go ahead.

speaker
Marty Freeman
President and Chief Executive Officer

Good morning and welcome to our first 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. Our first quarter results reflect a continuation of the encouraging trends that started to develop late last year. While our first quarter revenue declined on a year-over-year basis, demand for our service improved as the quarter progressed. This contributed to the acceleration in our LTL volumes during the quarter with strong sequential tonnage growth in February and March. Importantly, during the quarter, our team continued to deliver best-in-class service to our customers and maintained our disciplined approach to yield management. Providing our customers with superior service at a fair price is the cornerstone of our strategic plan. The consistency of our service performance day in and day out creates significant value for our customers and is something that we take significant pride in. As a result, We were pleased to once again deliver 99% on-time service and a claims ratio below 0.1% in the first quarter. The strength of our unmatched value proposition has differentiated us from our competition and allowed us to win more market share than any other LTL carrier over the last 10 years. Our value proposition will continue to support our ability to grow our business in the years ahead, and we continue to believe that we will be the biggest market share winner over the next 10 years as a result. Our best-in-class service also supports our yield management initiatives. Our long-term, disciplined approach to pricing is designed to offset our cost inflation and support our ability to make strategic investments back into our business. These investments will allow us to stay ahead of our anticipated growth curve to help us ensure that we'll always have the capacity we need to grow. Our ability to say yes when a customer needs us the most is the hallmark of our industry-leading customer service. Business levels in the LTL industry can change very quickly, and being able to respond to growth opportunities in an improving demand environment is one of the primary areas that differentiate us from our competition. We believe it is important to consistently invest throughout the economic cycle, despite the short-term caused headwinds associated with this strategy. This is why, despite a challenging operating environment, we invested nearly $2 billion capital expenditures over the past three years, and why we plan to invest an additional $265 million in 2026. We've also continued to invest in the most important component of our long-term success, which is our OD family of employees. Our people and our unique culture are truly what sets us apart Old Dominion as a result we have worked to ensure that we are providing a competitive wage and benefit package as well as various internal developmental programs like our in-house driver training schools and our management training program these programs not only provide important opportunities for career advancements for our team but they help ensure that our company is ready to respond when our customers need us the most while we were always focused on long-term It is critical that we remain diligent in controlling our cost and continue to operate as efficiently as possible without compromising our superior service standards. That remained the case in the first quarter as we continued to find ways to maximize our operating efficiencies and control our discretionary spending. We continue to believe that our business model contains significant operating leverage, which has been enhanced by our ongoing investments in our technologies, and continued focus on business process improvements. We produced solid results in the first quarter by continuing to execute our strategic plan, and I want to thank the entire OD family of employees for their unwavering dedication to our customers and to our company. Due to our consistent execution and investment, we are uniquely positioned to effectively handle incremental volume opportunities as the demand environment improves. As a result, we remain confident in our ability to win market share, generate profitable revenue growth, and increase shareholder value over the long term. Thank you very much for joining us this morning, and now Adam will discuss our first quarter in greater detail.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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Investor presentation