United Airlines Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to United Continental Holdings Earnings Conference call for the fourth quarter and full year 2018. My name is Brandon and I'll be your conference facilitator today. Following the initial remarks from management, we will open the lines for questions. At that time, if you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phones. This call is being recorded and is copyrighted. Please note that no portion of the call may be recorded, transcribed, Thank you, Brandon. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United's fourth quarter and full year 2018 earnings conference call.

Yesterday, we issued our earnings release and separate investor update. Additionally, this morning, we issued a presentation to accompany this call. All three of these documents are available on our website at ir.united.com. Information in yesterday's release and investor update, the accompanying presentation, and the remarks made during this conference call may contain forward-looking statements which represent the company's current expectations or beliefs concerning future events and financial performance. All forward-looking statements are based upon information currently available to the company. Number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to our earnings release, Form 10-K, and other reports filed with the SEC by United Continental Holdings and United Airlines for a more thorough description of these factors. Also, during the course of our call, we will discuss several non-GAAP financial measures. For reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings release, investor update, and presentation, copies of which are available on our website. Joining us here in Chicago to discuss our results and outlook are Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz, President Scott Kirby, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nacella, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Jerry Latterman. In addition, we have other members of the team in the room available to assist with Q&A. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Oscar.

Thank you, Mike, and thank you all of us for joining us today. Well, what a difference a year makes. No doubt remember that it was a year ago when we laid out our multi-year growth strategy and set forth a series of concrete promises. I'm proud to say that in 2018, our incredible United team, over 90,000 strong, got to work fulfilling those promises, because what matters is proof, not promise. You'll remember that we said we would deliver higher unit revenue in 2018 while simultaneously increasing supply, and we have. Not many on Wall Street believed this was possible when we initially announced our plan, and now there are a few who question the value of our continued growth. As we've talked about, this uniquely united growth strategy is that not all capacity is created equal, and I think we proved that this year. In fact, our PRASM has or is expected to outpace the industry in each of the last four quarters and is likely to outpace the industry by approximately 200 basis points in 2018. If we turn to slide five, you'll also remember that we said we expected to increase our 2018 adjusted EPS to 650, between 650 and 850, and we have. In fact, we did better at $9.13 per share for the year. We also said we would be laser focused on cost discipline with a full year CASMX goal flat to down 1%. We have, again, delivered on that promise, expecting to leave the industry with a CASMX down 0.2% for the year. We also said that we'd ensure that our commitment to a smart growth strategy wouldn't detract from our focus on running a great operation, and we had. In fact, we flew more passengers than ever last year and achieved the highest completion rate in our history. So no doubt there is much more work to be done, but we are very proud of the significant progress we've made in 2018, and I thank all our employees. Now the question, of course, becomes what difference will the next year make? So as we look ahead to 2019, we are paying very close attention to the government shutdown, potential trade disruption, and other sources of economic instability. We read the same headlines that you do, and while concerning, we've not, to this point, detected much of an impact on our numbers. Scott will walk through our facts after making this particular point, but of course we will keep watching, and in the meantime we'll just stay focused on the priorities that we can control, in particular the way we serve our customers. So switching to that, more than ever we're focused on putting our customers, all of them, at the center of everything that we do. This year we'll continue to roll out a series of innovations and improvements to the customer experience that we believe will continue to reshape United's image. We'll introduce a series of new routes boosted by new customer-friendly aircraft that are designed to make United the airline our customers choose to fly. Just next week, we'll be able to download a completely reimagined version of the United app. It is already the number one downloaded app amongst U.S. carriers, but we are making it even better, putting useful information at your fingertips without losing the features our customers love. We'll also continue to add useful information to over 60,000 mobile devices used by our employees that have real-time information, can communicate better, and solve your problems in the moment. These are just a few of the examples of the digital advantage that has resulted from the new entrepreneurial culture that we're fostering here at United. This culture, coupled with our deep company-wide commitment to our core four principles, will be essential to the success of our efforts to take our standard of customer service to a whole new level. Lastly, moving to slide six, let me emphasize that while we are delivering on our commitments to our customers, we're also delivering on our commitments to you and our shareholders. Last year, our ability to recover almost 100% of the year-over-year increase in fuel expense helped us achieve the full-year adjusted EPS of $9.13. In 2019, we are committed to delivering an adjusted EPS target of $10 to $12, which puts us nicely ahead of the pace to deliver our adjusted EPS of 11 to 13 in 2020. So with that, let me hand it over to Scott.