United Airlines Holdings, Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to United Airlines Holdings earnings conference call for the fourth quarter and full year 2019. 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, or rebroadcast without the company's permission. recording of this call. If you do not agree with these terms, simply drop off the line. I will now turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Mike Leskinen, Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Brandon. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United's fourth quarter and full year 2019 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 company 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. A 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 Airlines Holdings and United Airlines for 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. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Oscar.

Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to join you all this morning. 2019 was a banner year for us at United, highlighted by a four-quarter streak of growing profit margins. This winning streak allowed us to reach our 2020 adjusted EPS target of $11 to $13 per share, one full year ahead of schedule. This incredible performance would not have been possible without the dedication of the finest collection of airline professionals in the world. So I want to thank the 96,000 members of the United Family who worked so hard to serve our customers. I'm also pleased that they will share in our success with a profit-sharing payment that's on average 45% higher than last year. With all that we've had to overcome in 2019, there is no group of airline employees in the world that is more deserving. You'll hear more details about our financial performance from Scott and Jerry, but I also want to quickly touch on our fourth quarter results. Our adjusted earnings per share of $2.67 was 11% higher than the fourth quarter of last year. This reflects 50 basis points of adjusted pre-tax margin expansion in this last fourth quarter, which, as I mentioned, is the fourth consecutive quarter that our pre-tax margin has grown in the fifth consecutive quarter on an adjusted basis. As you'll hear today, we're all quite proud of what we accomplished last year, but I'm most excited about what it means for our ability to plan and deliver for our customers, employees, and over the long term. And that also includes the announcement that we made at the end of 2019 about the leadership of this company with keeping this bright future in mind. Thinking back to where United was when I took over as CEO in September of 2015 and where we are today, this company's success is a testament to the power of long-term commitment to our proof, not promise, philosophy. By every metric and benchmark by which the health and strength of a company is measured and judged, the United of today finds itself in a much stronger position than the United of four years ago. I made it a personal priority to guarantee our future by assembling a deep badge of talent in order to give our customers, employee base, and investors confidence in our direction and leadership. Today, I am 100% confident that we have the absolute best leadership team of any airline, hands down. Taking advantage of that talent and cumulative experience by initiating a deliberate, well-planned, and transparent transition is what healthy companies do. And that's exactly what we're doing between now and the end of May when I'll assume my new role as executive chairman. It was important for us that preserving this continuity and my partnership with Scott means we'll continue to work to capitalize on the bright future that lays ahead, not just in 2020, but through the new decade. That's why we're eagerly anticipating the chance to get together for Investor Day in March to share more about that long-term strategy. So with that, Scott, over to you.