Saia, Inc.

Hello, my name is Chris, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Q2 2023 SIA Inc. 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'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Thank you. Doug Cole, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to SIA's second quarter 2023 conference call. With me for today's call is SIA's president and chief executive officer, Fritz Holzgriff. Before we begin, you should know that during this call, we may make some forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements and all other statements that might be made on this call that are not historical facts are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially. We refer you to our press release and our SEC filings for more information on the exact risk factors that could cause actual results to differ. I'll now turn the call over to Fritz for some opening comments.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss SIAS second quarter results. While continuing to manage through an ongoing softer economic environment, I'm proud to present what I view as very solid results produced by our team in the second quarter of 2023. On a bright note against easing year-over-year comparisons, the pace of volume declines moderated each month as we move through the quarter and have actually turned positive so far in July. We believe changing industry dynamics over the last several weeks have played a role in this. Internally, we monitor our customer satisfaction metrics on a daily basis. For the quarter, our trends continue to progress favorably as customers are increasingly satisfied with our service both in our legacy facilities as well as the new facilities opened in the last couple of years. It is gratifying to see our team's commitment reflected in the financial results. Despite an overall freight environment down compared to the prior year, we saw solid results in the quarter. Total revenue of $694.6 million was down only 6.8% compared to last year's record second quarter revenue, despite a 3.8% fewer shipments and a fuel surcharge revenue being down nearly 32%. Our focus on service, pricing, and mix of business has been key to offsetting these factors, and our yield excluding fuel surcharge revenue improved by 2.7% compared to last year, even with the headwind created by an increase in weight per shipment and a decline in length of haul. We continue to highlight the importance of business mix and freight selectivity and closely monitor our revenue per shipment, a key metric for our team. In the quarter, revenue per shipment excluding fuel surcharge increased by 4.8%, benefiting from a 2.2% increase in average weight per shipment. Industry pricing continues to be resilient in the face of negative tonnage trends, and we saw an average contractual renewal increase of 5.3% in the second quarter. Our second quarter operating ratio of 82.7 deteriorated 230 basis points compared to our operating ratio of 80.4 posted in the second quarter last year. But again, that was a record quarter for both revenue and OR, and the industrial economy has changed meaningfully since then. I'll now turn the call over to Doug for more details from our second quarter results.